Building the Ultimate Gaming Desktop

Alan writes "FiringSquad has just posted my Ultimate Gaming Desktop system building guide in which we take a no-budget but don't-waste-money approach. We even use an Athlon FX-57 in here. This is in fact only day one of a five-day series that will total over 32,000 words..." From the article: "Today's games aren't multithreaded. So, when designing a gaming system only one CPU core is needed. Therefore, the fastest individual core is going to be what's important for having the fastest frame rates and the fastest benchmarks. In real-life, when you're playing a game, your CPU still needs to spend time managing memory, the swap file, all while keeping your real-time anti-virus file scanner and firewall active. Everyone claims to run a clean system, but how many of us have been dropped out of a LAN game because we received an instant message?"

Comments

Re:Hmmm

[uberwidow]

Yeah, the typical reviewers don't seem to understand that benefits of dual core and dual CPU systems. In Widows XP you simply right click one of your CPUs and assign affinity to whatever application you want dedicated to that CPU. With the OS and the other overhead apps affinitized to the other CPU you have the potential of a full opteron 275 fully dedicated to your game.

However, it is standard media reviewer dogma to poopoo dual core and dual CPU systems. It doesn't make any sense because there are several games in development now that make use of multiple threads and World of Warcraft makes use of sycronous loading which allows multiple graphical loading requests to be made at once. Hyperthreading helps with this but dual core or dual CPUs would help much more.

Re:Today's games aren't multithreaded.

[tepp]

Me == idiot.

All games these days are multithreaded.

I hit cancel on the post... but not fast enough :)

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use tools for force processor affinity for any given process on Windows 2000 and above.

Also, the ArsTechnica system guide is out

[OglinTatas]

ArsTechnica

I use the hot rod spec whenever I am looking for a new mobo. The rest I just shop around for on a part by part basis, paying close attention to price breaks on video cards.

Ridiculous but fun.

[Noodlenose]

Ok, just for the laughs of it: if the task would be to put together a machine that has 5 % less of the speed and FPS of this so called "no-budget" dream machine, how much would we spend? 3000 dollar less? Just because building a machine is possible it doesn't give me any cost - usability benefit (bang for the buck, for the dyslexics out there).

4000 US$ for a gaming machine? No thanks. I really, really like my machines fast and well built, but I rather spend the the remaining 3000 dollars on some improvements on my home entertainment, a nice luxury weekend with my girlfriend in Wanaka and buy a couple of bottles of Single Malt, Central Otago Pinot Noir and pack of East Timor Fair Trade Coffee.

There you have it...

Re:Clean system?

[karnal]

BTW, those black lines in Trinitron tubes are not where the "electron gun beams don't overlap"... Those are stabilizer wires used to keep the grille in the tube in place.

You'll see them in every trinitron. I've learned to ignore them, and actually need people to point them out to me nowadays - my mind just blanks them out completely, as weird as that sounds.

That's just the point: they don't

[Moraelin]

"Your whole argument relies on some made up numbers. What if the other background processes took 50 units of work per second, then suddenly the dual core processor has the advantage."

That's the _whole_ point: they don't take much. All this dual-core hype is based on the lie that there are some massively CPU-intenside background processes that leave your game starving for its own dedicated CPU.

Well, here's what you can do. Turn off SETI, IM, and generally all the things you would realistically turned off if you wanted the maximum frames-per-second in a game. Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL. Let it stabilize for a few seconds, then look at your CPU usage. Those are your Windows background processes at work.

There's no made up number there. You don't have to believe my numbers. You can read the actual numbers for your own system, yourself.

_If_ you were to see some 50% CPU usage when idle, yeah, _then_ you need a second CPU badly. But here's the fun part: I see 0% on mine.

So getting a second CPU to run all that 0%, and thus reduce the game CPU's load by a whole 0%... well, I hope you can understand why some of us are less than thrilled by that idea :)

Windows background processes take less time than you think. What Windows does have, though, is a lot of _synchronous_ stuff going, i.e., where your application must wait for the results anyway. I.e., moving that to another CPU wouldn't do you one bit of good.

E.g., when your game is taking ages at the loading screen, because some AV program scans every byte loaded, that's one such synchronous thing. Each call to load a block _must_ wait until that block is scanned and loaded. Whether that's happening on CPU 1 or CPU 2 is irrelevant. Your game gets to wait exactly the same time in both cases.

E.g., if a computer is slow because it's swapping (e.g., your computer illiterate friend -- you know you have one by that description -- having 5 spyware programs and 5 applications open while gaming), that process just can't possibly proceed until the desired page is swapped in. If your game's (or any other application's) main thread wants to access location 31337, it can't possibly proceed until the value there has been fetched. Which means until that whole page is loaded from disk, if it was swapped out. Whether it's CPU 1 or CPU 2 handling the swapping, it still won't accelerate that one bit.