Originally posted by Quizzical

I would wait until TERA launches and see how the game runs then.  At the very least, there will probably be a lot more information out there about what hardware TERA needs to run well, so that we don't guess wrong and get you the wrong hardware now.

Besides, there are some major hardware launches due just before the game launches.  There are also rumors that Nvidia will have a highly competitive video card for $300 out around that time, which could force AMD to slash prices to be competitive.  I don't entirely believe those rumors, however.

Me either, NV are having GK104 yield issues. and there is the speed difference in GDDR5 controllers. If NV don't fix their GDDR5 controller and their cards are stuck at ~4500mhz their GPU physics will cripple their framerates. as well as having 33% less bandwidth at the same bus width.

Yield issues plays havok with overclockability. 7000 series OC's like crazy.

What pressure? 

Just about everyone is jawdropped by the game so far.

I don't see any pressure.

This is the 1st beta event Anet has thrown. They are in debug mode. There is bound to be hiccups with this many people playing on beta software and hardware.

You don't throw your 1st closed beta event without gathering every performance metric you can. It's like them running 2x the players at once. mabye worse.

The fact Anet has pvp running this many ppl without crashing means their networking is solid. all it needs now is optimization. 

I have little doubt that with the talent at Anet all will be well at launch.

I don't see why Microsoft and Sony can't make GW2 work on PS3 or Xbox360.

They could develop a new trackball controller with 12 or so thumb buttons + 2 pov joysticks + 16 finger buttons + thumbpad.

The controls are the biggest hurdle. Toning down gfx is easy since PC version has low gfx settings anyway.

But make the game for PC. Then let MS and Sony drool over the possible sub numbers. Thel cave in for the development cost.

We need to push PC gaming 1st so the console makers start making more advanced controllers. 

You should get a Radeon 7770. Bang for $ they are awesome. When you further upgrade your system you can buy another for crossfire. The 7770 crossfire reviews are awesome. 580gtx performance for 300ish.

AMD must have some bandwidth special sauce to get the performance out of 128 bus

Originally posted by smh_alot

Originally posted by grndzro

One thing that puzzles me is that prior to TOR's release Bioware wasn't banging it's drums much about TOR, it was all FUD style quick glimpses of action and very minimal event participation. This leads me to believe that even Bioware wasn't too proud of it's own product.

So why do some fans think it's the best thing since sliced bread. It looks like garbage, no endgame, replayability is boring due to overused voiceovers, Leveling is too fast to properly enjoy all the quests, combat is EZ mode, PVP is a mess....

In contrast to GW2 that is headlining every event to show fans every possible aspect of the game because it's that awesome.

If I would have bought TOR at release I had no choice but to pray it was awesome. By the time GW2 comes out I will know for a fact that it will be awesome due to the amount of coverage. Looking at the 2 company's faith in their own products brings a stark contrast.

 

Who says TOR fans think it was the best thing since sliced bread? Who says most TOR fans don't simply see it as a fun MMO to play? Who says there's no endgame or replayability and that leveling is too fast? Maybe to you, but endgame, replayability and leveling speed is certainly not worse than most other AAA MMO's, and to quite some people even better than in a lot of those other MMO's. If anything, I'd rather think that it's some GW2 fans who're in ultra fanboi mode and who think it's the best thing since sliced bread. Hey, I don't really care, if that's their thing to go into hyper fanboi mode then that's their thing, but let's not use double standards. People simply enjoy what they like, and what one person likes another person can dislike. That's how life usually works.

Please pay attention to syntax. If you had actually read the word red you wouldn't have posted.

One thing that puzzles me is that prior to TOR's release Bioware wasn't banging it's drums much about TOR, it was all FUD style quick glimpses of action and very minimal event participation. This leads me to believe that even Bioware wasn't too proud of it's own product.

So why do some fans think it's the best thing since sliced bread. It looks like garbage, no endgame, replayability is boring due to overused voiceovers, Leveling is too fast to properly enjoy all the quests, combat is EZ mode, PVP is a mess....

In contrast to GW2 that is headlining every event to show fans every possible aspect of the game because it's that awesome.

If I would have bought TOR at release I had no choice but to pray it was awesome. By the time GW2 comes out I will know for a fact that it will be awesome due to the amount of coverage. Looking at the 2 company's faith in their own products brings a stark contrast.

Originally posted by Painlezz

{mod edit}

 

Mass Effect is amazing, will be amazing, has been amazing, the Demo is amazing, people love the demo, nothing but good things to say about the demo...  Where do you get off saying They're trying to sell Mass Effect 3 by using other "better" products? 

