I am thinking I need a newer pc with a little bit more speed, as of late I play eve, and its not all that demanding, but I think it may be cool to run dual monitors and such.

I was looking around for parts to build a pc and found this pre-assembled one: http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/ ... CatId=2846

Any thoughts on this or suggestions on what to put together?

I prefer AMD and would like to go with the phenom II processor, but not sure if this is the way to go, it seems to be on the higher end of the prices, but I figure to go crazy this time and budget around $800-$1500 for my new PC.

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Jake Rivers - Senex Legio
Get off my Lawn alliance

ibuypower.com is offering some pretty impressive deals. Also, at the end of the day, AMD has definitely closed the gap in terms of price/performance with upcoming chips, but still have some catching up to do. You may prefer AMD (as I do), but you should be buying Intel at this point still if you fancy performance (the i920/950 smoke, and overclock VERY well, over 1GHz on air, with almost no effort)

As for graphics, ATI is pretty much rocking the house with the 5970. I've got a GTX480 in my current system (at a VASTLY discounted price), and it screams, but if I had to buy at retail, it'd be an ATI at the moment.

All of this said, you might want to wait just a BIT longer and jump onboard the new H2 (1155) socket for Intel's upcoming stuff. It's worth the wait based on the units we've gotten to play with.

I just bought a new PC from ibuypower.com I will get it by the end of the month.

Pretty much agree 100% with Elessar here on where to buy, chipset and video card.

having said that, I cant see why anyone gets more than dual core really, the fastest dual core processor will yield better performance for anything that you can do today really.

One more thing... use http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php to pick your video card, helped me a ton.

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Don't listen to this.

QFT.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

I notice little to no difference between Intel dual and quad desktops running games or VMs. If there's a big gap between the two I have no clue how to see it in normal use.

I put together a PC on newegg and then something almost exactly the same on IBuyPower, it's crazy but it doesn't really cost that much more.

I know some of you have bought from them before, how was your experience with them? build quality? customer service? Almost doesn't seem worth building my own again.

Ahh I decided i'd just build my own, got a good price on the i7 2600K, RAM, and PSU. My new question is about Sapphire AMD HD 6950 vs EVGA NVIDIA GTX 570. It looks like you can unlock the 6950 to get the same performance as the 6970 which is about the same thing as the 570 but for $150 cheaper.

My concern here is heat though, anyone buy a Sapphire card before? I was reading the fans can get loud and the card can get hot where as with the 570 you can run it cool with the fans higher and low amount of noise. I don't want to get the 6950 just because it's cheaper and it craps out due to heat earlier then the 570.

This would also be my first non-NVIDIA card. I used to see a lot of issues popping up with ATI/AMD cards and driver issues, i'm guessing that's probably a thing of the past?

Those of you who think that a quad core 2.3 will out perform a dual core 3.2 (similar price point), can you give any examples? Everyday software does not utilize anything more than dual core.

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Why does it matter?

You're asking the wrong question with current architecture. The reality is, with quad/hex core processors on the Intel side, you've got A LOT more headroom for Turbo Boost. It sounds like marketing gimmick, but in the i7's and Sandy Bridge procs, it fairly substantial for everyday use. In short, it's basically an automatic overclock for single-threaded apps/games. It will speedstep the unused/underused cores, and increase clock on the single core. This results in huge chunk of performance without any significant heat generation.

On a side note, most quad cores at this stage match the remaining duals in clock speeds, usually with better memory support. Had you asked this question in 2009, I'd have answered differently, but Murphy has caught up with you in 2011

Elessar, do yo have any data to peruse demonstrating its effectiveness? Not because I'm incredulous, but because numbers are nice for comparing. Also, any specifics on when those new Intel CPUs are due?

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They are out.

God, I meant Moore's Law, not Murphy Blargh.

And I'll dig up some of our internal papers Myrtle.

Ok... My ibuypower PC arrived DOA. Dont know what I am going to do next.

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I suggest sending it back?

I did, and instead bought all my components from newegg

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So you did not fix it but bought the components to build one by yourself. Good luck with that...

It was a warrantied PC, if i cracked the case to fix it, I would have voided the warranty. Also, I used the opportunity to upgrade to sandy bridge for the same money.

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Distributed processing will see wider use as people get into client-side uses for what we're feeling out for Cloud applications, and for virtualization. Figure another year, and the "faster but fewer" core model will start fading out.