So I am thinking about buying a new rig with the following...

- AMD Phenom™ X4 9950 Black Edition Quad-Core
- Asus M2N SLI NVIDIA nForce 560 SLI MCP Chipset DDR2/800 SATA RAID PCI-Express MBoard w/GbLAN,IEEE1394,USB2.0,&7.1Audio
- 4GB PC6400 DDR2/800 Dual Channel Memory
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX280 1GB
- 1TB SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 32MB Cache 7200RPM HDD

also what kind of power supply do you guys recommend, how many watts?

what do you guys think... opinions?

nah, i dont like that motherboard, go for a 790GX with the new SB750 southbridge, (a little cheaper, Otherwise the 790FX, doesnt have the integrated graphics) whole lot more stable, and got great reviews in performance.. i think the one u posted might pose a bottleneck..

...ok quick question real quick, might be stupid... but what is the difference with the regular ASUS SLI ready motherboards and the Crossfire ready ones? Both of these support all video cards or no?

I agree with GtoX,

That chipset is getting pretty long in the tooth, one of the new AMD chipsets would be a better choice with that CPU.

MadBullet said:

they will both support a single video card from either vendor, however if you intend on running a mulit-GPU system you will need to buy a motherboard that is designed for the video cards you are planning on buying.

SLI Ready: can run a single ATi video card but not crossfire. Will work with single and mulitple nVidia based video cards.

Crossfire Ready: can run a single nVidia card but not SLI. Will work with single and mulitple ATi based video cards.

i might want to go SLI in the future so i dont know if i want to go with the 790GX... what about...

- M3A78-EMH/HDMI AMD 780G Chipset DDR2/800 SATA PCI-Express

or

- Asus M3N72-D AMD 750a SLI Chipset DDR2/1066 SATA PCI-Express (about $50 more expensive though)

I usually try and steer people away from dual video card setups, I've ran SLI in the past it was far from perfect. While you do get a speed increase in certain titles you gain it at the cost of stability in others.

You said you were thinking of getting a GTX 280 that will be more than fast enough for pretty much everything coming out this year and into next year. If you bank the money you would have otherwise spend on a second card and use it to upgrade to the latest and greatest a year from now (about when the GTX 280 will stop being able to easily chew through anything) then in the end you can still play anything, and will pick up the added benefit of any new features that will be released between upgrades instead of having to wait an extra year by commiting yourself to a 2 year upgrade cycle. (*cough* DirectX 11 *cough*)

Just wanted to add that unless you are planning on running a 30" monitor you probably wouldn't notice the difference between a single GTX 280 and GTX 280 SLI when you are backing them with a Phenom 9950 since that chip is going to cause major bottlenecks. While it's pretty quick as far as CPU's go it is going to be too slow to really drive two cards as powerful as a GTX 280.

What kind of CPU do you guys recommend, I see most of you have Intel...

For what you're trying to do a Yorkfield based Intel Quad Core is the best choice. It will be more expensive than a Phenom but will be faster. All Intel Q9xx0 chips have a Yorkfield core. I think the Q9550 is as high as I would go because after that the increase in price for the increase in speed gets to be too high.

That is unless you would prefer to wait unil next month and pick up one of the new Core i7 chips.

MrBungle are you sure that q Phenom is not enough? To my understanding a bottleneck is caused when one component is not able to perform a certain task well enough because it lacks the required power to do so. I seriously don't think that any game today or even in the coming month or year will be so intense as to stress all 4 cores in the cpu.

Besides, cpu is way overrated. I remember reading in Tom's Hardware or Guru3d that the minimum cpu needed to not bottleneck a 8800gtx or a 8800gt was an Athlon X2 @ 2.2ghz, something like that.

Meats_Of_Evil said:


even if games can't use all 4 cores, the achitecture of Phenoms hinder there performance. it may not be on a "bottleneck" level but C2D are much faster in games.

MrBungle said:


a rig powered by Core i7 will cost about $900-$1100 minimum just for the CPU, RAM, and Motherboard

Meats_Of_Evil said:

Q9550 vs Phenom 9950 BE = 40 FPS difference in favor of the Intel chip

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/desktop-cpu-charts-q3-2008/...0,819.html




I noticed a substantial increase in everything from modern shooters to RTS going from a Athlon X2 @ 2.6 to my Intel Quad on a 8800GT... With the Atlon in UT3 the preformance monitor on the G15 keyboard was showing 99 - 100% cpu usage and i was experiencing regular studders and slowdowns which all disappeared after upgrading the platform and keeping the GPU the same. That says CPU bottleneck to me.

FingerMeElmo87 said:

I'm assuming that he's got a pretty good size budget since he's shopping for a quad core system with 4GB of RAM and a GTX 280 graphics card.

Why do people even consider buying Phenoms when they know Intels' are much faster? Just buy a Core 2 Quad please and be happy.

I have about $1500 for a new computer... what would you guys buy with this? Maybe that'll clear up things haha but from what I am seeing AMD is out of the picture. Most people would definitely go with an Intel chip instead.

Another quick one... what power supply size would you guys recommend for a rig like this?

...and thanks again for all this great information =)

you may be able to use the one you have now.. how big is your current PSU?

i'd get an HD 4870X2 over the GTX280

for some reason i don't believe this...

http://game.amd.com/us-en/unlock_radeonhd4870x2.aspx?p=4

is it really that big of a difference?

haha

The 4870 X2 is faster but not THAT much faster... you should go to Anandtech or Hexus or some place like that and read reviews on the 4870 X2 if you wan't to get an accurate view of the speed of the card vs. nVidia's offerings.