Computer Build Resource Thread - Page 699

On October 31 2011 07:09 Myrmidon wrote:


No, unless you're running 32-bit and have a lot of stuff open in addition to the game such that the memory-addressing limit becomes an issue.



No, performance is pretty much identical on all compatible motherboards except for maybe how I/O (e.g. USB3 controller) is handled, but that's more of a difference between motherboard design rather than which chipset is used. A motherboard mostly just provides copper traces to connect stuff like the CPU, graphics card, and RAM together, peripheral controllers like Ethernet and audio, and power circuitry for handling the CPU and other components. Some high-end motherboard is not going to somehow change the logic inside the CPU to make it run faster.

The chipset just determines which features are available for the motherboard manufacturer to implement. For example, H61 does not provide any SATA3 connections, whereas the other three support two of those in addition to the four SATA2 connections all those chipsets support. So most motherboards for H67, P67, and Z68 will take advantage of that and use two SATA3 ports. But some H61 motherboards will provide SATA3 ports through a third-party controller, and some other motherboards will also use third-party controllers to provide more than two SATA3 ports. As in most things, it depends on the motherboard model.

For socket 1155 systems, Intel recommends 1.5V RAM to prevent (long-term) damage to the memory controller. So higher is worse. In practice, 1.65V is not so high that it's probably going to be an issue, so that's most likely okay.



Does that price include motherboard and RAM? If you're upgrading an old system, you need a new motherboard and possibly RAM (you will if you don't have DDR3) to support a new processor.

On October 31 2011 07:20 Myrmidon wrote:


Some games use Nvidia's proprietary physics SDK called PhysX. One feature is that you can offload some of these physics calculations to an Nvidia GPU. It's possible to use two GPUs, one running just the PhysX calculations, and the other doing normal work. The secondary one running PhysX need not be very powerful, since it doesn't need to do that much work. In these scenarios, you can get slightly higher performance with such a dedicated PhysX GPU, than without.



That depends on ibuypower sales, how good you are at finding components, what kind of deals you got on components, what kind of components you're getting (best deals or more premium options), and so on. But $750 -> $1000 is optimistic, assuming you're comparing with a relatively good ibuypower configuration. There's usually not that much difference. Maybe $750 -> $900, if you need to purchase an OS for $100? I don't keep much track of prebuilt prices.