Quote: Original post by LilBudyWizer
That's not really a comparable GPU. The 5850 would be closer, but costs 1/3rd more while only performing maybe 1/5th better. The problem is you start paying a little bit more for a little bit better performance and, pretty soon, you're paying a whole lot more for a marginally faster machine.

Who was going for 'comparable'?

You can't put an Intel i7-975 extreme processor in the machine and then go on to say about 'paying a little bit more for a little bit better performance'.

Which is why I said the 5870 which is nearly twice as fast as the card you selected in WoW (link) and doesn't cost twice as much.

While I'm here;
- Triple channel ram does not 'make sense'. Certainly not on this machine. A dual channel s1156 machine would have been fine and done for some time. Memory benchmark tests show a minor increase and real world tests find next to none. Pretty much the ONLY reason to run a triple channel system is because you want the ram (and then I'd argue you'd want to be shooting for 12gig and up), not for speed.

- SSD vs HD for game launching; I'm running all my Steam games off an SSD now, honestly? Hardly notice a difference. SSDs are great for boot, and probably great for industry but unless you are doing something with alot of IOPs in flight there isn't a great deal of difference.

So yeah; you did it wrong.

Well, you would have a point if I put an i7 975 extreme in it, but I put an i7 920 in it instead. The design goal was the low end of the high end. The only single component over $300 was the motherboard and only marginally so. I could have trimmed some there, but I wanted the USB 3.0 and SATA III. All told I spent about $700-$800 on drives which is a bit excessive, but my background is databases.

I felt the SSD was a luxary item at this point, they command quite a premium, but it has a significant impact on her perception of what she paid for. It isn't just loading the game, but every time she teleports or enters an instance. Since she's a mage and raids that can be 20-30 times or more an evening. Particularly if you consider releasing after dieing is one and re-entering the instance is a second. The GTX 275 seems more than adequate to me so far. Adequate to me is staying over 30 fps. I'm lost on arguements about how much better 90 fps is than 60 fps and 120 fps is than 90 fps.

Quote: Original post by LilBudyWizer
Adequate to me is staying over 30 fps.

You can hit that with a $600 machine if you pick and choose, and handily with a $1,000 machine.

Good for you that you can afford a $3,000 machine to play WoW, but I really don't see the point, myself [smile]

It's entertainment and recreation so cost justification isn't really relevant. Particularly whether it's worth it for WoW. That's what she plays. It certainly wouldn't be worth it for Crysis because she doesn't play that. I had $3k to put into a system and that's how I spent it. My focus was more on running databases than playing games so I sunk a lot into the disks.