need help building $1300 gaming computer

[bdollar]

ack where did that mobo come from? don't do a nvidia board with an ati gpu. i thought you had decided on the gigabyte x48?

 

[bdollar]

oh and my vote is vista 64.

and yes you can oc the e8500 some with air and fans.

 

[jpdykes]

Gigabyte X48 board, definitely.

Otherwise looks good.

 

[newgamer22]

fixed it 😉

 

[Nik_I]

the reason i suggest p45 is it appears the op wants this for quite some time. may not plan on crossfire. but if down the road a year or 2 or even longer, lots of people keep rigs for a long time. it may be very cheap to add another of the same card and get enough performance without having to spend the $ on a new single card. but if that never happens and crossfire was never used you aren't out the extra money an x48 would have cost you. so to me it is sort of taking the middle of the road.

but i do agree. if no crossfire at all the p43 would be the way to go.

the way i see it, it would be better to spend less now and upgrade sooner rather than later. with core i7 right around the corner, any motherboard/cpu/ram he buys will be useless not to far in the future from now. by buying a p43, he can save some money to put towards a new motherboard in the future after the prices come down, or towards a whole new rig.

 

[jpdykes]

Core i7 will not be released onto the consumer market until late 2009, if recent reports are to be believed, at that point it is expected to be at a fairly high price. It probably won't be until this time in 2010 that it becomes viable to upgrade again.

Even at that point developers are showing no real sign of wanting to multithread and if that isn't sorted an 8 core processor isn't going to help you massively. We'll be back to the same situation where the equivalent of today's E8500 will beat the equivalent of today's Q6600 in games.

I might be tempted to suggest P45, as the actual gain with a second x16 slot seems to be small at the moment.
Jeremy

 

[bdollar]

on one of the threads shadow (sorry cant remember the rest of his handle but much more senior poster then me ) posted a link comparing gigabyte p45 and x48. on 30" 2560x1600 resolution the difference was pretty huge. as they went down in resolution the difference dropped off significantly. the op on this thread might be getting that 30" so that might be one reason to go with x48. on 22" and below the difference was not enough to really matter (at least in my opinion).