Help With Building My New Rig

[Stncold]

Due to budgetary reasons and other things that I will have to start paying for soon, I've decided to build my new rig now.

However also due to budgetary reasons, I'm stuck with a dilemma on what I can get on this new rig.

The new rig I'm currently looking at for Oblivion, Huxley, Crysis, R6 Vegas, WoW and Warhammer is going to look something like this.

Intel E6420 DC 2.13Ghz, Vista, 2GB DDR2 SDRAM and 768 GF 8800 GTX.

I'm wondering if it would be more fruitful to instead get the GTX's little bro 256 8600 GTS and increase the RAM to 4GB.

Any opinions are welcome, thanks.

[Lunarhawk]

I doubt crysis will be able to run all that great without dual video cards, but that's just something we have to live with. I recently got the same setup except with the 8800GTX 320mb instead of the 768. Parts for me should arrive tomorrow so I can't tell you how it runs yet =/ As for 4gb I don't know much about what it affects myself, so I can't really tell you wether it's worth it to downgrade the video card a bit to get more RAM - you could always just get a lower version of the 8800 like mine instead of dropping all the way to the 8600 though.

[Stncold]

Well for a bit cheaper I can drop the GTX and instead get dual 256 8600 GTS. Only problem is that getting the 4GB RAM will be out of the question because it will be over my budget.

So in short I'm looking at three options:

2GB SDRAM and 768 8800 GTX.

4GB SDRAM and 256 8600 GTS.

2GB SDRAM and dual 256 8600 GTS.

[Corbs]

Originally Posted by Lunarhawk

I doubt crysis will be able to run all that great without dual video cards, but that's just something we have to live with. I recently got the same setup except with the 8800GTX 320mb instead of the 768. Parts for me should arrive tomorrow so I can't tell you how it runs yet =/ As for 4gb I don't know much about what it affects myself, so I can't really tell you wether it's worth it to downgrade the video card a bit to get more RAM - you could always just get a lower version of the 8800 like mine instead of dropping all the way to the 8600 though.

If that's the case, there won't be that much people playing Crysis in the end.

Honestly, between those 3 options, I'd go for the first one since it's a lot cheaper to upgrade (buy more RAM) later on than to change your video card.

[Skaltrum]

Crysis is not that intense of a game.

A friend of mine runs it just fine (minor shader problems) with a flashed X850GT.

Two 8600GT's will never match the power of one GTX or ever an 8800 GTS 640. And just a little FYI, nothing uses 4 gigs of ram. The actual performance increase you would see from more ram is somewhere in the range of 2% which becomes nothing when you compare a system with 2gigs/GTX vs. 4gigs/8600GT(1 or 2).

2 gigs of ram will suffice for quite a while. For graphic intensive games, always go for the better video card.

[Skaltrum]

and I forgot to add, drop the E6420 and go for the 6740. Another 500mhz stock for the same price.

[Corbs]

I'm sorry, but the Crysis beta is far from being close to anything perfectly stable. Of course, it does run smoothly most of the times, but I doubt your friend is running it at 30 fps constantly without any leak. Afaik, the shader problem seems only to occur at the very start of the game (or exploring new areas). Plus, let's not forget that the beta does not feature any destructible environment...

I, on the contrary, strongly recommend 3 GB of RAM with Vista.

[D0gSoldi3r]

Going to wait till DDR3 becomes popular then gonna move over to Intel chipsets and quad cores the middle of next year, better waiting for the price drops and hardware delays.

BTW : I would dump Vista at least till service pack 2 comes out, Cause Vista looks terrible imo. I'm sticking with XP.