The Best Gaming PC Money Can Buy

SlappingOysters writes "Gameplayer has gone live with their best PC hardware configurations for Q1 2009. They've broken it into three tiers depending on the investor's budget. And while the prices are regional, it is comparative across the globe. The site has also detailed the 10 Hottest PC Games of 2009 to unveil the software on the horizon which may seduce gamers into an upgrade."

Comments

What a crock...

[FortKnox]

Budget machine has a quad core? And is almost a grand?

Tom's Hardware does these, and the budget is usually closer to the $600 mark, with the mid range around $1200.

And the fact that they put two optical BD burners on the extreme one (one on each page) makes me think that this article was slapped together instead of fully investigated. Where's the benchmarks? The proof that you built a good machine?

Looks like a buncha kids opened up newegg and built themselves machines in their head...

Re:What a crock...

[XPeter]

And the fact that they put two optical BD burners on the extreme one (one on each page) makes me think that this article was slapped together instead of fully investigated. Where's the benchmarks? The proof that you built a good machine?

Looks like a buncha kids opened up newegg and built themselves machines in their head...

Why the hell would you want to benchmark one of those beauties? It's like a wife. Your supposed to spend money on it, care for it and look but not touch.

Re:What a crock...

[Kral_Blbec]

The site wont load for me (slashdotted already) but it sounds like toms does a much better job.

I assume by BD you mean BR. If its a "gaming" machine, why do you need blue ray? I have a cheap usb drive i hook up to mine when ever its needed, but steam and alcohol 52 pretty much eliminate the need for that anymore. Optical drives are hardly essential for gaming. Even for extreme models

Re:What a crock...

[Anonymous Coward]

How? Are you a dildo?

Re:What a crock...

[Sinning]

Nope, the mailman.

Re:What a crock...

[ZirbMonkey]

Tom's is way better. If I want to upgrade my PC or video card, they actually do proper benchmarks and realistic budgets. I may never have triple SLI, but only because I don't feel like dropping another $500 on video cards for relatively minimal fps gains.

I dropped a grand on a new i7 system last week. Primarily because I was tied of my old Opteron 170 rig, but a good deal because I'd been influenced by the Tom's hardware midprice build. A grand is not "budget."

Re:What a crock...

[TheKidWho]

When they talk about hot computers, they are referring to your gpu/cpu temperature of course.

Re:What a crock...

[JWSmythe]

    But she said I was the only one for her.. {sigh} I'll have to start playing "pool boy" for a less "active" lonely house wife. :)

Re:What a crock...

[El Capitaine]

I agree, Blu-Ray is not really necessary for a gaming machine (are any PC games Blu-Ray yet?) And to have two BD burners...(going from first post - article is slashdotted)...this seems less like a gaming rig and more like a video production machine.

Also, Blu-Ray is abbreviated to BD, for Blu-Ray Disc. All of the abbreviations for the format use BD, not BR, such as BD-J, BD+, BD-ROM, BD-R.

"Blu-ray, also known as Blu-ray Disc (BD), is the name of a next-generation optical disc format jointly developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA)"
Taken from http://www.blu-ray.com/info/

Re:What a crock...

[yoshi_mon]

You need to reinstall your sarcasm detection package.

Re:What a crock...

[tha_mink]

A grand is not "budget."

Of course, 1000 AUD is about $700 USD.

Re:What a crock...

[Spazztastic]

You need to reinstall your sarcasm detection package.

There's a serious lack of sarcasm tags, and it's required when it's not immediately obvious.

Re:What a crock...

[Anonymous Coward]

Chingo la mujer, tambien! Ella sopla mi pene como un puta. Si, Si, Si!

Raul

Re:What a crock...

[Fross]

Yo dawg, I heard you like burning, so we put a burner in your burner so you can burn while you burn.

Re:What a crock...

[Creepy]

Sharky Extreme used to do these (not sure if they do it anymore), and it sounds like the budgets are similar (though I think they had 4 tiers - budget, mid, high, and extreme). The budget machine there was also $1000, but that includes some stuff like Monitor that isn't always included in other PC building guides. The extreme guide usually had the disclaimer that "if money was no object...," so I say "only 2 blue ray burners? Why not 4?" I can't tell if they're similar due to the slashdotting.

I'd question a quad, but that depends on what the PC is for. I added a quad to the one I'm building (incidentally, off the top of my head, mostly with parts off newegg...), but you lose about .5Mhz clock speed for those two extra cores. Since my system splits time doing builds and gaming, a quad made sense for me (parallel builds... yum). A duo would be better future-proofing for games, but I bought hardware with room to grow (can add memory and improve CPU at a later time), favoring lower memory latencies over more memory and a faster FSB than the CPU needs so I can update that when prices drop (in addition, mobo and memory apparently OC quite well).

Anyhow, benchmarking never is perfect, so I always take it with a grain of salt - a CPU intensive benchmark that threads may give great results on a quad, but one that doesn't would favor a faster duo. Same thing with any apps you ran. Ditto for GPU tests. Even with real world tests like Crysis, it may stress shaders more than memory and HL2 might do just the opposite.

Re:What a crock...

[FortKnox]

well, as the title of the article says, this is a gaming box. Quad isn't used in gaming, so you can get a duo with a higher clock speed at that price. They are spending like $200 on an AMD quad. With that price, you can get a top of the line intel at 2.4 or 2.6GHz that you can overclock the crap out of. For games, you need 2 cores and major clock speed, not a quad core and mediocre clock speed.

Re:What a crock...

[Shadow of Eternity]

Alan Wake
Bioshock
Company of Heroes
Crysis
Far Cry 2
Hellgate: London
Lost Planet
Microsft Flight Sim X
Rainbow Six Vegas
Source Engine
Splinter Cell Double Agent
STALKER
Stranglehold
Supreme Commander
Unreal Engine 3
Half-life2: Orange box engine games/mods

Nowadays you've basically got a choice between a 3.4ghz quadcore and a 3.4-3.8ghz dualcore (4ghz is still a little out of range for the average overclocker). I'd rather have another 2 cores and a slower clockspeed than a slight boost in clockspeed. Then again maybe that's because I'm not an idiot that relies on the false logic that just because it's not immediately the absolute best thing out there that it won't be very useful to have for the next few years.

Re:What a crock...

[geekoid]

It's not about money, it's about what's the best.

Sadly, I can't read the article at the moment. You are correct, benchmarks are needed.

Re:What a crock...

[travbrad]

Actually a few games are beginning to take advantage of quads (GTA4 is probably the most notable), but they are the exception. Most games will still be faster on a higher clocked dual-core. That's why I decided to get an E8400 (which can go to 4ghz relatively easily), rather than a quad core. Also, dual cores are cheaper and consume less power. I do some video encoding too, but my preferred programs are still only dual or single-threaded, so the quad wouldn't have made sense. One would hope/think developers will find a way to make use of more and more cores as time goes on though, since that's the direction the CPU makers are headed.

Re:What a crock...

[MBraynard]

What do you mean by i7?

Re:What a crock...

[Almost A Knave]

well, as the title of the article says, this is a gaming box. Quad isn't used in gaming, so you can get a duo with a higher clock speed at that price. [snip] For games, you need 2 cores and major clock speed, not a quad core and mediocre clock speed.

Sorry, but that's completely false. Sure, you can hit 4GHz relatively easily with a Core 2 Duo E8xxx, but good Quads are regularly hitting 3.6GHz. I fail to see how the former is major speed and the latter is mediocre, especially since you will see completely negligible real-world benefit. The duals beat quads almost exclusively in synthetic benchmarks that do not reflect real world gains. Most games available today are GPU-bound (with several notable exceptions like GTA4 and WoW), so squeezing out an extra 400MHz on the dual core will not necessarily net you even a modest framerate increase. If anything, a C2Q will seem more responsive in everyday use because the extra cores can be used for common multitasking -- alt-tab out of a game, turn on some music, start burning a DVD, etc. A dual core will be pegged by a couple processor-intensive tasks, while a quad has room to breathe. So yeah, I fail to see why a dual core is a shoe-in for a gaming machine while a quad is not, unless the buyer in question doesn't care at all about future releases, multitasking, or present-day multithreaded applications.

Re:What a crock...

[w0mprat]

You need to reinstall your sarcasm detection package.

There's a serious lack of sarcasm tags, and it's required when it's not immediately obvious.

Where is your irony tag...

Re:What a crock...

[Taibhsear]

What do you mean by i7?

The new core from intel. Nehalem processors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_3

Re:What a crock...

[DarthJohn]

Intel's new chip design. as seen on /.

Re:What a crock...

[Barny]

You ain't missing much :)

Their logic is astounding, they push a pair of 4870X2 cards rather than a tri-sli of gtx280s for the "ultimate pc" because, the pair of 4870s is 4 GPUs....

This is not to say they make no mention of adding a separate 9600gt for physX (with a flexible pci-e 1x connector you can fit it in with a tri-sli setup) or a well priced raid adapter (areca or such) to run some SSDs so they actually have the bandwidth they can supply.

All in all, a competent system builder could "build" a much better ultimate pc (way higher cost of course, but this was not about cost was it?) without thinking about it for more than about 10min.

Re:What a crock...

[RicRoc]

What are the exact specs of the the PC you are building? What is the price? Did you consider how loud it will be? Linux hardware compatibility?

Re:What a crock...

[Kral_Blbec]

Heh, shows how much I care about movies. I just play games :P

Re:What a crock...

[pow2clk]

Uh. You are aware this is an Australian website while Tom's is in the US? They have their own money system and everything there. Check it out: http://www.google.com/search?q=970+australian+dollars+in+us+dollars Thus, "nearly a grand" in gameplayer.com.au money amounts to about $700 in Tom's money. So it's not so far off after all.

Re:What a crock...

[LackThereof]

A small handful of new games, most notably Left4Dead, show non-trivial performance improvement on quad cores, even at lower clock speeds.

This is a new development, and I wouldn't put a quad in a "budget" gaming box just to improve performance in a very small handful of new games, but all signs point to future games preferring quads.

Re:What a crock...

[thegnu]

You need to reinstall your sarcasm detection package.

There's a serious lack of sarcasm tags, and it's required when it's not immediately obvious.

Where is your irony tag...

Guys! I found it:
[/irony]

Re:What a crock...

[dbIII]

well, as the title of the article says, this is a gaming box. Quad isn't used in gaming

There are examples where it can be. Last year World of Warcraft increased in performance dramaticly on multi-core systems with a patch that allowed better multi-threading. Even a Nintendo DS has multiple CPUs so it's about time those game programmers that have not been dragged into the 1990s get their act together.

Re:What a crock...

[Shadow of Eternity]

I almost think you're just trolling me. Almost. But since you did ask a reasonably answerable question the average improvement I've seen when I enable the extra 2 cores in Orange Box engine games is going from 60-80fps to 120-200fps.

As for buying for the future being a stupid catch phrase, bullshit.

Re:What a crock...

[indi0144]

nice try but I have the original one: [\irony]

Re:What a crock...

[Techman83]

That's around AU$1000, considering that our dollar has taken quite a beating at the moment, anything we have to import is becoming pricey. So that $1000 is actually around US$670

Re:What a crock...

[SplatMan_DK]

Looks like a buncha kids opened up newegg and built themselves machines in their head...

I agree. Why the hell pay more than 10K for a homebuild rig when I can pay around 9K for an Alienware ALX rig with similar specs (i7 Extreme, liquid cooling, SLI gfx, 1200 W PSU, 2xFlash based HDDs in RAID0)?

Not only is it waaaaay cooler to have an Alienware rig, it also means that you get everingthing delivered as a working machine, not as a damn do-it-yourself-kit. I buy computers from serious computer resellers not from IKEA dammit. And I certainly don't want to waste precious gaming-time bending liquid-cooling tubes with a screwdriver when I could be slaying Big Daddies and Necromorphs instead!

The article was clearly written by hardware-freaks with a wet dream NOT by gamers!

- Jesper

Re:What a crock...

[Archimagus]

Also, it seems that they are in Australian dollars. Looking at some of the prices they seemed off from the last time I opened newegg. $70.00 for 4 gigs of generic ddr2 800. I have found 4 gig kits for $20.00 and lower.

Re:What a crock...

[azenpunk]

"look but not touch."

i'm never getting married then.

Re:What a crock...

[tvon]

Yeah, but I don't think any quad-core chips hit the performance/price sweet spot. More likely you'd get a dual core that is easily over clocked.

Re:What a crock...

[mpeskett]

Price vs Performance. For the same clock speed, a quad will be significantly more expensive, but the extra cores may not help performance for gaming all that much.

Since it was the "budget" build in question here, if you can get almost-as-good for a lot less money, that would be the more sensible option.

Re:What a crock...

[simplexion]

gameplayer.com.AU$

Pffft.

[XPeter]

These PC's are low-end when compared to my overclocked Commodore 64.

Re:Pffft.

[jellomizer]

The flames that are coming out of the back isn't a case mode then.

Re:Pffft.

[Yvan256]

Your overclocked Commodore 64 can't beat my overclocked CoCo3.

