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.

Clean system?

[sinner0423]

I don't know why firingsquad decided to cheese out and recommend an LCD, it's as important as the rest of the stuff they're suggesting they would buy.

IMO, LCD monitors have come a long way but they are not quite where they should be to be able to handle high motion video(games) and color reproduction. I would've suggested a high quality 19-21" CRT for the ultimate gaming rig.

After posting an ask slashdot about gaming LCD monitors, I took a plunge and bought one. I took my 17" DVI Samsung 710T back after realizing the flaws with the technology while trying it out for a days straight. It may look great in the store but give it a solid night of gaming / computing and you'll see all kinds of shit go wrong on the screen.

I'm saving this article...

[BTWR]

I just saved the HTML of this page (not bookmarked: I actually saved the actual HTML, so I can be sure I can open it up later), and I have just copied it to a CD, put it in a case, and tucked it away in my drawer. I will be opening this up sometime in 2015 (ten years from now) and I will post, most humorously, at 2005's "ultimate gaming machine." I remember purchasing the fastest computer around in june 1997: A Pentium II 266mHz machine. That thing blazed so fast. I wonder how this machine will stack up in a decade (check my site in 2015 if you're curious!)

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.

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.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil

[Moraelin]

Yes, that would be good and fine, if it wasn't utterly false.

Let's take those in the paragraph you quote, because two are synchronous tasks, and one is a whole 0% to 1% CPU time.

1. The swap file. Do you understand how that works? It a process wants to read 1 byte from the memory location X, that process can't possibly proceed until that byte has been fetched. If that's in a page currently swapped out, it can't possibly proceed before it's finished loading back into RAM.

So offloading swap management solves... what? You wait for that page anyway, and wait exactly as much time anyway, because it's the HDD that's the bottleneck there. So offloading that to another CPU will bring exactly _zero_ benefit.

2. Your real time virus scanner. Another synchronous task: if your game is waiting (e.g., at a loading screen) for a block to be loaded and scanned by the real time AV scanner, that's it. That thread is stopped and waiting until the scanner is done with that block.

So, again, a second CPU will bring exactly _zero_ benefit there,

3. Your real time firewall. Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, look at the CPU usage for that one. Oops it's at most 1%, most of the time less. Yeah, it sooo makes sense to buy a slower dual-CPU for that.

Here's just some simple maths: if you have a 2.8 GHz CPU and lose 1% of that to the firewall, it leaves you with some 2.77 GHz worth of power for your game. If you get a 2.4 GHz dual CPU so the second one can take care of the firewall, you're left with a 2.4 GHz CPU for your game. Ooops, so dualies are still a losing proposition after all.

So, no offense, all I see there is one aspect of why premature optimization (in this case, of hardware) based on false assumptions and lack of measurement is bad. That's just the problem: you end up dumping time and/or money and more often than not end up with something actually _slower_ than the straightforward solution. In this case you dump a bunch of cash on a l33t dual-core solution, based on false assumptions about what those processes do and how, and actually end up _slower_ than a cheaper one-core solution. Was it worth it?