Quick question: Building a new PC, AMD or Intel?

[Karlos]

I can't advise. I went a bit nuts when building my current PC, which has turned out to be far more powerful than strictly necessary, but with the associated extra cost.

[Karlos]

However, Nvidia seems to be falling apart at the moment so I think the best card you can get for that price is the ATI 4850.  It has 800 registers!

800, eh? Such figures are a bit meaningless on GPU's nowadays. For example, my GTX 260 can be running 24576 hardware threads at any given instant (24 multiprocessors running 32 "warps" of 32 threads each).

The GTX280 is the fastest consumer GPU on the market, but the 4870 X2 cards, having 2 GPU's are, of course, faster.

[Karlos]

Atheist wrote:
Hi Karlos,

But, you can get a 4850 for $189, and a GTX280 is a whopping $389, including a $30 mail in rebate. Is the GTX280 twice as fast as the 4850? I don't think it is. (I don't know.)

The 4870 is $269.99, including $20 rebate.

This is from newegg.com.

The cards might be even cheaper, if you look around.

My good friend GadgetMaster happens to have a very similarly specced system to myself, albeit with the HD4850 and X38 chipset (everything else pretty much identical).

It's true that you can't really notice the difference in most cases, though when you put Crysis on the highest detail settings, my GTX260 definately has the advantage over the HD4850. I should point out that it cost considerably less than the full blown GTX280 and was pre-overclocked by XFX.

I picked nVidia over ATI principally because I was interested in writing code using CUDA. Otherwise I might have gone for the HD4870.

[Karlos]

redrumloa wrote:
Here it goes, final purchase:

EVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLI motherboard
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 (2.66Ghz, 8MB cache)
4GB Corsair DDR3 1333Mhz
GeForce GTX 260
Ultra X3 800 watt power supply

:banana:

And with that, the main PC is going offline to be gutted and updated.

/me crosses fingers

If gaming and multimedia is your objective, you can't go wrong with a card like the GTX2xx or HD48xx. The Radeon is probably better bang for buck. That said, I'm more than happy with my GTX260. One for Thierry: it has 16384 registers per multiprocessor ;-)

[Karlos]

I was considering OC'ing my Q9450, apparently it's stable on this board at 3.2GHz (from 2.66) with a beefed up cooler.

Then I read a few posts by people that had overclocked theirs for a few months only to discover it became unstable and remains so even at the stock speed.

Considering how much it cost, I think I'll give it a miss. My GTX came pre-overclocked by XFX, from a core speed of 576 to 640MHz, shader clocks up to 1363MHz and the memory speed to 2300MHz. That's fast enough for me considering my previous (PC) graphics card was a GeForce 4 MX...

[Karlos]

I have Vista 64-bit home premium on mine. I totally stripped all the services to the bone and turned off all the eye candy. Now it looks like Win2K I sort of know where I am with it.

I only use it for gaming though. For anything remotely serious, I run linux.

[Karlos]

From what I read about it, apparently the GPU client that runs on the G200 series is also taking solvent interaction into account in the folding calculations. I don't think any other non CPU version does that. One to consider when comparing it to console folders

My Q6600 ran at 3.2GHz for quite a while with no problems and my Xeon 3110 has been running at 4GHz+ for a bit

Now wouldn't be a good time to have to replace any of it though :-(

[Karlos]

adz wrote:

Karlos wrote:

...console folders

Console folders be damned! ;-)

Now, now, any folder is a good folder. Just don't let them use their Cell (or whatever) optimised folding engine as a demonstration of how 1337 their hardware is. Any G200 core crushes it whilst doing significantly more complex calculations.