Re:Pffft.

[genner]

These PC's are low-end when compared to my overclocked Commodore 64.

A Vic-20 is good enough for anyone.

Re:Pffft.

[kikito]

My overclocked abacus still rules

Re:Pffft.

[howman]

I've got an over clocked OMNI with dual paddles and plastic cell covers for your black and white TV monitor sittin on my desk here.

Re:Pffft.

[toddestan]

Yeah, but it isn't portable like my TI-85!

The thing about these machines is

[Toreo asesino]

...there's not actually any games that needs anywhere near the horsepower they pack. I'm rarely impressed by a machine that with full details at super HD resolutions can run any game....at 400fps. Your eyes can only pickup 80fps anyway; you wouldn't know if it was 100 or 10,000 fps unless the fps counter didn't say.

Oh, and in 1-2 years comparable hardware can be picked up at a tenth of the price.

Still, I'm all for the advancement of benchmarking science, so this is still a good thing.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[rodrigoandrade]

You mean the original Crysis, not Warhead, as the newer game was optimized to run on lesser hardware.

I know because I have both running on a Core 2 Quad Q9550 with 2 GB of 1333 MHz DDR3 and a Geforce 9800GT. Warhead runs smoother on higher settings.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Anonymous Coward]

Your eyes can only pickup 80fps anyway; you wouldn't know if it was 100 or 10,000 fps unless the fps counter didn't say.

It doesn't matter what your eyes can see. It's about responsiveness. Faster rendering makes the game more responsive. See, we live in an analog world which has essentially infinite FPS. The closer a game gets to that then the better it feels because it will respond at the exact microsecond you do something. It does make a very real difference.

Now granted many people don't care otherwise there wouldn't be people like you that think "80 FPS is enough for anyone." Gunny how that number keeps creeping upwards. First it was 24 FPS (because that was all the eye could see), then 30, then 60, now you're saying 80. LOL

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Mprx]

You can easily tell the difference between 100fps and 10000fps by looking at high contrast fast motion. Human eyes don't see in frames, but the point where increasing framerate won't cause any perceptible difference is probably in the thousands of fps.

Here's a good explanation of the issues of motion reproduction:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/TempRate.mspx

Whatever temporal sampling rate you choose, it's unlikely to be fast enough
There is no practical frame rate high enough to properly portray all the motion typically encountered. It is necessary to pick a sensible rate that is slow enough to allow the video signal to be stored, routed around, and of course broadcast.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[DuckDodgers]

While I agree, the counterpoint is that you get a lot of diminishing returns for your PC investment. Depending upon what you get, maybe $800 well spent (not counting the monitor) will get you 80 fps.

Bump your PC spending to $1800, and the extra $1000 gives you better graphics, maybe 120 fps, maybe 200, whatever. But unless you have money to burn, that extra grand wasn't well spent. Just put it into the bank, and buy another $800 machine in 3 years.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[timster]

See, we live in an analog world which has essentially infinite FPS.

The Planck time allows for only around 1.86x10^43 fps, which is nowhere even close to infinity.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[VShael]

The Planck time allows for only around 1.86x10^43 fps, which is nowhere even close to infinity.

Holy frak. What sort of high-spec machine is our universe running on then?

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Anonymous Coward]

And you can see the difference between 100 fps and 100000 fps in a display that uses a 60Hz refresh signal by counting the tearing lines you get per frame.

Ofc, you disable vertical sync to get to the 100000fps.

At some point it is better to invest in shorter display cables to get a feedback loop that is smaller. You should also invest in the smallest display you can pay so you can view it completely while being as close to it as your nose allows. That way you will reduce the space light needs to travel and your feedback loop is shorter. That will surely will give you that extra CS-or-whatever kill.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[GenP]

Mr. Munroe.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[wgaryhas]

depending on the monitor's refresh rate, 80 fps may be the best a monitor can do: 8 ms response time = 125 fps 12 ms = 83 fps 16 ms = 63 fps And many monitors have response times of 12 ms or more. So if you aren't paying attention, you could build a system that updates faster than the monitor can display.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Prien715]

There's still no machine in existence that can run GTA 4 on its highest settings....

Re:The thing about these machines is

[lymond01]

What sort of high-spec machine is our universe running on then?

Over 6 billion cores and counting...

Re:The thing about these machines is

[tonytnnt]

Your eyes can only pickup 80fps anyway; you wouldn't know if it was 100 or 10,000 fps unless the fps counter didn't say.

Give your eyes some credit (and stop spreading that terrible rumor!). The US Air Force has shown that the human eye can detect and identify objects at slightly over 200 fps. Really we need to go WELL above 200 frames in order to get to true realism (perhaps to 500.) If you'd like a more in depth explanation of the 200+fps ability of the human eye, I'd refer you first to here: http://www.tweakguides.com/Graphics_5.html and secondly to Google. It's well documented. On the Tweakguides page there's even an application called FPS Compare that runs a 3D environment split down the center, with different rates on either side. It's interesting. You may not consciously notice the difference at first, but try the random testing (look at the readme file) and give it a shot. I could usually pick out the faster rate, even when comparing 80 to 100.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[joranbelar]

You only think we live in an analog world because the quantization is too small for you to detect. ;)

Re:The thing about these machines is

[gandhi_2]

at a certain price point, you are really just paying for shit-talking rights.

problem is, you have to go back to jr. high to use them.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[ccozan]

I fell obliged to serve this link http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm/. Short story: 500fps.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[SmurfButcher Bob]

Wrong. Mine, which is specced to run Duke Nukem Forever, runs your game at that resolution just fine.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[tonytnnt]

The Planck time allows for only around 1.86x10^43 fps, which is nowhere even close to infinity.

Holy frak. What sort of high-spec machine is our universe running on then?

I heard Blizzard is upgrading WoW to the Universe Server in a few more years...

Re:The thing about these machines is

[geekoid]

FPS drops as more things are moving on the screen, so a 400FPS by it's self isn't noticeable, but when you have 40 people, effects, and bosses all going at it, it will drop the FPS a lot.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[geekoid]

It is if you play a popular MMORPG. Players and effects will drop your FPS a lot.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[geekoid]

For all intent and purposes within this context it does.

"...hich is nowhere even close to infinity."
Do you even understand what infinity is?

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Mprx]

Virtually all LCDs are locked to 60Hz refresh rate, and will drop or blend frames if you try to input higher frame rates.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Twinbee]

What say we all universally switch to a 300fps system for now. It divides by 20, 25, 30, 50, 60, and 100, so it would convert most of the old signals smoothly. And I bet OLED technology would allow it.

At a push maybe even 600fps, so that 24fps would divide also.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Mprx]

Note that to test high frame rates fairly you'll need a monitor that can be synchronized refresh rate to frame rate (such as a good CRT) or you could be noticing the differences in tearing or judder rather than the differences in frame rate.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Nebu]

Your eyes can only pickup 80fps anyway; you wouldn't know if it was 100 or 10,000 fps unless the fps counter didn't say.

It doesn't matter what your eyes can see. It's about responsiveness. Faster rendering makes the game more responsive. See, we live in an analog world which has essentially infinite FPS. The closer a game gets to that then the better it feels because it will respond at the exact microsecond you do something. It does make a very real difference.

Not really. It's very common to design your game loop so that the code which updates the screen is modularly-separated from the code which does game-state updating and input reading.

Thus you could build your game engine to render 30 frames per second, but do 10'000 game-state updates per second and 10'000 input (from keyboard, mouse, joystick, etc.) per second.

If you ever see the term "frame skipping" in an option menu somewhere, the engine's FPS and "game-state-updates-per-second" are probably not in perfect sync.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[gad_zuki!]

Actually 24-30 is all your really need. The illusion of motion works great there. This is mostly due to the motion blur illusion that works in photographic mediums, but not so well with CGI. Essentially, moving things dont look right without blur. Youre not getting anymore response at 80+ fps, what youre getting is the illusion of a polygon moving across a screen looks more "smooth" because evolution has made us so that things moving without blur look wrong. Things still look wrong, but its so smooth and glassy its less distracting.

So more FPS is throwing hardware at a software problem. Modern games designers and console makers dont see an absurd fps as the fix here. They are artificially inducing blur with CGI motion blur. Now you can run your game at 24-30 fps and it will feel like a film movie does or how a DVD looks like. Your monkey brain wont be thinking "that looks wrong for some reason" because the machine will be generating blur for you.

With good CGI blurring you can use your CPU/GPU horsepower for other things instead of pushing FPS. Details, physics, etc. Its all a pay off one way or another. Nothing is for free.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[skeeto]

Holy frak. What sort of high-spec machine is our universe running on then?

Remember that your perception of passage of time is determined within he universe machine itself, so the universe machine need not be powerful, just have the proper amounts of (real) time, memory, and energy.

Actually, that assumes it's running in a universe like the one it's simulating.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[timster]

Welllll...

See, I tend to object somewhat to what I see as a misunderstanding of the word "analog" and beneath that, failure to understand the limitations of our own senses. "Analog" in the first place has zilch to do with "infinite" frame rates or infinite detail or what have you. I've seen people say that they think an old audio cassette tape "sounds better than CD" because "it's analog" as if that somehow meant it didn't have a horrible bandwidth deficiency.

In the case of frame rates, the capabilities of the "analog world" (how can the world be an analog of itself anyway?) are silly to even discuss, since we're perceiving that world through a biochemical structure which reacts at a snail's pace. The structure of the poster's argument makes it seem as if he believes you could perceive a difference between a million FPS and a billion FPS. But rather than throw out numbers like "million" or "billion" I went with the reciprocal of the Planck time -- way funnier.

As an aside, I'm not sure who ever believed that 24FPS was "as fast as the eye could see" when it's barely above the flicker fusion threshold.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[QuantumPion]

But real time motion blur requires that you generate double the number of frames, and then blend them together. So you still need hardware capable of rendering 60 fps to get 30 fps with motion blur.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[ydrol]

Your eyes can only pickup 80fps anyway

You might find this interesting. http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm

Re:The thing about these machines is

[AAWood]

You know that whole "the eyes only work at xxfps!" is an urban myth, right? Yes, I daresay 10,000fps is overkill, but the eyes don't see in discrete frames, they perceive a constant input.

Devices such as monitors and TVs which use discrete frames have to display those frames fast enough that the eye can't tell the difference, or it becomes noticeable and annoying. In TV and films they can be shot taking this into account, ensuring that objects move around relatively smoothly, but in games the camera is usually player controlled, and often swings round much faster, so framerates have be higher to compensate.

If you play those types of games, having a system that can achieve a high FPS is important. More important is having a system which can achieve a consistent FPS. And if nothing else, having a system which is overkill for the current high end games just means you have that much more time until the inevitable upgrade to keep up. Comparable hardware may be available for cheaper in a couple of years, but in a couple of years the games need more and the hardware is no longer, pound-for-pound, comparable.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[travbrad]

Not only that, but a lot of people seem to overlook the fact that their monitor is only capable of a certain refresh rate. Many LCDs only do 60hz at their native resolution, which is basically "locking" you down to 60FPS regardless of how fast your video card is rendering.

It is still good to have a high average frame rate though. If you average 80FPS, it may dip much lower (like 40-50FPS) in some games, which will look noticeably stuttery (probably more stuttery than if you just ran at a constant 40FPS).

By the way, if you are getting 400FPS you are either A) Playing really old games or B) Running much lower settings/resolutions than you should. People still can't run Crysis at even 50FPS (constant) with uber overclocked systems, and that has been out for more than a year. Many people are struggling to even get 30FPS in recently released GTA4. So there is a point to having these really fast rigs, even if most games easily run fine on slower hardware. I don't think it's worth the cost (I generally stay about 12-24months behind the cutting edge), but it does make a difference on some games.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Mprx]

100fps physics with 30fps rendering will be more playable than 30fps physics with 30fps rendering, but nowhere near as good as 100fps physics with 100fps rendering. Find a good CRT and test it for yourself. 30fps is nowhere near enough to adequately represent fast motion.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Mprx]

Motion blur is not an acceptable solution, because real motion blur is modified by eye movement. Artificial motion blur will not look realistic because it will be present even when tracking motion with eye movement. It will produce an artifact very similar to the sample and hold blurring present seen on LCDs. Even measuring eye position can't solve this problem -- there is no getting round the fact that fast motion requires a fast frame rate to avoid artifacts.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[hvdh]

Refresh rate is configured by the video mode. It is independent of display response time. TFT response time is the time it takes the display to switch from dark to light. If is not the time between [new pixel is sent from the GPU to display electronics] and [pixel intensity on screen changes according to data sent]. This is called Input Lag. Typical TN displays (the cheap consumer ones) have a response time of 5-10ms and an input lag of 30ms.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[robthebloke]

I disagree - as do the facts. PAL is 25fps, and NTSC is 30fps. In modern parlance, these formats are actually 576i and 480i respectively.

