New Gaming PC Suggestions?

FYI, I agree that matching up AMD with ATI would be for the best in the long run, given that AMD owns ATI now and will be branding the Eyefiniti Graphics chipset under the AMD name. The likelihood of AMD and ATI cards working better would probably be due to the fact AMD will now have direct interest in ATI graphics chips and Graphics division will now have better access to AMD chipsets to probably optimize for their uniqueness.

While ATI has not had problems with Intel based boards, nor nVidia with AMD, a lot of the base programming is done based on Intel boards and nVidia chipsets. AMD/ATI have their own methodology to doing things under the same environment, but sometimes coding does not take into account this methodology, hence there have been quirks with some games or programs that will require driver updates.

Anything Geforce GTX 470 or higher should be what you are aiming for. You'll get physx (spelling), and more and more software is starting to support them in terms of processing power. IE9 already uses full GPU hardware acceleration for graphics text, and video......this alone is why I refuse to by anything ATI, that and the fact that at one point some games were optimized for platforms using intel cpus and nvidia cpus, dont know if thats still true.

Your going 1366 so you require triple channel memory, I would shoot for at least 6GB of DDR3 with the lowest timings you can find. SSDs will give you the best performance for hard drives, so I would get two of those and RAID 0 them for the primary drive, and for secondary I would get a 1.5 or 2 TB hard drive for storage, music, vids, etc.

Konceptz804 said:

Anything Geforce GTX 470 or higher should be what you are aiming for. You'll get physx (spelling), and more and more software is starting to support them in terms of processing power. IE9 already uses full GPU hardware acceleration for graphics text, and video......this alone is why I refuse to by anything ATI, that and the fact that at one point some games were optimized for platforms using intel cpus and nvidia cpus, dont know if thats still true.

A fair majority is optimized for intel and nVidia. Although Intel has a very good brute force method for processing calculations were as AMD has shortcuts on some things to get good performance, hence their chips have PR speeds higher than their actual processor's speed. They also use a slightly different bus speed at times which tends to throw some things off a little unless you get specific parts and drivers to understand those differences.

ATI and nVidia just have different OpenGL thought processes. nVidia broke the 3DFX back when 3DFX was the only good 3D Rendering Gaming standard in favor of OpenGL acceleration as well as the fact it didn't require '2' cards to do the 2D as well as 3D acceleration. Again, the process in which ATI does its GPU processing is slightly different than nVidia and they originally were a 2D graphics card company than got into 3d a bit after nVidia won the 3D implementation standard games have come to accept.

I think what hurts ATI a bit more is the fact that Driver implementations for OpenGL sometimes ran into serious snags, which required newer updates. Popular games having serious errors or performance with ATI cards for certain things often the source of the concerns.

Keiichi25 is correct in stating that some games have been deliberately coded to give poor performance on ATI GPUs.

I've built 11 gaming systems in the past 4 years, only 2 of which were AMD based chipsets with ATI GPUs. I got lucky with my build.. no BSODs so far, and I'm slowly upping the OC settings. It seems like a good idea to match the motherboard with the graphics card(s) you plan to use.. EVGA with EVGA, MSI with MSI, etc ..don't know why but I've never had one come back with a premature hardware failure or excessive BSODs when I've done that. I've had no problems with my ATI graphics cards with any of the games I've installed

As far as AMD vs Intel.. it was a matter of the most performance for the money. A Phenom 1090T x6 can be OCd to 4.4-4.5 GHz given adequate cooling.. easily the equivalent of a stock i7-980x.. but it costs about 2/3 as much when you figure in the cost of a refrigerated liquid cooling system that also keeps the memory and graphics cards under 50c

I'll post screenshots of my benchmarks once I'm done tweaking everything in the "show us your OC" thread. As it stands now.. you'd have to pay about $8000 to get an Alienware box that could beat my system...

Well, I should correct that saying...

I shouldn't say they are deliberately coded for nVidia. Although they have been mostly tested on Intel and nVidia based systems. It is the general baseline for gaming at this time.

Why I say it is not necessarily great for ATI is mostly that there are times ATI handles things differently that sometimes coding will trip on something that ATI never considered. Happened before, will happen again. It isn't a fool proof way to make it generically usable.

At the same time, a software company isn't going to necessarily have all the possible cards to see what can and cannot work. They will have roughly a baseline computer model or a few of them and work there.

Now as far as Desktop (IE not 3D) acceleration is concerned, I believe that there would be hardly any problem to deal with Desktop hardware acceleration mostly because the basis of desktop stuff is pretty universal and doesn't really require complex calculations. Video playback is also fairly standardized and in some ways can be front loaded to the memory over the video card if it isn't doing pure 3D graphics rendering, because again, Video playback and desktop drawing is not super complex compared to trying to dynamically render lighting for 3D objects in a specified space with various light sources.

Wishmaster said:

Konceptz804 said:

IE9 already uses full GPU hardware acceleration for graphics text, and video......this alone is why I refuse to by anything ATI, .

Im confused by this, What do you mean?

'Hardware Acceleration" Means its being processed or rendered by the GPU.

ATI cards are hardware the same as Nvidia cards are, and are just as capable.

"Hardware Acceleration" is not exclusive to one brand or another.

The only reason for the larger GPUs would be for gaming.

As far as the HW acceleration, It doesn't take very much for decoding YouTube Videos for example, even the so called HD ones.
In fact, you do not need that big of a card to decode Real HD video even.

Sorry I meant more so for cuda, i do a lot of video encoding and cuda acceleration helps out greatly.

i7 920 DO, way cheaper than extreme, will OC above 4.0GHz with 1600MHz or higher ram.

Raid 0 array, of SSD's

Two nVidia GTX 400 series cards

Gigabyte UD3 series X 58/SLI mobo

900W PSU

HAF 932 case