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.