Both formats were designed in the era of early CRT's in the 50's and 60's, and were designed to be interlaced when displayed. These frame rates were not picked because humans can't notice the difference, they were picked to match the frequency of the AC power supply. (which was 60Hz in the US, 50Hz in the EU).

Now the ideal, would have been to use 576p and 480p instead of the interlaced formats - however we are talking about relatively primitive TV technology here - the signal bandwidth needed to send non interlaced signals simply wasn't available at the time. So, they compromised and went interlaced, which has led to this mis-information that 25fps is enough for many years now.

If you ever owned a dreamcast, you might remember that games would ask if you wanted to display the image at 50 or 60Hz....

You might also be aware that DVD's and BD's are 60Hz non-interlaced.

Incidentally, the 24fps figure also has historical reasons for being. 24fps is 'good enough' to convey fluid motion, whilst being 'cheap enough' to allow the film to go into actual production. (rolls of film cost quite a few $ back in the 1930's). When the final film was displayed, each frame would normally be displayed 3 times - giving the effect of 72fps.

The only place where 24fps still rules the roost, is traditional animation where the cost of in-betweening at 60fps will more than double the production budget - for relatively little effect. (Mind you most animation productions use CGI these days to provide automatic tweening).

So. anyhow, Not sure of the exact figure, but the 80fps figure quoted by the grand parent, is more or less correct.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Khyber]

Quad-core i7 with quad SLI and 16GB ram under Vistax64?

Betcha it would.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[roskakori]

Your eyes can only pickup 80fps anyway; you wouldn't know if it was 100 or 10,000 fps unless the fps counter didn't say.

[...]Gunny how that number keeps creeping upwards. First it was 24 FPS (because that was all the eye could see), then 30, then 60, now you're saying 80.

There are to different issues at work which are well documented in literature and backup up with experiments:

1. At a certain framerate, single images blur into an animation an can not be distinguished as single images anymore. This happens at about 25 FPS.
2. If you flash a single image for a short enough time, the eye and brain will not be able to recognize it anymore. While the brain decodes an image, it does not have to look at it all the time due to a "burn in" effect with the eye. Because of that, the time you actually see the image can be very short. Experiments with showing silhouettes of airplanes to fighter pilots yield that some of them could still distinguish certain planes even if they were flashed for only 1/200 of a second.

So 25 FPS are enough to make a game look basically fluid, but 200 FPS can be useful to process rough and basic information. For example when quickly rotating the view and scanning for the muzzle flash of enemies firing at you.

And, as others pointed out already, more FPS means less latency. As example consider a muzzle flash the game internally creates 1 milliseccond after you last screen refresh. At 25 FPS, you will be able to actually see it after 40 milliseconds, at 200 FPS it only takes 5 milliseconds. This give you 35 milliseconds more time to process the information. But you still lose 4 milliseconds compared to a system with 1000 FPS.

Granted these milliseconds might not matter much for casually playing a shooter, for instance I still enjoyed playing Doom at about 20 FPS on an upgraded Amiga 2000 back then. But for competitive gamers these milliseconds might just be the edge they need to win some price money.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Chabo]

Wouldn't it just be able to blur from the previous frame? I agree it adds some overhead, but intuitively it seems like a machine capable of 60fps would get about 50 with motion blur, not 30.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[NovaHorizon]

actually the current estimate is around 200, with some believing that fps is simply an incompatible way to measure how fast the eye can see as we may not see 'frames'

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Joce640k]

LOL!

24fps has never been true for computers.

The perfect framerate is the one which your display device can show without noticable flickering. Any more than that is a complete waste of time (and looks worse).

In a cinema it's 24fps, on a CRT it's 75-80fps, on LCDs it's 60fps.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Kbac]

Univ 1000 Series XP-R 29 S, But I hear the Univ 2000 Series should be released late December of 2012 making the 1000 series obsolete... ummm... So what is going to happen to the obsolete system?

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Carewolf]

LCDs are locked to 60Hz and they are the only ones using response-time as measurement. So either get yourself a nice good CRT or just limit yourself to 60Hz, because your screen won't show anything more.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Menkhaf]

It doesn't matter what your eyes can see. It's about responsiveness. Faster rendering makes the game more responsive. See, we live in an analog world which has essentially infinite FPS. The closer a game gets to that then the better it feels because it will respond at the exact microsecond you do something. It does make a very real difference.

Ever thought of spending a few bucks on some smokeables instead of dropping a few hundred bucks on a new graphics card? "Hacking" yourself to make you slower is a lot cheaper than buying new hardware ;)

Re:The thing about these machines is

[halltk1983]

Playstation 3?

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Translation Error]

Yggdrasil.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[dave420]

It's not only about FPS - it's about quality settings. If you can reach 100FPS with all the details turned down, no FSAA, no HDR stuff, you sure will notice an upgrade that still plays at 100FPS, but with all that stuff turned on. That's the difference. That's why PS3/Xbox360 games look as good as they do - it's not just FPS but quality of the graphics.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[sootman]

Funny how that number keeps creeping upwards. First it was 24 FPS (because that was all the eye could see), then 30, then 60, now you're saying 80.

Part of the reason for this is blur. 24fps of naturally-shot film looks real because each frame is a little blurry wherever there's fast motion so the illusion is complete. 24fps of artificially-generated static images is NOT convincing. (Compare the old Ray Harryhausen-style stop-motion films to modern go-motion work.) So you either need a lot more fps or the game needs to blur the image for you.

So when people started making games, they figured 24/30 fps was enough because that worked for film and video, not realizing there were other differences. Then the numbers started climbing.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[T-Bone-T]

I bet my i7 with 12GB RAM might actually be faster than yours. Why? Support for 3 channels. You're going to have a bottleneck between half of your RAM.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[gad_zuki!]

Thats not really true. Although current blur implementations are not very mature and add overheard, they dont require 2x the horsepower. A good part of this stuff is just rehashing the previous frames, so youre not rerendering everything. I wouldnt be surprised to see blur effects mature (say with Temporal anti-aliasing) to a point where they arent very intensive. Even with the overhead you still get a realistic feeling of movement as opposed to the super-smooth glassy feeling that really has no real life analogue.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[BlueNovember]

...Your eyes can only pickup 80fps anyway; you wouldn't know if it was 100 or 10,000 fps unless the fps counter didn't say.

Some truth in that, but you are making something of a generalisation.
I've linked to this page a few times; it explains things nicely:
How many frames can humans see?

Re:The thing about these machines is

[setagllib]

Windows can hardly manage 10,000 system calls per second. You'd be very lucky to even get 1000 game logic updates per second on a *realtime* system, let alone a userland thread with syscall based locking, which again is all Windows has. 100 is much more reasonable.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Prien715]

Nope...bottleneck is video card memory. No current card on the market that has enough memory to load the highest quality textures into memory.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Prien715]

Uh...yeah

I mean, in that you mean the game's graphics quality is much worse, but can't turn it up.

See:
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6202552/p-4.html?tag=feature;sidenav

Re:The thing about these machines is

[spice guru]

Anthropocentric Chauvinist! Dogs observe things too!

Re:The thing about these machines is

[__aayejd672]

I think human eyes can only pick up something like 28-30fps. The reason higher fps is better is mainly for online gaming - at the end of each frame networking can be handled, the higher the fps the more often you can send data to the server. If your bullets register before someone elses its all good :)

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Nicolay77]

My 21" CRT can do 125 hz in some resolutions. It's usually at 85 hz all the time.

I just config the game with vsync on and it feels smooth and nice, and fraps tells me that I get 85 fps almost continuosly at 1600x1200.

It's sad (at least to me) that we still don't a display technology with the advantages of both CRT and LCD.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[lymond01]

Human's observe dogs observing but there's no lasting proof of processing by hounds -- no remaining data output. I write, therefore I am. Of course, with the advent of organized 1s and 0s, I may not be for much longer.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[Khyber]

For ID Tech5 based games, textures take up nearly JACK. The megatexture idea is quite nice, you only need about 24 megs of RAM to texture a whole level and the entities residing within it.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[azenpunk]

if you have a higher fps than your monitor can physically accomodate then what happens (i believe) is that the top part of the image will be one frame and the lower parts will be rendered from the next frame or two. all of this still helps produce a smoother image (up to a point)

but the biggest benefit of a really high FPS for most gaming is that when the fps slows down during really high activity scenes the slowed speed will still be at a high enough fps to look smooth.

Re:The thing about these machines is

[spice guru]

dog observes food - food is eaten - state is changed - state processed by dog - not only is this tangible proof of the observation abilities of the dog but it is also evidence of higher learning. The output is the absence of the input. The dog is not merely commenting abstractly on the observation but materially altering it's existence. This also neatly bypasses the "translation problem" whereby no external observer can be sure that you have read a student's exam paper simply by noting that you put a tick at the bottom. If you were to eat that exam paper then the ambiguity would dissolve.

GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[syousef]

On the Extreme 4 GB of Video RAM? Seriously?

Someone please Correct me if I'm wrong but if you're mapping 4GB of video RAM you'll not be able to run a 32 bit OS. Given that this is a gaming PC, wouldn't this be a deal breaker? I mean even the uber gamers occassionally like to run older games right?

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[Paradigm_Complex]

It's not as though one can not run older games on 64bit hardware/OS's.

Also, for software which supports 64bits it should be faster than it's 32bit equivalent, which is quite important for modern gaming.

Also, there is a 64bit version of XP.

Also, Vista really isn't that slow if you give it enough RAM - which clearly is not an issue in this case.

As of the time of writing, for a brand-new top-of-the-line gaming machine you'd want Vista 64 on there.

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[wisty]

I think nethack can be compiled to run on a 64 bit system. If not, it's open source, so you can modify it yourself.

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[mikael]

Not sure how the programming interface for graphics cards has changed, but the SVGA graphics cards used a 64K 'memory window' to make the contents of the video framebuffer available to the CPU. You could write a value into the page register which would indicate which bank of video memory the CPU should read and write to.

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[Eudial]

On the Extreme 4 GB of Video RAM? Seriously?

Someone please Correct me if I'm wrong but if you're mapping 4GB of video RAM you'll not be able to run a 32 bit OS. Given that this is a gaming PC, wouldn't this be a deal breaker? I mean even the uber gamers occassionally like to run older games right?

The kernel should deal with that. If you request some memory address, paging assigns a virtual address for the physical memory so that you can access -any- 4 Gb of data in some order.

You can still only access 4 Gb at one specific time per process, but that should be enough for most purposes, no?

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[JWSmythe]

    You're giving me flashbacks of the "good old days", when memory was outrageously expensive, and there was a program to let you use some of that extra video memory for the system. Some kids, who could afford systems with (oh my gosh) 4Mb RAM, would use 2Mb for a ramdrive to run the game in, since it was so much faster than their 20Mb hard drive, and the rest would be used for the game itself.

    I know we can still do silly things like that in Linux, but I don't know what's available for Windows users. I've only had a few requests to make ramdrives, even in Linux. One was for a temporary database, so it could work faster than the drives would allow. :)

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[Repossessed]

Yes and no. 32 bit windows has a mode called PAE, It will let you acces sa ful 4 gigs of RAM and then deal with video (and other hardware) memory separately. The catch is, hardware compatibility with pae mode windows is fairly low, since a lot of hardware manufacturers don't test their drivers in pae mode.

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[XMyth]

I'm curious why you think that "for software which supports 64bits it should be faster than it's 32bit equivalent" ?

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[DoofusOfDeath]

Don't some operating systems map the kernel's code and data into one end of every process's virtual address space? I believe that's why programs can't readily use the whole 4 GB for their own purposes.

I believe this is remedied by using the x86 PAE extensions, or just by switching to a 64-bit operating system and recompiling your programs as 64-bit programs. (Although I think that on current Intel chips, you still only get something like 48-bit virtual addresses and 36-bit physical addresses.)

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[MojoRilla]

The kernel should deal with that. If you request some memory address, paging assigns a virtual address for the physical memory so that you can access -any- 4 Gb of data in some order.

In theory, yes. In practice, no. A 32 bit windows machine can't use a 4 gb graphics card at all, because video memory is mapped before other memory and eats into the 4 gb address space for each process. Windows used to allow the use of PAE to allow the 4 gb to be virtualized, but this was disabled due to driver issues. See this for more detail.

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[iainl]

For disk reads, modern cacheing configuration shouldn't be signficantly slower than a RAMdisk.

For writes, it's obviously no good for any data you need to survive a reboot. There are a few specific circumstances where you want this, but don't have access to the source in order to tell it to just work in memory. But not many.

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[Rogerborg]

I'm curious why you think that "for software which supports 64bits it should be faster than it's 32bit equivalent" ?

Memcopies? Fuck, I don't know, 64 is twice 32. Chicks flip for numbers, is all I know.

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[Prien715]

First of all, the 32 bit addressible space is 2^32 which is 2^10 (KB) * 2^10 (MB) * 2^10 (GB) * 2^2 (4). That's exactly 4 GB unless I'm using some fuzzy maths. It's my understanding that there's a BIOS restriction on PCs that doesn't allow them to address physical memory past 3 GB...but since the GPU memory itself is a different animal, I'm not entirely certain the same 3 GB restriction would apply.

