QUESTIONS! About ''The Pure uber computer of uberness!'' :D

Comments

• Ridelynn Member EpicPosts: 7,383

  February 2013

  Depends on what your definition of "Decent" is.

  If your looking at compliance, the instant a DX11.1 game comes out (which could be any day, as Windows 8 already has it) - your dual 690GTX's are already obsolete, because Kepler isn't 11.1 complaint.

  Operating system install, such as Windows 7/Windows 8 require around 40G in and to themselves. That's enough space for the files, a bit of swap space, a bit of temporary storage, and cache files. So add that to the size of whatever programs you plan on installing, and I usually double that for good measure, but plan on keeping at least 10% free space (and the more the better, SSDs like free space). It would be better to go with one larger drive than several smaller ones, in my opinion: you don't have files scattered everywhere, you don't have to rely on RAID or HD Volumes to glue them together, you don't have several different points of potential failure, SSDs operate better with more free space, and the price per byte tends to be lower, so you may want to consider a single 512G drive rather than a 240 and a 120.

  If you just randomly install everything to the C: drive, then having a drive won't do you any good - you have to be at least 10% smarter than the system your operating, and know how to move the default installation of programs - not hard, but something you have to do.

  The 3930K is based on Sandy Bridge architecture, we're one full generation past that now, and on the verge of yet another (Haswell due out by mid-year). Sure, it may have 6 cores, but that doesn't do you any good unless you have software that can run well on 6 cores, and not much out there does (particularly games, which are stuck in the 2-3 core region for optimal utilization). Your paying a whole lot of money for a 6 core older generation CPU, that won't get you any performance gain gaming at all. You have the money to spend, which is great, but honestly, I wouldn't look past the 3770K (which is the Ivy Bridge current generation quad core), it will give you stock better gaming performance than a 3930k, even with 2 fewer cores. If you don't believe me, check out the Anandtech benchmark comparisons, and pay close attention to the gaming benches near the bottom: the quad core 3770k beats out the 3930k in every game except one, Civ5.
• tom_gore Member UncommonPosts: 2,001

  February 2013

  Not to mention the 3770k costs you around 200 EUR less.

  Sandy Bridge-E is a waste of money for a gamer.
• Quizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,355

  February 2013

  1)  SSDs are so fast that there's no point in having one SSD for the OS and a different one for applications.  While you could do that for hard drives, good SSDs are about two orders of magnitude faster than good hard drives in the situations where hard drives are slow (i.e., random reads and writes).

  2)  Windows 8 actually isn't that different from Windows 7.  While I'd recommend Windows 8, I'm not inclined to criticize people who have strong opinions one way or the other unless they're really stupid opinions (e.g., "Windows 8 murders puppies").

  3)  The Core i7-3930K is exactly the same chip as the Xeon E5-1650 that you cite.  They merely have different things artificially disabled.  The Xeon probably disables overclocking, for example, while the Core i7 disables ECC memory support.  For consumer use, you'd rather have the Core i7 than the Xeon, as that's the consumer version of what is primarily a server chip.

  4)  Onboard sound is good enough for nearly everyone.  You don't seem to be terribly price-sensitive, but I usually recommend trying onboard sound first, and only buying a discrete sound card if you decide that the onboard sound isn't good enough.  Sound cards don't put out much heat, so integrating them into a motherboard isn't hard to do.

  Extra:

  1)  Wireless is bad, as it's intrinsically unreliable.  You should get a wired mouse unless you absolutely need a wireless one for some reason.

  2)  I would typically recommend that you play the games you want to play because you like those games.  Let's not be quick to praise badly-coded games that find creative ways to run poorly on fairly high end gaming rigs and really need a beast of a system like yours.  You might want to look into high levels of supersample anti-aliasing, though, which you may be able to force through video drivers.

  3)  Outdated can mean a lot of different things.  You probably have a month or so before it's outdated in the sense of "makes no sense at all to buy new".  Nvidia's upcoming GK110 GPU chip will do that, with raw performance in two GPU chips not far shy of what you'll get with four, but the huge advantage that 2-way SLI is a lot more likely to work right than 4-way--and in cases where SLI completely fails to work, a single faster GPU is better than a single slower GPU.

  If you mean outdated in the sense of "really should look into replacing something", then you'd have several years.  Which is about the same as you'd have if you spent $1500 rather than $4000.