I'm starting to save up for a new PC tower to continue development on. I plan to do mostly stuff with XNA Game Studio (DirectX 9 basically) but I want to start dabbling in Direct3D 10 as well. And of course I'm going to use the machine to play games with. So today I spec'd up a tower on NewEgg and wanted to get some opinions on it: NewEgg.com Wishlist. My main concerns is: Is that GPU worth the money? Is there an equal one that costs less? I'm willing to spend the amount, but I want to make sure I'm getting my money's worth. Are there any other comments on it or suggestions on hardware? I'm trying to keep total cost (with a monitor) under $1500, so for that price I think this is a good build. But I'm also no hardware expert so advice is always welcomed. Thanks.

While I have a hard time saying it's worth that much money, the 8800 is the best card on the market right now, in my opinion (I haven't looked too much at the 9800 but it looks like an overclocked 8800). If you're going for absolute horsepower, that's where you want to go. If you can get an 8800GT significantly cheaper, it'd probably be worth it, but definitely do not step down to the 8600s. The performance drop between the two is huge. You might be able to SLI two 9600-series cards and get about the same performance as an 8800 in general, but I've never tried it myself.

Basically, I'm not aware of any card equal to the 8800GTX that costs less than it does. Whatever you decide to go with, be sure to hardocp.com it first and make sure it lives up to its numbers.

Quote: Original post by NickGravelyn
My main concerns is: Is that GPU worth the money? Is there an equal one that costs less? I'm willing to spend the amount, but I want to make sure I'm getting my money's worth.

Definitely. IMO it's unmatched by any other card. It's actually stable too (unlike the 6800's which had some bad overheating problems...)

Looks like a great system, except that I despise those cramped keyboards. I recently had to copy the S/N off my Dell keyboard at work and order one for home, because I couldn't find any (besides wireless ones) that have a classic key layout ;)

Thanks for the input. Glad to hear the GPU is worth it. Now I just have to save up some money :).

You might want to reconsider your processor as well. Unless you're going to be doing a lot of 3D rendering on the CPU, like with 3D Studio Max or whatever, you won't see much of a gain from having 4 cores over 2. And actually, for the same price, the Core 2 Duo E8500 consistantly outscores the Core 2 Quad Q9300 on game-based benchmarking tests.

Agreed with Cap'n that you may not get much gain from 4 cores unless you really intend to use them. However, the price difference between the 8500 and 8400 is too big for the measly gain, besides that, if the motherboard you've selected doesn't actually support the .5x increments, then all you'll have is an expensive 8400 anyways.

My recommendation for dual-cores would be the 8400 or Xeon 3110, which is the exact same chip re-branded for the server market. The advantage of the Xeon 3110 is that its been binned for higher quality, in other words, it runs stably at lower voltages than the 8400 letting it run more reliably and cooler, and potentially giving more head-room for over-clocking if you're into that sort of thing. The Xeon can sometimes be found cheaper than the 8400, since everyone is scrambling to get ahold of 8400s because they don't know any better. I've seen a difference in price of as much as 90 dollars. I got my Xeon 3110 for just $210 shipped.

Both operate at 3.0Ghz default clock and have 6MB of L2 cache. They're 45nm so they run cool and overclock extremely well. People with exotic cooling have hit 5+Ghz stable, most of these can hit 4Ghz or higher with a good air cooler and quality motherboard. Hitting a 400Mhz FSB (giving you 3.6Ghz in this case) is joke-easy (and even rather conservative), even on a stock air-cooler and plain-jane motherboard.

For comparison (and S's and G's) here's the specs of the rig I'm building:
Xeon 3110 - 6MB L2, 45nm, 3.0Ghz (3.6 OC'd) ($210)
ASRock 4Core1600P35-WiFi+ Mobo ($130)
PNY GeForce 9600GT 512MB ($155)
4GB DDR2 (4x 1GB) Crucial Balistix PC2-6400 4-4-4-12 ($130 - $70 MIR)
Panasonic Dual-Layer DVD-R/RW ($60)
Seagate 300GB SATA HDD (Had this laying around, payed $90 for it)
Antec Solo case - 4 external 4.25 bays ($60)
380 Watt Modular PSU (Had this laying around, payed $80 for it, may need upgrade)

Total Cost: $685 (plus $170 worth of parts I had on hand)

Everything has either come from Newegg.com or my local Frys [grin]