However, I'm not even sure it'd be the OS that'd be the issue. If the GPU registers themselves are 32 bit, you'd be SOL regardless.

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[Poltras]

More registers, along others things. Which makes the compiler performs further optimizations. Some say they've seen 15% speed increase from the same source (with GCC).

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[Nick Ives]

Firstly, games work fine in 64bit Vista. I have a Vista x64 installation that I reboot into just for playing games and everything works OK. For really old games I can just use DOSBox which is an even better solution because it means no reboot!

Secondly, in Crossfire/SLI memory isn't doubled up like that. The cards both have the same contents in their memory, so 2x2GB cards is still just 2GB of video RAM overall. TBH that's far too much memory even for a pair of 4870s, but still.

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[Nick Ives]

Because amd64 isn't just a 64bit version of x86. Most ISAs that have 32 and 64bit versions will be faster in 32bit mode because less data is being moved around. Amd64 took the opportunity to remove some cruft from x86 and add more registers and so code compiled for it will generally run faster on CPUs that support it.

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[sanosuke001]

No, Windows needs to map video ram and any other physical device to memory space. In a 32-bit OS, you only have 4GB address space. You can't take away the video card's memory, so if you have a 32-bit OS with 2x2GB ram for your video cards, Windows won't boot.

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[Cowclops]

What computer had 4MB of ram but only a 20MB hard drive? By the time I had 4MB of ram, I had a 340MB hard drive to go with it.

(But your point still stands, lol)

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[azenpunk]

i thought the problem with a 32 bit OS was that 32 bits for an instruction just isn't long enough to address anything past the 4 GB mark, not just more than 4 GB per process.

have i got it wrong?

Re:GPU: 2x2GB 4870 = No 32 bit XP?

[Eudial]

The physical address connected to a memory address can be changed by the kernel, so that it can access any memory without any specific order (including, in theory, memory outside the 4Gb range). The wikipedia article on virtual memory explains it.

6GB of ram?

[wjh31]

last time i checked, the i7 boards had 6 ram slots, for an easy 12GB. Also im pretty sure its possible to find boards with atleast 3 PCI-E slots, so they are missing an extra graphics card there. 6 SATA slots is also do-able, so with one to the BD burner, that leaves 5 for a raid 5 SSD config to give 1TB of SSD. And only one screen? 3 cards means 6 screens, i feel they missed some obvious extras

Re:6GB of ram?

[houghi]

+1 insightfull

Re:6GB of ram?

[adachan]

3 Cards in SLI does not mean 6 screens. It does mean 1 screen that runs games really fast (or so Nvidia wants us to think). For a gamer, I think faster FPS is better than more screens (which very very few games support).

Re:6GB of ram?

[wjh31]

what about for running each of your WOW accounts simultaneously?

Re:6GB of ram?

[LandDolphin]

WoW accounts? That's why you'd pick up a couple cheap eMachines to run those bots behind you.

Re:6GB of ram?

[NudeAvenger]

buy X computers... where X = number of your WOW accounts.

Re:6GB of ram?

[ion.simon.c]

Noobs.

If I played that damn game, I'd run windowed instances in multiple VMs. ;)

Re:6GB of ram?

[genner]

Noobs.

If I played that damn game, I'd run windowed instances in multiple VMs. ;)

Good idea if you could find a VM that had 3d acceleration.

Re:6GB of ram?

[Fross]

3 cards in the machine does not necessarily mean 3 cards in SLi. You can run them independently, each driving their own set of screens.

Re:6GB of ram?

[Rogerborg]

Noobs. If I played that damn game, I'd run windowed instances in multiple VMs. ;)

Good idea if you could find a VM that had 3d acceleration.

Pfft, you don't need much of a framerate to run WOWGlider on your dupes.

Re:6GB of ram?

[darkmeridian]

I agree that the article missed lots of easy performance boosts. RAM is so cheap, they definitely should have maxed out the board. As far as the hard drive goes, they should have added a RAID controller card with 128 megabytes of on-board cache along with a bunch of 1.5 GB hard drives in RAID configuration. Multiple screens is the credited response. At the very least, they could drive a Dell 30" Ultrasharp and two 24" screens on the side.

Re:6GB of ram?

[tonytnnt]

... Also im pretty sure its possible to find boards with atleast 3 PCI-E slots, so they are missing an extra graphics card there...

[H]ard|OCP just did a video article on 3-way SLI for those who are interested. http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTYwNiwsLGhlbnRodXNpYXN0

Re:6GB of ram?

[bughunter]

At some point, the benefit of any additional FPS is going to be imperceptible. There's no agreement on the exact number, but you generally see it put at somewhere between 60 and 120 FPS. Let's call it Maximum Perceptible FPS (MPFPS) for the sake of this post, and say it's value is not much greater than 2^7.

If you've got a motherboard with three slots, and three cards capable of delivering MPFPS, there's no other point in using them to drive a single display past MPFPS.

Alternativey, I'd put cards dedicated to three different kinds of jobs in those slots: First - a High FPS, High-res, large format 3D accelerated Gaming display. Second - a very large format 2D-accelerated workspace for browsing and coding. And Third - a max resolution progressive scan HD television card.

Re:6GB of ram?

[afidel]

Heck, even 4GB DIMM's aren't even that expensive anymore, about $250 even with HP's markup. So for a top end gamer box you can do 6x4=24GB of ram, should be enough to play the game and cache the entire install folder to ram =)

Re:6GB of ram?

[JTsyo]

The i7 uses DDR3, which is not quite so cheap.

FFS

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Seriously, can we please, please stop describing people who purchase dubiously durable consumer goods that will be obsolete within a few years as "investors"? And, obviously, stop describing those goods as "investments".

There is nothing wrong, per se, with buying such things; but the notion that you are "investing" in them is patent nonsense.

Re:FFS

[wisty]

In 1 years time, it will be worth 40% of what they paid for it. That's an investement, isn't it? Heck, it's not even a bad investement these days.

Re:FFS

[Masami Eiri]

It is an investment, just not one with a monetary payout.

Re:FFS

[Chrisq]

Normally I would agree with you, but looking at the stock markets over the last 12 months you might have been better off buying hardware....

(Does anyone want to buy some SCO shares?)

Re:FFS

[Spazztastic]

There is nothing wrong, per se, with buying such things; but the notion that you are "investing" in them is patent nonsense.

This. You put central air/heat into your house, you're investing it. You put money into a company, you're investing it. You fork out about $3000 to build a computer that is completely overkill, you're NOT investing it. An investment is when you'll see some sort of profit from it, so unless if you're a professional gamer and it will make your frag count increase by 23.2%, it's not an investment.

Re:FFS

[Greyfox]

Perhaps their belief that it's "investing" is an indication of why we're currently in the middle of an economic crisis.

Re:FFS

[Sinning]

Happiness isn't profit? Since when does it have to be a monetary return?

Re:FFS

[drinkypoo]

An investment is when you'll see some sort of profit from it, so unless if you're a professional gamer and it will make your frag count increase by 23.2%, it's not an investment.

So I take it you put a fairly low value on personal enjoyment and satisfaction? BACK TO THE SALT MINES WITH YOU, SLAVE!

Re:FFS

[Spazztastic]

Happiness isn't profit? Since when does it have to be a monetary return?

Happiness also doesn't require money down. It's a terrible thing that it seems to be required though, however that's a whole other discussion.

Re:FFS

[geminidomino]

So you'll see profit from putting central air/heat in your home? Any more than buying a computer?

Indeed. It increases the value of the home itself.

Re:FFS

[Nerdposeur]

So I take it you put a fairly low value on personal enjoyment and satisfaction?

"Investment" means "trying to grow your money." Nobody says "I'm investing in an ice cream cone," no matter how much they enjoy it.

There's nothing wrong with spending money on what you enjoy. But let's not corrupt the meaning of words.

Re:FFS

[drinkypoo]

"Investment" means "trying to grow your money."

Maybe you should consider utilizing a dictionary occasionally. In particular, the American Heritage Dictionary defines sense three of the word as "Property or another possession acquired for future financial return or benefit." Pleasure is a benefit. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Re:FFS

[Spazztastic]

So you'll see profit from putting central air/heat in your home? Any more than buying a computer?

Indeed. It increases the value of the home itself.

That's the point I was going for with it. We did it and we saw a profit on it.

Re:FFS

[Lumpy]

Ack! stop the investment word use!. It's an expense. It's a liability. It's not an investment.

I really want to beat to death the guy that started talking about expenses as investments. Because it furthers the financial stupidity that plagues this nation.

something that loses value != investment.
Buying real estate can be an investment, but that gaming computer will never EVER be an investment.

Buying stocks can be..... well... Stocks are an expense and liability right now, I think scratch off tickets are a better investment.

Re:FFS

[JWSmythe]

    A good firearm can be worth 10% or more than the purchase value in a year.

    I purchased an "affordable" .45 (name brand, just not hugely expensive) several years ago for $300. Last time I checked, in good/used condition it is worth about $500.

    I picked up another one, of a better brand name for about $600 about 3 years ago. Now it's worth about $800.

    I built out some very nice computers for myself over the years. They each cost about $2,000, using very good parts. I'd be lucky if I could sell any of them for $100 now. Computers never hold their value. If you try to resell the same computer 6 months later, it's obsolete. That's not an investment, that's a consumable product that will never have a good resale value.

Re:FFS

[evol262]

Read dictionaries much? Familiar with basic grammar? The "benefit" is explicitly financial the way that definition is phrased, else it would be "Property or another possession acquired for personal benefit or future financial return".

Re:FFS

[randyest]

something that loses value != investment

That's a pretty stupid way to define investment, since it means that there are no investments at all, anywhere, over the last few years. Seriously, you're suggesting that if I buy a stock it's only an investment if it doesn't lose value? That's dumb.

Re:FFS

[Anonymous Coward]

And an affordable .45 can get you a $2,000 machine overnight!

Re:FFS

[lymond01]

No mod points but your statement was dead on. Most people consider "investing" only in terms of cash accrued after purchase. If you purchase in a high end gaming computer, your investment in your enjoyment just increased (hopefully). Good call, drinkypoo.

Re:FFS

[timiscool999]

He's not saying it's not enjoyable. It's just not an investment. It's a PURCHASE.

Re:FFS

[Prien715]

If you'd believe that spending money for personal enjoyment is an investment, then strange things seem to qualify. As in, I invested $200 in hookers and blow last night.

Unless you've got a wicked sense of irony or are a pimp and drug dealer, I'm not quite sure that qualifies as an investment;)

Re:FFS

[geminidomino]

I was referring to the central air, not the computer.

The profit from central heat/air adds value to your house.

The profit from a multi-megabuck computer for gaming is increased e-peen. Comparing the two is apples and cow pies.

Re:FFS

[geekoid]

Incorrect.

something that loses value = bad investment.
something that gains value = good investment.

investment doesn't equal money, either.
For example, if I play a game better my investment into that game went up.

Money can be value, but money isn't the only thing with value.

Re:FFS

[geekoid]

Wrong.

A good investment is something that returns a value.
A bad investment is won that doesn't return a value.

That value doesn't have to be money.
If I get value out of winning, it's a good investment. If I play a game that runs equally well on a 500$ machine, but I buy 1000 dollar machine I ahve made a bad investment. i.e. I gain no value.

The fact that people only thing an investment is something the returns a monetary gain is the underlying problem in the market, ATM.

Re:FFS

[darkmeridian]

Eating food generally isn't considered an investment even though you need to eat to survive.

Re:FFS

[JWSmythe]

    With a .45, I could get almost anything I wanted almost instantly. But, I'm a good guy, not a bad guy, so it's strictly for defensive purposes.

Re:FFS

[mog007]

If you kept that gaming pc for a century or two, it would become worth a hell of a lot more than you paid for it.

Re:FFS

[Khashishi]

wooooosh

Re:FFS

[zippthorne]

You invest in assets. you expect to see a return.

"investing in yourself" is a figure of speech. You can "invest in yourself" by buying entertainment gear to improve your quality of life. But that gear is not an investment any more than diamonds are an investment.

Re:FFS

[drinkypoo]

"investing in yourself" is a figure of speech.

Yes, and it happens to be a valid one.

It's difficult but not impossible for me to fathom that you would be stupid enough to provide an example of why I am correct and try to use it as an example of the opposite.

Obviously, you have drunk the capitalist kool-aid. The simple truth is that financial investments are not the only kind which pay off. They don't have to pay you in money! You can be paid in other coin (as you can see, we are so capitalistic that I can describe the entire situation in monetary terms without ever actually talking about money.)

You are trying to rob the language of meaning to suit your own ends. One of the wonderful things about English is that one word can mean so many things. Whether you like it or not, spending money to make yourself a happier person is an investment in your self. The return on your investment is happiness, which you may not be able to buy outright, but which you can certainly facilitate with the intelligent disbursement of funds.

Re:FFS

[billybacs]

One could also profit in the sense that they save on heating/cooling costs since it's a more efficient system. 15 years, depending on how much you save, the new system could pay for itself. (I'm not sure what the break-even would be on most of them, though).

