SAPPHIRE 100259-1GL Radeon HD 4870 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFire Supported Video Card
That plus a few other accessories not worth mentioning for $828. Which is a steal, considering that if I were to buy a similar system with Dell, Alienware or elsewhere, it would cost over $2k. I bought this at newegg.com after months of looking for prices elsewhere. But frankly they have excellent service and they're certainly worth the few extra dollars I spent. Not to mention I can use Billmelater.
I plan on overclocking it eventually to 3.66ghz, but not anytime soon. I still have only a 550W PSU which admittedly probably wont cut it, so I'm going to be very gentle with it at first, heck I may even downclock it. Also my C: drive is an old IDE, but I'm going to clone it to a SATA drive, and eventually I want to get two 1TB WD Caviar Black HDDs in Raid 0, and a 1000W PSU, so I can have Crossfire-x down the road. But for now I figured I'd start with the bare minimum to get it working. I'm hoping upgrading Vista to 64bit isn't too much of a hassle, and that Vista wont go apeshit on me once it finds out it has a new brain.
Go3Team From United States of America, joined Mar 2004, 3266 posts, RR: 22 Reply 3, posted (4 years 1 month 1 week 2 days 13 hours ago) and read 1487 times:
Wait until you get the drives, and Vista before you put it together. Trying to upgrade parts with new drivers on an old OS install can be trouble.
Phoenix9 From Canada, joined Aug 2007, 2546 posts, RR: 8 Reply 4, posted (4 years 1 month 1 week 2 days 11 hours ago) and read 1472 times:
Quoting FLY2HMO (Thread starter): I want to get two 1TB WD Caviar Black HDDs in Raid 0
Try to get a SSD for your main drive in addition to the two above....with all that speed and raw processing power, you don't want your HDD slow it down to a crawl.
PS: I know what those two TB are going to be full off
Life only makes sense when you look at it backwards.
Continental From United States of America, joined Jun 2000, 5476 posts, RR: 21 Reply 5, posted (4 years 1 month 1 week 2 days 2 hours ago) and read 1419 times:
You *may* be able to run FSX in medium to low settings now with a decent framerate.
FLY2HMO From , joined Dec 1969, posts, RR: Reply 6, posted (4 years 1 month 1 week 1 day 23 hours ago) and read 1387 times:
Quoting Go3Team (Reply 3): Trying to upgrade parts with new drivers on an old OS install can be trouble.
Been there done that. It wasn't too bad. Safe mode is your friend. Plus where's the fun in building a computer if everything goes smoothly?
Quoting Phoenix9 (Reply 4): with all that speed and raw processing power, you don't want your HDD slow it down to a crawl.
I've considered them but they're super expensive considering how little memory they have. Plus the technology isn't quite all mature just yet. I've read comparisons and test articles and everyone of them seems to agree that the marginal speed gains aren't worth the reduced capacity and extra cost. Plus those WD Caviar Blacks are really good performers from what I hear.
Quoting Phoenix9 (Reply 4): I know what those two TB are going to be full off
You'd be quite wrong. Why waste HDD space when you can have some server keep that stuff for you anyways?
My main reasons is that every computer I've had I always am on the verge of maxing out the HDDs. Right now my C: drive is a puny 38Gb. 30 of which are taken. I figured with 2TB I would have nothing to worry about for a long time.
Lnglive1011yyz From Canada, joined Oct 2003, 1588 posts, RR: 17 Reply 8, posted (4 years 1 month 6 days 15 hours ago) and read 1269 times:
Quoting Phoenix9 (Reply 4): Try to get a SSD for your main drive in addition to the two above....with all that speed and raw processing power, you don't want your HDD slow it down to a crawl.
Bad idea -
SSD's are horrible for a core gaming / busy system.
SSD's are limited in life to read and write cycles, and unlike a temporary hard drive, or a memory stick, you're going to run the risk of loosing data in the end.
Until the SSD technology improves, I wouldn't go down that route!
Lewis From Greece, joined Jul 1999, 3448 posts, RR: 5 Reply 9, posted (4 years 1 month 5 days 7 hours ago) and read 1176 times:
I got an i7 920 system myself with the same MB and 6GB DDR3 ram, running on Vista Ultimate 64. I have yet to see the processor struggle or even reach over 50% usage, but Vista eats up over 25% of the memory just sitting in idle.....
FLY2HMO From , joined Dec 1969, posts, RR: Reply 10, posted (4 years 1 month 4 days ago) and read 1134 times:
So I installed this beast a few nights ago. My heart sunk after I turned it on and after it POSTed I got the dreaded "OS not found" message. I was freaking out because I had not backed up anything. Then I went back into the BIOS and realized I was an idiot and configured the HDD boot sequence incorrectly since I got the HDDs names wrong. So after switching that Vista booted up, I installed a few drivers here and there, and that was it. It went very smooth, aside from the monumental scare earlier.
But holy crap this thing hauls big time! I can't slow it down no matter what I throw at it. It is mildly overclocked at 2.8Ghz but even when its underclocked in power save mode it just obliterates any program I throw at it. All my games, specially newer DX10 games like Crysis, Mirrors Edge and HAWX look insanely good and run with no less than 35FPS average, and they are all at the highest settings. The lowest average FPS I get in FS9 is 50! And just as an experiment I ran my antivirus, and a defragger all while playing FS9. FS9 did not glitch once. I just can't get over how powerful this beast is, and I'm only running at 50% theoretically since I'm on Vista 32bit. Also I'm still on my old slow IDE HDDs. I'm just waiting for my new PSU and my new HDDs so I can set them in RAID 0 and get a fresh Vista Ultimate 64 install. I can't wait to see how it will perform then.
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From , joined Dec 1969, posts, 
From Canada, joined Aug 2007, 2546 posts, 
Plus where's the fun in building a computer if everything goes smoothly? 
From Sweden, joined Feb 2004, 993 posts, 
From Greece, joined Jul 1999, 3448 posts, 
I can't slow it down no matter what I throw at it. It is mildly overclocked at 2.8Ghz but even when its underclocked in power save mode it just obliterates any program I throw at it. All my games, specially newer DX10 games like Crysis, Mirrors Edge and HAWX look insanely good and run with no less than 35FPS average, and they are all at the highest settings. The lowest average FPS I get in FS9 is 50! And just as an experiment I ran my antivirus, and a defragger all while playing FS9. FS9 did not glitch once. I just can't get over how powerful this beast is, and I'm only running at 50% theoretically since I'm on Vista 32bit. Also I'm still on my old slow IDE HDDs. I'm just waiting for my new PSU and my new HDDs so I can set them in RAID 0 and get a fresh Vista Ultimate 64 install. I can't wait to see how it will perform then. 
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