Upcoming hardware purchases

[Catreina]

With my PC sucking for broadcasting (and me getting < 30 fps when NOT broadcasting), and my investigations resulting in the Core 2 Quad Q9300 being my bottleneck, and the fact that the motherboard is totally locked (so no OC capability), I am looking at new hardware.

Here is what I am looking at - total cost is ~$3000, but should be uber:

Case & PSU:

Newegg.com - COOLER MASTER HAF 932 RC-932-KKN1-GP Black Steel ATX Full Tower Computer Case - Computer Cases
Newegg.com - CORSAIR CMPSU-1000HX 1000W ATX12V 2.2 / EPS12V 2.91 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Modular Active PFC Compatible with Core i7 Power Supply - Power Supplies

Motherboard & CPU:

Newegg.com - ASUS P6T SE LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard - Intel Motherboards
Newegg.com - Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition 965 Nehalem 3.2GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor - Processors - Desktops
Newegg.com - Noctua NH-U12P SE1366 120mm SSO CPU Cooler - CPU Fans & Heatsinks

RAM (12 GB DDR3):

Newegg.com - CORSAIR XMS3 12GB (6 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model HX3X12G1600C9 G - Desktop Memory

GPU (2 SLI):

2 (SLI) x Newegg.com - EVGA 896-P3-1170-AR GeForce GTX 275 896MB 448-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card - Desktop Graphics / Video Cards

HDD (Raid 0):

2 (Raid 0) x Newegg.com - Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000HLFS 300GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - Internal Hard Drives

Any suggestions (I have the SATA cables being purchased as well, and I have extra CD/DVD drives here at home, though I could add one).


Oh, and donations welcome too. It could be years before I get my damn settlement.

[adz4u28]

after looking at your video, i would say you could increase your fps and performance by quite a lot just by losing 90% of your addons you have installed tbh : )

otherwise its quite an impressive list of gear, i would say rather overkill for the task but well i guess you will futureproof yourself for quite a while with that.

for comparison for you..

i run a intel dual core e5200. with 2gb of ram and a gtx 275 and i run 4 copies of wow quite fine and smooth with the only issue being at the moment of memory to stop it paging to disk which i will get fixed today by moving to 4gb.

remember its world of warcraft you are running here, not 3dmark and yes i have taken into account broadcasting on my opinion

[Catreina]

I can run 5 copies if wow without much issue at all. The issue starts when I begin trying to broadcast live video. This is a CPU intensive task - extremely intensive. When this starts happening, even one wow window will start having issues.

A separate computer will help resolve this, but only if it can handle the CPU requirements of the encoding process


As for FPS and performance - I have playtested with 0 addons in use. My fps gain? 2

[adz4u28]

ouch :/

well, without doubt that pc is probably 50000x more powerful than all the cpus they used to launch apollo 11.

i would say get a seperate pc to sort this out like tim has.

[adz4u28]

side note..

can i have your old cpu?

[Yaksman]

It looks good. I haven't really kept up with the OC enthusiast scene much since the E8400, Q6600 CPU era.

I've heard great things about the i7 series, but I'd personally feel guilty about spending that much on a cpu. I'd probably OC something in the $200 range. I feel that's usually the best bang for the buck, but if you want a top end system, it looks pretty good.

Cooler Master makes pretty good cases. Corsair ram is top notch. EVGA is great for graphics cards. And from personal experience, the Noctua 120mm coolers are AMAZING.

I think I have the gen before that one, but I've got my CPU OC'ed from 2.4 to 3.4 GHz, voltage up to almost 1.5V, and it was running around 50-55 degrees at 99% load. I didn't believe the software, so I checked another piece of software and it said the same.

So yeah, if you're going to spend 3k on a comp, that's about as well as you can spend it.

[Boiling]

I will say cut your costs and get a quadcore or a core 2duo(aren't the extremes cost down now too?) I7 isn't really needed after OCing for now IMO.

[Boiling]

Also for cases, I have an antec 900. It has plenty of fan cooling(2 in the front, 1 on top ,1 in the back and 1 on the side, my xfx 780i tri sli motherboard has a fan next to the CPU which cools as well as the heatsink and fan)

[Catreina]

The problem is that right now I have a Q9300 (this is a Core 2 Quad) - the CPU has a bottleneck in that it has 6MB of L2 cache (3MB x 2).


I could likely get a new MB that would allow me to OC the Q9300 into the stratosphere, but even if I do that, I will still want a totally new PC for my broadcasting.

Also, because of certain IRL events, I may not be able to purchase this for months, or even years.

[EaTCarbS]

why so much for a PC?

mmm... EDIT: Thinking of buying this one, actually.
Newegg.com - iBUYPOWER Chimera LX2 Intel Core i7 920(2.66GHz) 12GB DDR3 1TB Dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit - Desktop PCs

Not bad for whats in it
Newegg.com - CyberpowerPC Gamer Ultra 2006 Phenom II X4 940(3.0GHz) 8GB DDR2 1TB NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit
Free upgrade to Microsoft Windows 7 - Desktop PCs