Re:FFS

[Masami Eiri]

Better gameplay experience?

next up on article series ...

[heitikender]

... best web-server hardware configurations money can buy, also 10 hottest server apps for 2009.

How does this look?

[poetmatt]

http://techreport.com/articles.x/16064

How does that setup look for a current setup? Also, if there were further performance improvements to this setup, what would you change?

Re:How does this look?

[jgtg32a]

Get the 4870x2 instead, and double check that your PSU can support two of those if you wanted to

Re:How does this look?

[poetmatt]

So other than a pair of x2's crossfired instead of just 4870's crossfired, you don't think there's much else? Or are you saying get a 4870x2 instead of 4870's in crossfire? If so, why even?

What about a jump to 12G of ram instead of 6G? Matched triple-channel again.

Re:How does this look?

[jgtg32a]

I didn't really look too closely at it I just saw 2 4870@512, the 4870x2 is just two 4870 glued together but they have 1gb of ram each for a 2 gb card. This will also give you an upgrade path, if you wanted.

I wouldn't really bother with 12gb of ram unless you were going to make an 8gb ramdisk to load the entire game into RAM.

The 10 ...

[Akita24]

... penis replacement candidates already know. The rest of us don't care.

Why best gaming machine?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not the best for the bucks?
I usually never spend more than 800($CAN) for an upgrade... and I'm good for gaming for a few years with that... Why 4 cores? Currently games only use 1... so it's better to have 1 good core than 4 half-good...

A good old P4 Prescott with watercooling (a littlebit overclocked) is still better than a quadcores!

Re:Why best gaming machine?

[GweeDo]

The Unreal 3 engine and others happy put two cores to use. On top of that you still have OS processes and services running while you are gaming (unless you are playing some hot old DOS games off a boot floppy!). While I agree that for a "budget" style PC quad core is way over kill, dual core is far from being a silly investment. Once you consider the cost of a AMD Athlon X2 or something it is a no brainer.

Re:Why best gaming machine?

[Sinning]

Dual core has major advantages for modern gaming rigs. Especially those with multiple monitors.

Try running a second desktop with a web browser on your P4 and watch how it kills your FPS.

Re:Why best gaming machine?

[Mad Merlin]

A good old P4 Prescott with watercooling (a littlebit overclocked) is still better than a quadcores!

Bzzt! P4s are terrible, even a single core of the lowest end Intel quad core (Q6600) will crush most, if not all P4s.

Re:Why best gaming machine?

[Xest]

Anyone who spends that kind of money on hardware to play last gen games is a fool.

Plenty of current and next gen games when they arrive utilise 4 cores, it seems to make sense if you're spending money on a PC like that for it to be able to still play the games of tommorrow than to play the games of yesterday that can be run perfectly well even if using only 1 of 4 cores anyway.

To create an example to make this point clear:

Game A is out now
- it can be run on a single core higher clock speed CPU at 150fps
- or a lower clock speed quad core CPU utilising only one of them at 140fps

The difference will be narrow (or may not even exist in fact) because the OS still utilises multiple cores to ensure the game has a core to itself whilst single core has to share the core with the OS and background processes so even if the game doesn't use 4 cores, the OS does. Then onto the next scenario, a new game:

Game B comes out in a month
- it can be run on a single core higher clock speed CPU at 20fps due to not supporting the latest SIMD extensions etc.
- or it can be run on a quad core CPU utilising all cores, with the latest SIMD extensions and such at 200fps

So tell me, if you're laying down this kind of cash for a PC that you'll probably want to last for a while, what makes the most sense to go for?

Only a fool uses the "quad core is pointless, existing games don't use them all" argument when spending the amount of cash required for a high end gaming PC.

Graphics chipmakers on the hook?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are graphics chipmakers making investments in the newer game development to "ensure" that the games require and/or perform better with the newest chips, or is it purely a result of the chips' improved performance on games that is naturally enticing upgrades?

What games don't run in 64-bit Windows?

[Sycraft-fu]

Seriously, I'm honestly curious. I'm a huge PC gamer and I run Vista 64-bit. All 32-bit Windows apps, which accounts for most games made in the last 10 years or so, seem to run great natively. For older DOS games, well those don't run well in 32-bit Windows. You get no sound, video problems, etc. The NTVDM isn't really good fro games. So what you do is fire up DOSBox, which runs them great. However that runs just as well in 64-bit as it does in 32-bit.

Thus far, I don't see any gaming problems with a 64-bit OS. So if you know of some, I'd be interested in what they are.

Re:What games don't run in 64-bit Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Phantasmagoria 2
Gazillionaire
Diablo 2
Burn:Cycle

And that is what I found in the first day of using Vista64

Re:What games don't run in 64-bit Windows?

[Pheonix28]

Amazing because I'm running Diablo 2 right now on........ Vista 64 bit... GASP!

Re:What games don't run in 64-bit Windows?

[DoofusOfDeath]

Seriously, I'm honestly curious. I'm a huge PC gamer and I run Vista 64-bit.

No offence, but maybe a Wii Fit would be a good investment, then? I'm just sayin...

Re:What games don't run in 64-bit Windows?

[GFree678]

Games which utilize PunkBuster fuck up pretty badly in 64-bit systems. PB just doesn't like the environment for some reason, though that's not surprising given how invasive it is as a low-level system scanner. Since PB doesn't yet have a 64-bit binary, until it does it will continue to misunderstand the 64-bit architecture and kick/unauthenticate players.

This is from what I've read rather than personal experience so if my info is out of date I'll gladly suck a lemon.

Re:What games don't run in 64-bit Windows?

[Cowmonaut]

I've never heard of the first two games, and the 4th one sounds familiar but I couldn't tell you what its about off the top of my head. As for Diablo 2, running it without issue on Vista x64 for a while now. My only complaint: the hard-coded resolution restriction.

So whatever you did to "configure" Vista to run "better", FIX IT. It is amazing to me how many people think they are "pro" and "optimize" their OS and then complain when programs that work fine for others (on the same OS) without those "optimizations".

Shorthand: KIDS! Editing the registry is potentially dangerous! MS actually spoke the truth when they mention that!

Re:What games don't run in 64-bit Windows?

[TheRealMindChild]

Where in gods name did they mention ANYTHING about optimizing/configuring ANYTHING? I hope to god you have nothing to do with the government or law enforcement.

Your gap of logic can be only classified as schizophrenic.

Re:What games don't run in 64-bit Windows?

[sanosuke001]

What is wrong with Vista x64? XP doesn't support DirectX 10, x32 would be a waste if you want any more than 1GB RAM (assuming CrossFile/SLI setup) and you can't PC game on anything other than Windows (and actually have access to most games)

You seem to be ripping on him because he uses Vista. I'm assuming you'd be ok with XP? Either way, Vista runs fine for me. I have a video card that supports DX10, I might as well have an OS that does, too.

Re:What games don't run in 64-bit Windows?

[Rycross]

Back in the day I had issues with Phantasy Star: Universe's anti-cheating system. When I wanted to play online, it'd decide it needed to shut down pretty much any program on my Vista 64 system. I could still play the game, but no multi-tasking. Didn't matter much though... the game sucked pretty thoroughly.

Re:What games don't run in 64-bit Windows?

[Nerdposeur]

[Ahem.] He's ripping on him because he's a "huge" PC gamer. Large. Needs some exercise.

Re:What games don't run in 64-bit Windows?

[Zan Lynx]

I bet I know the problem. Serious Diablo 2 gamers run a cracked version. (Game CD? What? Under some pile back of the closet.)

The original copy protect junk probably dies on 64-bit.

Re:What games don't run in 64-bit Windows?

[TheRealMindChild]

Let me clue you into something. Making that many assumptions and coming to an absolute conclusion like you have is way past an undesirable trait.

In this particular case, you exhibit what I call the "Not a bug" syndrome. You know... when you file a bug report and rather than give it a real examination, you get the response "Works for me, it must be you". It is short-sighted, stubborn, elitist, and flat out stupid. It shows both a lack of analytical and social skills.

Let me help you out a bit. http://www.google.com/search?q=Diablo2+vista

~2.5 million hits. Pages and pages and pages, starting with the very first link, without gap, of people unable to get Diablo 2 to work with vista (and possible workarounds). So riddle me this... in this case, which do you think is more likely? That you are a friggin genius and have every right to be an asshole, or you are just being a run of the mill retard and that the original poster actually had problems?

You don't need to answer that. We all know the answer already.

Re:What games don't run in 64-bit Windows?

[stewartjm]

I think I had to check the: Run in 256 colors checkbox, in the compatibility tab, to make Diablo II work on Vista 64-bit.

I'd guess the variable determining if you need to tweak things, might be the video card and drivers. The system I made it work on was using recentish nvidia drivers on an 8800 series card.

Not worth it

[Junks Jerzey]

Considering how few high-end PC games actually come out, getting a flashy PC just to play them isn't worth it.

Hardware issues aside, serious gameplayers need to be where the developers are, which at the moment means the Xbox 360. A Nintendo Wii or DS is optional, for those people who want to see some of the more innovative designs. (PC gaming diehards can now interject the usual comments about FPS controls and real-time strategy games and mods.)

And, yes, I'll point out that a 360 + Wii + DS + several years of Xbox Live is still cheaper than the PC mentioned in the article.

Re:Not worth it

[Anonymous Coward]

But the machines in the articles seems to be put together by idiots. You can get a very very nice gaming PC for around £400 (certainly better specced than any console). And the extra you spend, is quickly saved by the games being much cheaper.

I'm not going to inject anything about which platform is better, but to say that developers are currently with Xbox 360 seems to exclude an awful lot of them. It seems more like a variation of the PC-gaming is dead meme, which is again and again proved at best ignorant.

Re:Not worth it

[jgtg32a]

Any game that is on a console looks substantially better on the PC runs at a higher frame rate, and higher resolution, and has a better view distance.

Xbox dev is identical to PC dev very little needs to be changed to do a quick port from one to the other.

The PC in the article is a waste of money.

Re:Not worth it

[jgtg32a]

I guess that is worded a bit weird.

keyword "on the"

Re:Not worth it

[bigstrat2003]

On a second reading, I think my smrt brain also kicked in and I somehow read your sentence as "looks better THAN on the PC"... which isn't what you said at all. Mental fuck-ups FTW!

Re:Not worth it

[tonytnnt]

I've got a 360, and I really think allowing a keyboard and mouse type interface on it for gaming purposes would make me switch from mostly PC gaming to the 360 completely. It's a shame they don't develop for controllers other than the 360 controller and fake instruments. Until then, I will continue playing RTS, FPS, and MMOs on the PC, even if it is incredibly painful to do so (which believe me, it is. Even considering the problems XBox Live has (namely some of its users) at least it works. So many PC games have netcode that could only be created by Satan to punish players (see Company of Heroes, et al.)

Re:Not worth it

[jaraxle]

For the past couple of months, my wife and I have been thinking of upgrading our PC's (actually buying all new ones because ours aren't easily upgraded and would probably cost close to buying a new rig anyway to do so) for gaming purposes. We play Warhammer: AoR and while it's playable on our older computers, when larger scale battles happen it can become a bit of a slideshow even on low settings.

We also have an XBox 360 and a 42" LCD TV in the basement rec room. We are honestly considering scrapping the notion of upgrading our computers (buy new ones) which would cost on the order of $2500 Canadian for two good gaming rigs and just picking up a cheaper 32" LCD TV (1080i) for $399 and another XBox 360 (Elite package) for $399. My wife also seems to enjoy Fable 2 a fair amount more than WAR at the moment.

$800 and we'd wind up with two "gaming stations" that do multiplayer games (we love and have Rock Band 1 and 2 plus various other games), and allow us to not have to schedule our Fable 2 and Oblivion/Fallout 3 time around each other once the kids are in bed. :) We'd also still have two respectable family computers. Seems to me that with HDTV prices dropping considerably and the quality of games out for the consoles on top of the other multimedia benefits coming from XBox Live, PC gaming may be in for a further decline (the PC section at my local EBGames is not even half a shelf now).

~jaraxle

Re:Not worth it

[MemoryDragon]

I agree here, and also i might add the fact, that many people are capable of switching their graphics cards. There is a shitload of PCs out there which just need a decent graphics card to become a viable gaming rig, if you are on that road, a console is the absolute looser. Thank intel for pushing mediocre graphics cards onto a lot of laptops and desktops so that they push the stupid customers to buy the next processor upgrade!
The funny thing is if you are on the graphics hardware only upgrade route, any mid range ati and nvidia card will do the job. You end up with 150 dollars spent and games on the average 20 dollars cheaper than their console counterparts!

