HALP! Buying A New PC.Follow

It's a hell of a lot better than mine... I wouldn't be surprised if you could get high FpS on full graphics with that.

The vid card and PSU seem a little weak to me, but overall it looks like a solid machine. I'm not great with this stuff though, so wait for someone who is to comment.

Knocking out the liquid cooling would probably save you a buck or two, so do it. You won't be seeing a need to overclock that rig anytime soon, unless you demand quadruple digit FPS.
People never seem to understand how much difference a real Sound Card makes. I've always stuck with Creative products, but I hear snifflettes around the web that they aren't quite as good as they used to be. Dunno, mine sounds rockin.' Grab a sound card with onboard memory (Creative sells them as X-Fi, but make sure it's a true X-Fi, do some research on the specific card.), and you're set.

Are you set on Pre-Built? If so, what brand is that? When looking at prebuilts, the brand is as important as the parts. You don't want a bunch of awesome parts put together by Koreans whos tech support line doesn't speak any English. Make ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that they send you an OS disk. Most prebuilt manufactures will refuse to send you an OS disk until you threaten to cancel your order. With the OS disk, you can format that hard drive right away, and then get rid of the sh*tty 'backup partition' that often takes 10%+ of the HDD up for a 1 gig OS.
What monitor are you hooking that rig up to? May be time to upgrade your monitor instead of that liquid cooling system (or put that money toward a real sound card).

It wouldn't hurt to get a standalone NiC (network interface card, aka ethernet card), as sometimes those can clog up your bandwidth if they're onboard. I switched from an onboard to a $20 PCI card, and saw a 300 MS drop in latency. I can't garuntee it would have the same impact for you, but I can bet it would have SOME impact, especially if you got a fancy gaming specific one.

As said before, try to see if they can upgrade your HDD to something with the 32MB cache. MAKE SURE that it's going to be hooked to a SATA port, you don't want some damn IDE connection slowing you down.

So, TL:DR version:
Get a real sound card.
Get a real NiC.
Drop the Liquid Cooling.
Get a faster HDD.

Edit: Don't get me wrong though, that's an awesome deal, especially for a prebuilt.
I just built the same (similar) rig myself on Newegg, and having forgotten the OS, it's sitting at $1183 (US). It'll be just under 1300 with the OS. Only differences were a 32mb HDD, and I went with a Name Brand video card (EVGA) and RAM (Corsair), and the RAM was heatsinked. The rig you get will probably have an off brand of video card (Sparkle comes to mind) and RAM (Kingston, I'd guess, knowing current manu trends).

Edited, Nov 16th 2009 2:39pm by jaysgsl

At least you aren't playing on a laptop.

? ati 5870 is leagues beyond nvidia's offerings. plus nvidia has been paying developers to make sure that games utilize their chip architecture to the detriment of ati card performance.

You don't get what I'm saying about sound. Unless you actually go through and tick off each sound type, the game still plays them (even if the volume / speakers are set to 0). Each little data-chunk'o'sound is using resources. Getting a sound card with onboard memory eliminates those resources from being used by other parts.




If the developers all design with Nvidia's solutions in mind, I wouldn't say that any ATI is leagues beyond Nvidia's offerings. Nvidia cards are almost assured to work with a game. ATI will only work well if the designers happened to write the strings correctly for them (Blizzard is NOT NOT NOT a company that optimises their code for ATIs. EA doesn't optimise for ATI. Codemasters, Activision, and Microsoft don't optimise for ATI. Why buy one if the only game optimised for them is Tropico?)
You can have the fastest card, or you can have the card that's within a few milliseconds, and isn't going to cause a headache down the line. Which do you choose?

It's like saying you can have a sports car that runs only on Hydrogen. It's a good two tenths quicker in the quarter, and clears the slalom at 3 mph more than an equally priced car that runs on gasoline. Are a half of a bumper's length and a slightly quicker turn worth having to worry if the track is going to have the fuel or not?

So.... I take it you still run 8 Tracks, Beta tapes, Lazer Discs, and HD-DVDs right?

if you want to save some money i would say to downgrade the I7 to a I5 and cut the ram to 6 gb also what brand is the power supply?

A few comments:
- If you want a gaming rig I would seriously consider assembling it yourself. It's not hard to do. As Wondrous mentioned, use Tom's Hardware as resource.
- The major differences between the i7-860 and the i5-750 is that the former runs at a slightly higher clock speed and support hyper-threading. The i5 is cheaper.
- You don't need liquid cooling unless you are going to do some serious overclocking. A good non-stock cooler will let you o/c the i5/i7 pretty well.
- You don't need 8Gb of RAM for gaming.
- For a 1TB hard drive, you want the WD Caviar Black. Fast drive.
- Are you sure you need a sound card?
- You don't mention the PSU brand. Buying a good PSU is important.
- What monitor resolution are you driving with your GPU?

Sorry for any confusion I was just trying to warn against a 5850 in particular for the moment, I have used Ati cards before without any problems. Hopefully it will be a short term problem as the problems seem to be with windows7 64bit, 32bit versions do not seem to have the problem. I will probably buy another 5850 and run in crossfire when the driver issue gets sorted.