You, the bits you listed don't come to five grand, piddly res, no Water cooling or LN, it's also such a conservative system for if you want to enjoy the few hours it takes to complete crysis - to the max, go hard or go home
Sorry my mistake I'd forgot that I hadn't posted the complete system which does come to around £5000 including moniter, mouse and keyboard sorry. Could you enlighten me on what mean by this please. Thanks.
He's reiterating what's been pointed out by other posters. If you're spending £5,000 on a machine to play Crysis, then you're a complete fool. If you were hoping for people to bow with humility, you've come to the wrong place. Seriously dude, save your money.
Indeed, Nehlem is only afew months away, buy the best bang for buck comp you can from looking in the hardware section here and spend the four grand left over on upgrading bits of it when needed over the next few years if you need too. For instance you could save 600-700 pounds on your current spec by buying a Q9450 going into the bios of your mobo and just increasing the FSB (plus maybe voltage), don't line Intels pockets needlessly if you plan to overclock anyway
Sorry but I think people have misinterpreted me, I wasn't expecting people to "bow with humility" as you put it at all! It's not just to play Crysis I was just using it as benchmark and asking people here who are experienced with computers.
The high end of computing has always been about gouging the consumer for as much as possible on the latest and greatest. Its particularly bad at the moment because we have NVidia and Intel pretty much dominating everything in every way at the high end. They can pretty much charge what they like as long as its that 1% faster. So in other words, now, and for as long as I have been alive, buying a high end computer is a fruitless endeavour and you will be much better served by buying a mid range machine and upgrading it over time. A 5K machine now will be underperforming within 2/3 years. A midrange machine will still be within its upgrade cycle and you'll STILL have spent less money for the same performance. Lets be honest. A midrange machine does everything fast enough right now. Opening word that millisecond quicker isnt going to increase your productivity just because your waste of money machine is 'technically faster', it just means its having less of a hard time DOING THE SAME THING.
Well from reading the guru3d article your five grand spec will not play Crysis at a constant 60fps or higher, they only manage 51fps at 1900x1200 in the second table with all eye candy maxed. Bit-tech are meant to be doing a look at SLI article anytime soon and I would wait for that before you buy anything, but to max out crysis at 1900x1200 I guess you will have to wait for the next line of graphics cards Geforce 10 / ATI 5XXX ?
51fps is playable though, theres something weird about crysis that it actually plays alright at about 25 fps where most other shooters feel really jerky, not sure if its because of the motion blur or something but it is very playable at 25
I found it playable at 15 lol, dropped the eye candy abit and went through it at 30 though, EX3 wants a system to play with at 60 with maxed settings as he said in the OP and thus 51fps is nearly 1/6 away from this target (I think that's right I am no maths genius )
Say if you had a 24" monitor and a 26" monitor and played it at 1600x1200 on both would it be smoother on the smaller monitor? Thanks.
One thing that I don't see being mentioned here, do you have any idea just how hot and noisy three GTX 280's would be? Not to mention how power hungry as well. You will need some seriously well ventilated/cooled case just for that lot alone never mind how much maxxed out Crysis will make your CPU sweat. Seriously, do you really want to spend that much time, effort and definitely money on a distinctly average game? If the answer to this question is yes then do youself a favour and hangfire until the rumoured major announcement from nVidia in about 6 weeks or so on something called Big Bang2. Its apparently gonna blow everyones socks off with its revelations. Bearing in mind the last time nVidia did something like this it a couple of years ago was to announce the current version of SLI, anybody wanna take a guess at what's coming next?
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1466/1/nvidia_geforce_gtx_280_in_tri_sli_tested/index.html Tri SLI scales horribly here, and again they come nowhere near 60fps in crysis on very high, Big Bang 2 hurm 280 could be as much of a paper weight in 2 months time as the 9XXX now is afew months after release, 280 is apparently GF10 oops I missed that one, its not the leap forward I was expecting from the 8 series :X
I had already read this some where but thanks anyway hopefully it will be something really good like the first time.