Re:Not worth it

[MemoryDragon]

For the past couple of months, my wife and I have been thinking of upgrading our PC's (actually buying all new ones because ours aren't easily upgraded and would probably cost close to buying a new rig anyway to do so)

Where is the upgrade problem?
Normally getting a PC up to decent standards is just replacing the graphics card and adding 2 gigs of ram?
Or are those two so old that even this addition is out of question? If you want to stay on the PC route, then I can recommend get a cheap last years model maybe used and do the needed upgrade.
Well there is one thing however I made the experience in the past, that rigs from big vendors like dell or hp have some kind of points which do not allow regular cheap upgrades so that people have to rebuy the entire machine once in a while (normally it is the motherboard formfactor which is mostly non standard or something similar)

Re:Not worth it

[jaraxle]

rigs from big vendors like dell or hp have some kind of points which do not allow regular cheap upgrades

That right there is the rub. I made the mistake of buying two Dell Dimension E520's for my wife and I a few years ago, and they served us very well for what we used them for (World of Warcraft at the time). What I failed to take into consideration is the Dell proprietary parts, particularly the power supply connection.

In order to bump up the video, I would need to get new power supplies since the current ones are only 305 watt, which would cost on an order of $100 each (I've looked around, Dell p/s aren't cheap). Then there's the video which would be around $200-250 each for decent ATI HD 4850's. However, the CPU is only a Pentium D 915 dual core so since that's on the lower end that should be dealt with as well which would require motherboard too. Then there's the RAM, of which we only have 2GB in 512 sticks so all of it would need to be replaced with two 2GB sticks. Add in the Vista 64 OS on top of it all.

So basically, it's just easier and probably not much more expensive to replace the computers entirely (with a bonus of free 3 year parts/labour warranty from the company in Toronto I was looking at for buying Vista) and regift the computers to our sons.

Of course, last night the decision was made NOT to do any of this and we went out and bought a nice new 32" LCD TV and XBox 360 Pro holiday bundle for $1000 after tax/service plan. My wife and I both think we made the right decision, although it will be a little difficult moving away from the MMO genre (it's really the only type of game I've played "seriously" since EverQuest 1 came out).

~jaraxle

Re:Too rich for my blood

[Winckle]

It's articles that really do pc gaming a disservice. All you need to get pc gaming at reasonable resolutions is a decent mid range card like a 9600 or 9800. I have an 8800 GTS 512 and even on the absolute newest games I still achieve great framerates on good looking settings.

Not USD

[PantherX]

You did see that it's an Australian site, right? The prices aren't in USD.

Re:Too rich for my blood

[Sinning]

I wanna see you play WoW or WAR on your Xbox.

Re:I would buy a Mac

[Yvan256]

Tell that to the GMA950 in my Core 2 Duo Mac mini. :p

Yes the GMA950 sucks at 3D, but otherwise the computer is more than enough for what I need to do.

the site hasn't been slashdotted

[Gandalf_Greyhame]

it is an Australian site - it's been "Conroyed"

---
(I accidentally posted this in response to an incorrect article a minute ago - don't I feel stupid)

Don't do it!

[jcarkeys]

from the don't-we-post-this-every-few-months dept.

Then why do you keep posting them?

Re:Don't do it!

[aerthling]

For the lulls (in actual news).

Re:Don't do it!

[protohiro1]

For some strange reason time continues to progress at a constant rate.

Re:I would buy a Mac

[v1]

I'm a little surprised they haven't added macs to reviews like that. This one was apparently not too intelligent, they look like they went shopping to see how much money they could spend on a system, not really looking to make sure they got the best hardware configuration possible. Macs do tend to be more expensive on the average, and there's a lot more shiny expensive options available at their store, so this would have probably helped them with the direction they were headed.

Lets play...

- 8 core (dual quad) xenon at 3.2 ghz
- 32gb PC6400 (800mhz) RAM
- hardware raid card (we don't want software raid to slow the monster down!)
- 4 x 1tb SATA drives to feed to that raid card
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB VRAM
- dual 16x superdrives (or you can aftermarket a pair of BR drives from mcetech.com)
- pair of 30" cinema displays of course
- wireless keyboard and mouse (tho you'll need to find some $250 controller too I'm sure)
(I think we'll skip the modem option)
(also even for this I think we can skip the fiber channel card and xsan, I can't justify it here)
- may as well install server on it, you're going to be pushing game updates to your lan buddies right?
- at this point the 2 yrs of added warranty is a great value since it doesn't price based on config

$22,195. But that doesn't cover the controller.

There are a wide variety of ways to cut corners. Sony displays instead of apple's, buy your own memory and hard drives since apple's markup on them is insane, forego server, you can drop it down to about $7500, but you'll have to get the displays and ram separately. But this was just to see how much you could drop on a system.

Re:Too rich for my blood

[drinkypoo]

100% true. When it costs more to buy a current video card than to buy a whole game console, you know you're in trouble. The only games left on the PC are going to be simulation games, and sooner or later someone is going to allow arbitrary HID input devices on a game console and solve that problem too. (If you need multiple monitors, you can theoretically have multiple game consoles, which cost about the same as a high-end graphics card, anyway - so the simulation crowd should not be at all be put off by having a cluster of game consoles instead of a single PC.)

PC gaming is only still limping along because people are MAKING it limp along. Most people's computing needs would be served by having their game console provide rudimentary PC functions. And these days the game console is more than capable of serving as a multi-purpose PC, if only it was allowed.

What games

[phorm]

Maybe I'm just out of the loop, but I haven't seen a lot of "heavy" new PC games that would require an "ultimate gaming rig" these days.

That's not to say that some good games/additions/etc haven't come out or aren't on the boiler, but what's out-or-coming that would require or make use of a souped-up gaming rig VS just a decent machine (with a decent graphics card)?

Re:What games

[Spad]

I agree entirely; I've got a moderately specced PC: Core2 E6400, 320Mb nVidia 8800GTS, 2Gb RAM, XP 32-bit and I've not played anything on it that I haven't been able to run at 1280x1024@72Hz on High detail (Even Crysis).

I know it's supposedly "all about the 2560x1600 at 200fps" these days, but a) I hate widescreen monitors and b) I'm happy with 1280x1024 (Maybe 1600x1200 if I can find a reasonably priced 4:3 LCD that does it).

Re:What games

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried GTA4? That badly-ported mess needs every bit of power to make it not look like ass.

Re:What games

[Zan Lynx]

I agree and I don't think faster CPUs and bigger/more GPUs is the place to spend PC money. I think fast storage is where to spend it.

The biggest cause of "feeling slow" on the PC is RAM and disk. Get 4 GB RAM, then spend on disk. Get a Intel SSD or a Velociraptor or 15K SAS RAID. Get a dedicated battery backed RAID controller with a GB cache. Get an iSCSI card for your gaming machine, rip out all its hard drives and build all of the above into a dedicated SAN system for your house. When gigabit iSCSI isn't enough, go for Fibre Channel, 10 gigabit iSCSI or InfiniBand.

You can spend loads more "ultimate" cash this way and get amazing performance results that are more useful than another 30 FPS.

What a classy joke

[Mathinker]

I didn't figure out what you meant at first and was intrigued that the same site would have an article on servers, so I tried to visit the link.... and then I understood.

This is the first Slashdot joke which I've seen which is almost impossible to "whoosh" at.

I have a feeling...

[yoshi_mon]

That these machines would not run half as well as some system that would cost half as much but built by someone with a clue. Not just someone who went down line and picked out parts based on how much they cost.

For anyone really interested in performance rigs spend some time on a overclocking site. Those guys and gals really will show what it's all about. I know I'm damn amazed at some of the stuff they pull off and have learned a bunch just browsing.

Cost Perception

[jgtg32a]

The problem with just about every computer review is that the reviewers think that running a game at anything less than 1920Ã--1080 (1080p) is absolutely unacceptable.

I game on my HD TV in the basement which can only do 720p, a single 4850 will get you about 30 fps in Warhead maxed out.

Re:Cost Perception

[goose-incarnated]

Seconded - I'm currently in the middle of a starcraft multiplayer Free4All with AI players. Whats that, like, 640x480? Whatever it is, it's still loads of fun with bags and bags of style :-)

Title

[theaveng]

"The Best Gaming Politically-Correct Money Can Buy"

So they have some kid of new money that removes all references to God and the All-Seeing Eye? Hmmm.

Re:Title

[Petrushka]

So they have some kid of new money that removes all references to God and the All-Seeing Eye? Hmmm.

Umm ... yes. You sound like you think that's something unusual.

Re:Too rich for my blood

[Spatial]

Graphics cards are cheap. You can get one that plays every single available game nicely for 130 dollars (the 8800GT/9800GT for example).

Stop getting your ideas from stupid guides like this and check out a thread full of advice from people who aren't insane.

It must run pac man

[kadim]

.... I could say more, but I don't think I need to.

Site is slashdotted

[nizcolas]

But I was able to see a couple of pages before it went down. Did anyone notice the links to other stories at the bottom? I'm pretty interested in seeing which are the top 10 games to play while stoned.

Mod parent up

[upside]

This had me roffling on the floor lolling out loud.

Or something.

Phenom II line

[Enderandrew]

Isn't the Phenom II line launching within days? If you believe the hype, they'll stand up to all the Intel offerings, and if tradition dictates, the AMD procs will be cheaper. I'm curious to see how they really perform.

Re:Phenom II line

[drinkypoo]

Oops. Eureka! This is what I get for looking. Intel just released the processor on December 31 2008, so this is pretty fast timing. I wonder if you can actually buy these yet. They're still not on Acer's website, but the press release (see article link) says they're available now. It's like half the price I paid for this stupid nw9440. I can't believe that I actually believe that Acer is an upgrade from an HP. One of my pals here where I live who works for the local community college extension campus says that he used to work for Acer and that he would have been able to replace a machine that went through as much as my stupid HP, so I guess I have half as much to lose and am twice as likely to get it than if I bought something from HPQ down the road.

Re:Phenom II line

[drinkypoo]

Uh, the Q9000 is a chip that was just announced by Intel on December 31 and which you cannot actually yet buy (show me an order page with stock in hand.) I have a T2600 and a Quadro FX1500M, which if you pay attention you will see is an Intel processor with an nVidia display adapter. If you're going to chime in, please try to make sure that you have some idea what you are talking about. Incidentally, this is not the first crapshack HP laptop I've had to deal with; the former one did have a Mobile P4 though, which was ALWAYS a bad idea.

This laptop had overheating and DVD eject problems BY DESIGN. HP has sent me two wrong power supplies, FOUR wrong DVD-ROM drives including one they sent me AFTER I SENT BACK MY SYSTEM FOR PRIORITY SERVICE and got it back already and thus did not need another one, had an onsite service guy out to break my laptop, then he came back again and still didn't fix it, at which point I had to wait a week for a box to show up so I could mail my now totally nonworking laptop in to HP for service and wait four more days to get it back - when I have an extended warranty with onsite service. As a buyer of HP products YOU SHOULD BE PISSED OFF because of HP's incompetence - their inability to just fix my laptop the first time raises the price of ALL HP products. And I can't be the only person they've done this with. I'm thinking of keeping this latest DVD-ROM drive this time, my understanding is that since I didn't request it I'm not under a legal obligation to return it. But maybe I'll just wait to send it back until I am actually going to a UPS location. Fucked if I'm going out of my way.

The point wasn't that HP sold me a lemon, anyway; that happens! The point is that HP's service was both incompetent (continually sending me incorrect parts for a machine specified by serial number and part number) and unacceptable (it takes 45 minutes just to report a problem.) I can't help but notice that your comment has score 0, are you posting at -1 for a reason?

Re:Too rich for my blood

[santiagoanders]

All you need is a little patience and slickdeals.net! You also have to know how to fill out rebate forms, and tolerate the delay in compensation.

OCZ 600 Watt power supply - $30
EVGA SLI MB (B-stock) - $57
2 EVGA 9600GSOs - $35 x 2
4Gig DDR2 RAM - $40
Ebay Windows Vista Retail (though most people would just steal this one) - $60
AMD dual core 2.3 GHz - $25
750 gig HD - $55
Optical drive - $20
Case - if you care - $20

For a grant total of $377, I put together this SLI machine, which has more gaming power than an XBOX 360 elite, and does much more on the side. And I can overclock it (don't know if that's possible with an XBOX).

64.0 fps should be enough for anyone!

[TravisO]

64.0 fps should be enough for anyone!

MOD PARENT INSIGHTFUL

[Anonymous Coward]

If investing for you means exclusively monetary returns, then you forgot the reason you need money in the first place. You failed to invest in your life.

Re:Too rich for my blood

[JWSmythe]

    When casual computer users ask "What video card should I get", I tell them to go to the store and spend about $100. It won't be the latest, greatest hardware, but it'll be what was great about 6 months ago. In the end, most people surf the net more than they game anyways, so they could get away with the cheapest "new" video card that they can get their hands on. I wouldn't recommend that anyone go get a 1Mb Trident card or something, but anything in the stores is relatively recent. :)

Re:Too rich for my blood

[Xest]

Tell me about it, I built a new PC earlier this year having been playing mostly XBox 360 games for the past 2 and a half years.

