Hardware PC Hardware Buyer's Guide August 2010

Our monthly PC building guide to getting the best components for your PC, whatever your budget.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/buyers-guide/2010/08/09/pc-hardware-buyer-s-guide-august-2010/1

 

Next case design project of mine: Something capable of the folding rig detailed herein.
Challenge is on!

 

No HTPC?

Sorry, I just had to say it first as we always do ask the question.

 

here here! Also, what about a home media SERVER. There must be a market for them with all the functionality that NAS boxes are coming with, and the fact that even MS are (re)designing an OS specifically for it.

Being a bit picky now, but regarding the folding machine, there doesn't appear to be any consideration that the user might want to fold on the CPU and/or virtualised environments. I've only recently started reading about bigadv and enabled the passkeys on my clients. I can't say for certain what the amount of points I have accumulated through bonusses are, but there appears to be a good few thousand (3k) per day.

The selection made would render the machine solely dedicated to folding, and would be very little use for anything else. Granted you'd have a folding behemoth (I produce about 28k ppd over 2 computers!!), but if someone was going to be building a machine for folding, surely they'd want it to do more than just sit there churning through the kilowatts... There seems to be very little/no real justification for the choice of motherboard, especially as there are some 7 slot boards out there, which means you could potentially get 7 dual gpu cards and a folding CPU... if that's at all possible, which I doubt.

Maybe I've just taken this to it's illogical conclusion?

Cracking machine

 

game workhorse is nearly the same as my machine nice to see my psychic prediction powers over half a year ago was spot on

 

7 GPUs and a CPU folder is possible, but very unlikely. Imagine something like the Gigabyte UD9. It has 7 slots, but they are so close together, if you put 7 dual-slot GPUs in there, you're effectively leaving no room for air to move between them.

However, 7 single-slot GPUs like the 8800/9800 would fit in there nicely. Otherwise, 4 GTX460s are more than enough. Couple that with an i7, and you have a monster PC. However, be careful how much you set for the GPUs to utilize the CPU. I would put no more than 2 GPUs in a Core i7 machine, as I'd want the CPU to run the bigadv workload more than looking after the GPUs.

In this case, bit-tech have it right. If you want GPUs, use a lower powered CPU and fold it anyway. Who cares how long it takes. The GPUs are the priority. If it's i7 or larger, than the CPU should be the priority. If you want both, then an i7 plus 2 x GTX460 would be a good bet

 

Nvidia dropped prices again - you can now get a GTX 470 for £230 which is probably a better deal then the £320 5870. Two of them would cost about the same as a 5970 too, and particularly for multi-screen gaming be significantly faster as xfire is rubbish at that for some reason. That said power/noise of 2 * 470's would be a problem.

 

Hmm, so i assume they are going to phase out this card once stocks are gone and concentrate on increasing the range of 460 cards?...with higher factory clock speeds, more Vram and better,quieter coolers?...and then go for a Fermi refresh Q1/Q2 2011 to compete with ATI's refreshed 5xxx cards....

 

Can someone tell me the difference between a Maximus III Gene and the Rampage III Gene?

 

What we want is the more efficient GF104 architecture in a 512sp chip. I can't believe it would be that hard for them to do but no rumours of it yet.

 

It'd be £500 exactly with the 1GB version since it's £30 more and you were only up to a total of £470 for the cheap PC.

When are the next set of graphics cards due to be on sale? I'd like to replace my 4870X2 cos I think it's getting faulty and giving me lots of atikmpag.sys BSODs but none of the current cards are worth upgrading to as they are not much (if at all) better than this old card.

 

One case at a time mate!

 

Good article, Tho with NV surround requiring SLI surely a quick recommendation on a P55 board that can support SLI for upgrade purposes wouldn't go amiss. Especially since you recommended the GTX460 over the HD5870 in the Enthusiast Overclocker option and its the most logical upgrade path for multi monitor gaming. Just a thought

Im getting that error too only my screens go black and then recover.

 

I'm glad I decided on last month's spec for my new "gaming workhorse". A decent 460 is far more wallet friendly

 

Isn't the Maximus the AMD version?

 

lol
one is p55 one is x58 (1156 i5 mainly or 1336 i7 mainly)

use search before posting (both of you)

 

+1 to that... would be nice to see some different styles of PC (perhaps HTPC one month, audio workstation the next, photo editing PC etc) instead of always folding rigs...

 

TBH the only interesting options there would be HTPC and audio workstation, photo editing and video editing are pointless because if you're a photoshop CS5 user then just build the gaming workhorse with a £30 gpu or buy an equivilent Nvidia GPU if it's ATI recommended for CUDA, as for video editing then just do the first suggestion for general encoding or the same as photo if premier pro supports CUDA?

Photo editing and video encoding require the same thing NEED MOAR MHZ!!!!!

 

Why?

 

I'm wondering why you have chosen the older I5-750 for the enthusiastic over-clocker, when the newer I5-760 is available. I'm currently looking to build a system similar to the enthusiastic over-clocker so would like to now if the performance of the newer chip is better. Perhaps a new comparison test is in order.