I spent £1,600 (equivalent to $3,200 US at the time) on my new machine. I bought high end named RAM (something I never usually do), I bought a high end gaming motherboard (again, I always used to just go for any old board) etc. etc. So imagine my display when as soon as it was built I fired up Crysis to find it would not run smoothly anywhere even close to highest detail at 1920x1200 and nor would it run at max detail at lower resolutions. Whilst games like Spore and Warhammer Online ran perfectly, they're not exactly top end graphical marvels.

So yeah, I agree, PC gaming for games that show off the latest graphics is an absolute waste of time when there are consoles out there that due to having fixed hardware (at least the hardware that matters when optimizing) is so much cheaper and games can be so much better optimized for. Games like Gears of War 2 and Call of Duty 5 end up looking so so much better than Crysis on the PC even at full detail and yet also run amazingly smoothly and for a mere fraction of the cost of my gaming PC and without any of the hassle of making sure drivers are uptodate etc.

I'm not sure there's really a solution either unless we really move everything off of the standard PC hardware like we have graphics and just have "gaming boards" that are effectively like console hardware but that slot into the PC and just utilise it for display etc. but have some standardised specs to allow for proper optimization. As it stands, PC hardware now can't even compete with the graphical quality and smoothness of console hardware that is now 3 - 4 years old since release, and even older when you factor that it was developed long before release.

Perhaps what I miss most though is extensibility, games like Quake were fantastically fun to mod, but similarly even that became a little silly with newer games. The increased complexity of assets (higher poly counts, shaders etc.) means you can't really create decent mods as a one man band or small team anymore bar some smaller innovative code-only mods. Anything that requires a change in graphical style requires many more bodies working on it than before and if you do build a team of the right size and skills then why build a mod anyway? Why not just outright make a game when the workload is similar if you use one of the many great cheap engines out there (C4, PowerRender, Torque etc.) or even OSS engines (OGRE, Irrlicht).

Re:I would buy a Mac

[Sechr Nibw]

Lets play...
- 8 core (dual quad) xenon at 3.2 ghz
- 32gb PC6400 (800mhz) RAM -- buy upgrade ram from OtherWorldComputing, save money
- hardware raid card (we don't want software raid to slow the monster down!)
- 4 x 1tb SATA drives to feed to that raid card -- buy upgrade drives from Newegg, save money
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB VRAM -- overkill, but sure
- dual 16x superdrives (or you can aftermarket a pair of BR drives from mcetech.com) -- buy upgrade drives from OtherWorldComputing, save money
- pair of 30" cinema displays of course -- buy monitors from Newegg, save money
- wireless keyboard and mouse (tho you'll need to find some $250 controller too I'm sure) -- controller? for what? bluetooth? yeah that's built in. $250? what are you smoking? besides, a gamer wouldn't want the unresponsive wireless technology!
- may as well install server on it, you're going to be pushing game updates to your lan buddies right? -- mac os server? no justification for that on a gaming rig, since they'd likely be installing windows on it anyway to play said games
- at this point the 2 yrs of added warranty is a great value since it doesn't price based on config -- for the price of a mac, the upgraded warranty is always worth it

$22,195. But that doesn't cover the controller.
My mods bring the price to $8,300 from Apple, $1,200 for the 32 GB RAM, $260 to add a BD burner, $330 to upgrade to 4x1 TB drives, $2000 for 2x 30" Samsung displays. Total is $12,090. Still not cheap, but much cheaper than your 22k.

Re:Too rich for my blood

[Fross]

I'd agree to some extent, but some only.

I recently got Warhammer Age of Reckoning, and large battles were choppy on my overclocked 8800GT. I now have a 4870 and it's much more playable.

Similarly Far Cry 2 is awesome on the new card, but not on the last one. Though i don't really "play" it as it's a bit rubbish :/

I run at a medium res (1680x1050), though my settings are usually high to maximum.

A 4850 will be fine for medium settings on current games - the price point for a decent card is about $150 as it usually is.

Re:I would buy a Mac

[Yvan256]

iLife '09 should ship at the end of january. I'm expecting the new Mac minis around the same time.

Display refresh rate?

[argent]

Actually, you're better off running the game with its FPS synced to your display's refresh rate, because redrawing pixels that will never be displayed is a complete waste of CPU power.

Re:Display refresh rate?

[Mprx]

It depends on how much tearing bothers you. I'd rather waste CPU time and tolerate the tearing to get the minimum latency possible.

Re:Display refresh rate?

[argent]

If your display is running at 85 Hz you will never see an image more than once every 11.8 ms, whether the game is generating 85, 110, or 170 frames per second. If you're using an LCD, you will never see an image more than once every 16.7 ms.

If the game is synced to the display rate, then the latency between the virtual time in the game and what's displayed on the screen is zero. If it's not, then on average the latency will be half the game-time frame rate. You are *increasing* the latency by running at a faster rate.

Meanwhile, of course, your reaction time is measured in *hundreds* of milliseconds, and you're processing many cues over several seconds before you can react effectively to them.

Re:Display refresh rate?

[Mprx]

I use a CRT, at 120Hz.

Vsync does add latency, because you have to wait for a whole frame to be drawn before you can show it. Without vsync you can display partial frames (tearing). This means the image is inconsistent as a snapshot of a single moment, but because your eyes are only focused on a small part of the screen at a time this doesn't matter, and you can learn to ignore the tearing.

Re:Display refresh rate?

[argent]

Vsync does add latency, because you have to wait for a whole frame to be drawn before you can show it.

But because your eyes are only focused on a small part of the screen at a time this doesn't matter, because the part of the screen you're focussed on will not be refreshed any faster than the screen refresh rate.

I use a CRT, at 120Hz.

Then you would be best served by having the game (not just the display) synced to that rate.

Re:Display refresh rate?

[Mprx]

In the worst case, the bottom of the screen could be nearly a whole frame delayed compared to no vsync.

Vsync is also problematic because if the frame drawing time ever goes even slightly above the screen refresh time, frame rate drops by half. Ideally this shouldn't happen, but in practice it's not worth the extra wasted CPU/GPU time to guarantee it never will.

Re:Display refresh rate?

[argent]

I'm not talking about vsync, I don't care whether you're double-buffering or single-buffering, or using vsync or not. I'm talking about the highest useful frame rate, and about the structure of the simulated environment in the game.

1. It doesn't matter if your frame rate is higher than the display rate. You're running at an insane refresh, so you can possibly benefit from FPS rates over 60-85, but that doesn't apply for most people.

2. If the game engine (physics frame rate) is slower than the FPS (rendering frame rate), then nothing is happening in the "missing frames" anyway.

3. If the game engine is faster than the FPS, then you're wasting processing simulating events that are just going to cause the player grief.

Conclusion: the lowest latency will occur when the refresh rate, physics frame, and rendering frame are in sync.

Re:Display refresh rate?

[Mprx]

If the physics and rendering rate are higher than the refresh rate, you'll get even lower latency in exchange for minor temporal distortion on vertical eye movement and tearing artifacts. Yes, this is very wasteful, but I'm not aware of any game engine that splits the screen into horizontal slices (ideally single lines) and renders them just before the raster hits them, so the wasteful method is the only option.

Some game engines with fixed physics rate allow camera rotation synced with the rendering, and physics rate can often be increased.

Re:Display refresh rate?

[argent]

If the physics and rendering rate are higher than the refresh rate, you'll get even lower latency

That would only be the case if the physics was updated in sync with the raster.

Any part of the screen can be up to a whole frame behind the physics frame. The amount any point on the screen is behind the physics frame... the latency... will vary over time depending on the "beat" between the two frame rates, and the latency for any point on the screen will be the same whether screen is synced or not. Unless the latency is so low that a whole frame latency (the worst case) is undetectable, you WILL see artifacts from this beat. If you can't detect any such artifacts, then any latency you think you're suffering from is all in your head.

Re:I would buy a Mac

[Creepy]

a couple of mistakes there
The Quadro series is optimized for OpenGL and they target that series towards CAD makers. In any case you want at least two of these, if not more. For dual cinema displays, go with a motherboard with 4 x2 PCI Express slots and set up two pairs of SLI video cards, probably with the $300 crossfires since ATI tends to have faster SLI. If you do prefer CAD, use 2 FX 5600s (one for each display). Incidentally, I have one of those sitting about 50 feet away in a customer CAD lab at work and I'm extremely jealous because I still have an old single monitor CRT.

Add a 1500 watt power supply and a dedicated wall socket so you don't blow a fuse turning it on...

AMD may be a consideration for CPU (they top the current high end passmark benchmarks).

and PC6400 RAM? You'd better have REALLY low CAS and RAS latencies with that because PC17066 is out (though I doubt you could find a mobo that could fit 32GB, so there is a tradeoff).

If they know so damn much about hardware

[alcmaeon]

why don't they know enough to select better servers that can handle the load.

Re:If they know so damn much about hardware

[Khyber]

That answer is obvious. Wait until you actually READ the article. These computer specs look like you just let some kid loose in a candy store with a platinum credit card. No benchmarks, either, which is what is important for "ULTIMATE Gaming Rig."

That being said their Ultimate top-tier offering I can build for almost half the price.

Just kids that know nothing. Nothing to see there, I suggest we move along to something more important.

Re:Too rich for my blood

[CronoCloud]

When it costs more to buy a current video card than to buy a whole game console, you know you're in trouble.

I'm a console gamer but you're really talking about a high end video card, the $150 cards are good enough (medium to lower end of high settings) for most games, I hear.

so the simulation crowd should not be at all be put off by having a cluster of game consoles instead of a single PC

I would not want to be in the same room with a cluster of PS3's running a game, except in the dead of winter, with the central heat turned down a bit.

Most people's computing needs would be served by having their game console provide rudimentary PC functions. And these days the game console is more than capable of serving as a multi-purpose PC, if only it was allowed.

"If only it was allowed"?????? It's been allowed for years. I used to do this:

[CronoCloud@midgar CronoCloud]$ cat /etc/redhat-release
PS2 Linux release 1.0
 
[CronoCloud@midgar CronoCloud]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
cpu : MIPS
cpu model : R5900 V3.1
system type : EE PS2
BogoMIPS : 392.39
byteorder : little endian

But now I do this:

[CronoCloud@mideel ~]$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Yellow Dog Linux release 6.1 (Pyxis)
 
[CronoCloud@mideel ~]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
cpu : Cell Broadband Engine, altivec supported
clock : 3192.000000MHz
revision : 5.1 (pvr 0070 0501)
 
processor : 1
cpu : Cell Broadband Engine, altivec supported
clock : 3192.000000MHz
revision : 5.1 (pvr 0070 0501)
 
timebase : 79800000
platform : PS3
model : SonyPS3

Installing Linux on ones PS3 is probably one of the easiest Linux installs around. Works pretty well as a desktop.

Re:Gaming PC?

[CronoCloud]

Certain genre's will never be comfortable on a traditional gaming console.

Never say never when it comes to statements like that. Remember those guys who said back in 93: "You'll never play a blood soaked slugathon like DOOM on a kiddie console". Or the ones who said a few years later "You'll never have internet play on a console".

There are two console MMORPG's, both PS2 games (though FFXI has an Xbox port), both with keyboard support. Past trends prove that there will be more, it's only a matter of time.

Re:Gaming PC?

[CronoCloud]

Oh they got it right years ago, remember all those PSone ports of PC RTS's back in the mid 90s? Every one of them that I saw had PSone mouse support so they controlled the same. The problem was they didn't sell well, so no ones gone to the trouble of porting the more recent ones to the PS2/PS3...yet. One of the things that bugs me about my PS3 is that I can't use the PSone mouse with the games that support it. I wish SCEfoo would add a "let an attached USB mouse emulate the PSone mouse for PSone games" feature.

Re:Too rich for my blood

[geekoid]

I think the problem with Crysis is crappy development. It's a bad candle to hold gaming up to.

Re:I would buy a Mac

[geekoid]

If I am spending that much money, I want a few hundred gigs of ram.

Re:Gaming PC?

[Tridus]

Considering the way modern consoles work, once they have a keyboard, for practical purposes it's just a DRM'd PC anyway.

I wish more games did support mouse/keyboard though. Console strategy games would be far less annoying if you could use a mouse instead of trying to shoehorn a gamepad into something it's just not good at.

Multitasking and pipeline...

[argent]

You're running on a multitasking operating system, using graphics drivers that should be multithreaded. Also, with a P4, you may be running at a faster clock rate but you're running with a longer pipeline and higher branch latency... and by now you've got lower memory bandwidth than the latest multicores which makes those cache misses after a pipeline stall even tastier.

Australian currency

[GleeBot]

Anyone else notice that it's an Australian site? You know, .com.au? And that maybe all the $ prices are in Australian dollars, rather than U.S.?

Nitpick on the SA page you reference...

[argent]

Q: Should I go with RAID-0 Raptors for maximum speed?
A: No, most of you have no need for RAID, especially with the sorry state of onboard RAID controllers on most of the motherboards designed for home use. If you insist on using RAID then read up on it well in advance and use RAID 5 or RAID 1. RAID 0 is just asking for trouble and you gain little actual benefit from it.

If you're using RAID and you read up on it, unless you're running a datacenter or just archiving porn you'll leave RAID 5 on the shelf. It's (N-1) times as space efficient for an N-disk system, but less reliable (the chance of a second disk failure during a rebuild is getting higher all the time, and don't forget that you probably bought all those drives from the same batch) and lower performance. Go with RAID 1 or "RAID 1+0".

planck time discrepancy--wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

The Planck time allows for only around 1.86x10^43 fps, which is nowhere even close to infinity.

Holy frak. What sort of high-spec machine is our universe running on then?

could be infinite...according to wikipedia:

The Planck time is simply the time it takes a beam of light to travel a Planck length. As of 2006, the smallest unit of time that has been directly measured is on the attosecond (10â'18 s) time scale, or around 1026 Planck times.[3][4] There is also speculation that one Planck time after the Big Bang, statements can be made about the universe displaying properties equal to some of the other Planck units. (Some hypothesize that gravity must have separated first due to its homogeneity to the others. Some propose that the strong nuclear force is the most likely candidate due to its strength.)[5]

One Planck time should be the smallest measurable unit of time, according to quantum mechanics. But according to news reports, analyses of Hubble Space Telescope Deep Field images in 2003 brought up a possible discrepancy. Images should have been blurry at very far distances, but the news articles stated that they were not, challenging the theory that Planck time is indeed the smallest measurable unit of time in the universe.

Re:Too rich for my blood

[Machtyn]

Agreed. A person can spend $400 on a PC and have better specs than an Xbox 360 or PS3 (minus BD player).

Re:Too rich for my blood

[Machtyn]

It stinks that developers don't put enough time to do a decent port of a game. Sure, the XBox 360 is supposed to be a type of Windows XP... but that's just it, it is a type of Windows XP, it isn't Windows XP Desktop.

There are test warehouses out there, if you are going to do a port and not have myriad of hardware to test on, send it to one of these warehouses and let those $10/hour (because I'm in the games industry!!1@21!) testers crank out the bugs for you. (I'm looking at you Neversoft!)

Re:Gaming PC?

[Mystra_x64]

True. I usually play RPGs and fightings though. It's just I have some problems with this "upgrade often, upgrade now" style of PC games.

Re:Too rich for my blood

[MemoryDragon]

The problem is you went the wrong route. Crysis is absolutely the only game which pushes the pc currently to its limit. In my experience you do fine with a rather old board and add a decent pc graphicshardware!
So yes building a pc might be expensive, but you should reevaluate your priorities, in most cases it is mostly adding just the next generation of graphics card. To my experience a good radeon 4850 runs the games better than any xbox or ps3 out there given you have a decent amount of ram and not the latest processor (anything released the last three years does it processorwise)
So you simply went the wrong route, you probably could have gotten away with 200 dollars just by upping your old pc. Would it run Crysis better, probably not, would it run Crysis worse. No. Would it run any other game decently as the consoles out there, definitely yes!
I recently exactly did it, and I am rather happy with the choice I made. The games run better than on the consoles, and are way cheaper, and the upgrade was a measly 150 bucks!

Re:Too rich for my blood

[Spatial]

I spent £1,600 [...] I bought high end named RAM (something I never usually do), I bought a high end gaming motherboard

What exactly did you buy? This isn't to be a bastard, but by the sounds of it you chose your parts very badly and wasted a huge amount of money because of it.

High end RAM is only useful for overclocking, conferring no inherent benefit. A moderately priced motherboard is all that's needed even for that purpose. On top of that, CPU performance isn't generally important in games so spending a large amount of money in that area is not useful.

The beat goes on...

[argent]

More important is having a system which can achieve a consistent FPS.

Most important is having a constant FPS that matches the screen refresh rate, to avoid "beat" phenomena.

FPS vs LAG

[drewvr6]

I think people are better served with paying for higher bandwidth. Frames per second won't keep you alive if your network connection is lagging. You'll just know your dead faster.

would you put any stock

[e-scetic]

in hardware review from a site that can't keep itself up during a slashdotting?

Mod parent up recursively.

[argent]

Exactly: we don't know if real time is running at real time. If we're being simulated post-singularity using reversible computations (to provide an unbounded number of simulated frames by running the simulation slower as the energy density of the universe decreases) real time would be running asymptotically slower than real time over time, but we'd never be able to detect that even after we start running our own reversible computation engine to computationally extend our own apparent time into the apparent real time heat death of the simulated universe inside the real heat death of the real universe. You can apply a thought experiment similar to Cantor's diagonal proof to show that this system can be indefinitely nested, if the real universe is unbounded and uniform, even when you bring relativistic communication limits into play.

Re:Mod parent up recursively.

[Alpha830RulZ]

Ow, you make my head hurt...

Re:Mod parent up recursively.

[argent]

Upgrade your head.

Re:Too rich for my blood

[Xest]

That's not comparing like for like though, whilst as mentioned in my original post, things like Spore and Warhammer online certainly did run great it's not because the PC is a superior platform for gaming than consoles, it's because these games simply don't look as good.

The problem is the games that run well cater for much lower end systems as their best so that they can perform well to the widest audience but as a result they're also capping the quality of graphics.

So yeah, the games may run better (although I'm not sure that's even particularly, console games don't suffer from low performance like PC games because otherwise they wouldn't be sellable!) but the key point is they look nowhere near as good as console games. Even if you look at ports this is glaringly obvious, they simply don't look as good on the PC no matter whether it's a PC to console port or a console to PC port.

I'm sure it's a very powerful computer.

[brackishboy]

Maybe they should've served their webpage from it.

Re:Too rich for my blood

[Pebby]

Actually, as a console game developer for a living, it's not just about having fixed hardware like a 360. If you want to publish a PC game, no one will stop you. If you want to publish a console game, you have to get approved by the 1st party and there is a certain bar of quality, including how well it performs. Thus, plenty of PC games are churned out with shitty performance and no one is there to stop them.

Just 32 bit XP and it's knockoff

[dbIII]

Someone please Correct me if I'm wrong but if you're mapping 4GB of video RAM you'll not be able to run a 32 bit OS

You are wrong when you say "32 bit OS" since it would work on MS Server 2003 (and linux, BSD, mac, etc etc) but completely correct if you mean a poorly implemented memory management system that doesn't support the Pentium Pro and later CPUs that solved the problem in 1995 - so 32 bit XP and it's bastard child Vista 32 bit can't do it but everything else can. It's paticularly sad since some features of MS Server 2003 were supposed to go into Vista.

Re:Too rich for my blood

[drinkypoo]

I'm a console gamer but you're really talking about a high end video card, the $150 cards are good enough (medium to lower end of high settings) for most games, I hear.

In the age of flat panel displays, anything other than maximum resolution looks like crap.

And if you're going to play PC games, where the biggest differentiator (other than controllers and titles) is the maximum performance, why wouldn't you want maximum performance?

I would not want to be in the same room with a cluster of PS3's running a game, except in the dead of winter, with the central heat turned down a bit.

It draws less power than one of these uber-computers with a quad-core (Q9000 brings power consumption down quite a bit but just came out Dec.31 and probably no one has them yet) and SLI. I bet three of them (for example) wouldn't even be that bad, and further, only one of them needs storage etc.

"If only it was allowed"?????? It's been allowed for years. I used to do this:

The PS3 only allows you to use 256MB of its memory as system memory. Its processor is also pretty lame for general-purpose computing. The Xbox 360 would be dramatically more valuable, due to its three symmetric processors and shared memory pool. 256MB is not even enough to run an office suite smoothly (unless maybe you did it with Office 97 on Windows 98. Which won't run there anyway.) Further, you do not have full access to the graphics card on the PS3 or the PS2, which is why I never bothered with Linux on either. (Actually, I don't have a PS3, I don't have HD. And I don't plan to give Sony the money or the satisfaction.)

The original Xbox suffers from the same fate. The best thing you can do is get fast framebuffer access. The memory situation is even worse there. I occasionally boot linux to edit a text file or run ssh.

The consoles should COME WITH or OFFER THROUGH A SUPPORTED SOFTWARE PACKAGE an operating system loader. They could sell it and make a license fee on it at least.

Re:Too rich for my blood

[eniacfoa]

you are seriously in dreamland. GTAIV on xbox360 has frame rates that drop to such crap levels, probably 5-10 frames per sec in some cases, I find the game extremely irritating to play. theres nothing worse than trying to steer or aim with precise movements with frame rates so low its impossible. I havent played GTAIV on PC yet, but I could guarantee you that wouldnt be the case. PC gamers wouldnt stand for it. They would flood rockstar with hate mail and bad publicity. For $1000 australian I have a built a PC that shits on your xbox360 and wipes its ass with a PS3. Considering the versatility of a computer and the fact a PS3 is around $650AUD I say this is great value. Gears of war 1 and 2 both are really booooring FPS's. So is Crysis. But crysis does look better. I have also seen COD4 on my PC and on my friends xbox360. my version looks better. my friend who owns the xbox360 says my version looks better. Maybe your $3000USD machine was a lemon. Or maybe you need your eyesight tested. There is nothing on console that looks remotely as good or smooth as whats available in PC gaming. There is an article going around, search for it yourself, where a $60 USD gfx card is now more powerful than whats on offer in the consoles. Saying PC hardware cant compete with an xbox360 makes you sound like a complete idiot.

Re:Too rich for my blood

[Xest]

I can only guess you're very confused. GTA4 has no frame rate on the 360. Initially the PS3 version had some issues with framerates but these were fixed in a later patch.

The PC version you've never played, but seem to feel the need to speculate would never have problems was actually posted as a story here and on many other sites, because not only were bad frame rates a problem but the game wouldn't even work for many people and provided nothing more than extremely cryptic error codes. Even worse, because it was released via Steam it was so bad that Valve even decided to start issuing refunds to people!

The only thing the PC does better than consoles is higher resolutions, but what's noticable is how pointless these higher resolutions are when other graphical effects are simply too much for the non-gaming specific hardware and bus of PCs to handle. High end graphics cards rectify many, but not all of these issues.

I don't understand really how you can continuously speculate that things run bad on consoles. As has been pointed out by the response to my post above yours, console games are held to high standards which they have to meet before they can be released, that means a game with serious low frame rates and such simply wouldn't be allowed to be released, whilst on the PC it would be released anyway.

It doesn't really matter if a $60 is better than what's in the consoles which are now 3 years old (although I'm not sure that's even true), when that card still has to go through a bus that's designed for more generic applications than focussed on gaming specifically you're never going to get the level of optimization to match consoles of the same generation.

Look, I'm sorry mummy and daddy would only let you spend $1000 AUS on a PC and wont buy you a console but that isn't my problem, nor does it suddenly make lies you make up about GTA4 frame rates and friends with COD4 become true. Your personal guarantee that GTA4 wouldn't have problems on the PC doesn't really count for much when a very quick search shows quite the opposite, that it suffered some of the worst problems of any recent game on release.

Re:Too rich for my blood

[eniacfoa]

i didn't say that things always run bad on consoles...maybe you should read what we wrote and not put words into my mouth. i am pointing out that 'you' say games look better on console. 'you' say they look better and run smoother and you cite gears of wars 1 and 2. This is what im picking on. Gears of war is not that impressive graphically. I am buying GTAIV for PC and Im still willing to bet on my 8800GTS dual core pc it will run smoother, faster and generally look better than the xbox360 or ps3 versions. Smooth fast frame rates improve gameplay and higher resolutions are kind of important to how impressive the gfx are. Look at all the fuss with HD for TV let alone gaming. ill cite an actual comparison ive experienced. Compare Dynasty Warriors on console to PC. They look the same graphically but guess what? my pc will handle craploads more enemies on screen at any given time, the draw distances as waaaaaay further away and the frame rate never drops (unlike the console versions). This makes the same game better. I dont know how you spent 3K on a Pc and still think games are graphically better on console. when consoles 1st get launched they are reasonably competitive with pc's. But after this amount of time, hell no. You just dont need to spend 3K on a PC to make it beat a console. I am a professional musician, my audio interface (external sound card) cost half your 3K lemon let alone the rest of my studio. so stick your mummy and daddy stab straight back up your ass where it came from. the $1000 does not include the 24" LCD screen either. just system box and 8800GTS - Console killer. I still own several consoles and are not against them, nor do I feel gfx are super important to how good a game is, I still play my amiga 500, yes it still works and yes speedball2 still rocks.

Re:Too rich for my blood

[eniacfoa]

PS - the level of optimization you speak of allows the console to be fairly impressive with low, cheap to manufacture specs but graphically it still doesn't beat a decent PC.

Re:Too rich for my blood

[eniacfoa]

I am not making up lies about GTA IV. I dont think what you see as "acceptable" is what I see as acceptable. calling me a liar tells me your blind and retarded. When there is a significant amount of action happening on screen the frame rate is PATHETIC on xbox 360. In fact the frame rate only runs really smooth and fast when you are the only car on the road. I have not seen the Ps3 version in action, but im tipping it will be similar. You obviously dont have a problem with shithouse frame rates, other people do.