 

Far as i've seen, Battlefield 3 is nothing special.  I don't play it, I haven't seen many people talking about it, it isn't in the news, the websites, or anywhere.  It was just another release.  Another FPS clone. 

You clearly do not play BF3. It isn't a clone and if you know anythinng about Dice you'd know they stand behind their products and keep improving them long after they are released. 

{mod edit}

Most of the people that are going to buy BF3 have already bought it. 

The fact that EA is bundling BF3 with ME3 points toward some really nice patches comming for BF3 soon. 

It's all geared toward making Origin a well user supported platform. And from all the work that has been done to Battlelog I think EA is starting to get its act together. Future BF3 patches will tell all.

8800's have soft fill material, just moving them after they have been heated up repeatedly from gaming is risky.

With Llano it's all about memory speed.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mainboards/display/gigabyte-ga-a75-ud4h_7.html

See the faster memory even with a clock deficit wins. 

You should get the fastest ram within reason. Tight timings 2133, oc the Northbridge, Oc the APU(Both sides CPU/GPU), OC the graphics card, Get a fast SSD. I think with all that it should run just about any game pretty well.

An active chipset cooler might be usefull also when increasing the system bus.

OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG!!!!!

The Ivy bridge ES's I've heard about seem to choke on air. poor overclocks vs SB.

Wel know more soon imo.

Ooooh a 510

Pentium 4.....I would upgrade soon 

Then you'd need to decide what platform. AMD's FX 8 cores (AM3+), or Intel's 1155 4 core Sandy Bridge.

What is your current system? If it is good enough for another 6 months or so it makes no sense to upgrade right now with Win8 and the performance of Piledriver up in the air. 

If you can wait the prices of video cards will no doubt drop considerably when NV releases Keppler.

Win8 has a conventional interface like Win7 as well. it isn't just for tablets. W8 will probably be launched with exclusive games as well.

Looking back at my notes for the Bulldozer launch (AMD Bulldozer Review: FX-8150 Gets Tested), AMD was very enthusiastic about FX’s performance in Battlefield 3 (multiplayer beta, at the time). And no wonder—Battlefield 3's single-player campaign doesn’t care if you’re using a $130 Core i3 or $315 Core i7. It doesn’t care if you come armed with two Hyper-Threaded cores or four Bulldozer modules. It just. Doesn’t. Care. 

The multiplayer does care, it uses all the cores. It is already known that singleplayer dosen't scale with more cores.

Originally posted by Quizzical

Yeah, that's the review I saw, too.  Manufactured by Sirfa, 85 C Teapo capacitors, only 552 W on the +12 V rail for a "650 W" power supply, +3.3 V and +5VSB voltages barely stayed within spec, over 60 mV ripple on the +12 V rail.  None of those are horrible.  It's not like it's a Diablotek piece of junk.

But if that's what you're looking to spend, you can do a lot better for cheaper, unless you really want modularity:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139020

you have kicked my ass in power supply knowledge. I'll go with your reccomendations. 

Hardware Secrets does write good power supply reviews.  But they're pretty generous with their awards, so "golden award" isn't really high praise.  If Hardware Secrets gives a power supply a golden award and Hard OCP rates it a "fail", they're not necessarily contradicting each other if they're both borderline cases.

-----

So you're saying, don't believe the processor reviews on tech review sites.  But instead, trust what some random person on an Internet forum said.  And that's an overclock of over 50% if you want 4.8 GHz on an FX-8120.  A Core i5 2500K will overclock pretty well, too, you know.

Today, games might typically scale to about three cores.  A Core i5 2500K wins easily over an FX-8120 at three cores.  And it would still win if games scaled perfectly to four cores.  Or five.  Or six.  Even at eight cores, it would still at least be competitive.  It's going to be a long, long time before games assume have something stronger than four fast cores.

In the meantime, games that struggle with a processor will tend to do so because they can't take advantage of enough cores.  A Core i5 2500K will do wellin those games, too.  Will an FX-8120?  Actually, it often will.  But not always, and not as well as a Core i5 2500K

2500k dosen't play BF3 as well as FX-8120/8150. It isn't as smooth. This trend of heavily threaded games will continue. Thoes benchmarks point out that when paired with fast ram, NB overclocking, and cpu overclocking the FX does not bottleneck in lightly threaded games so that's a moot point with the components I selected. Go read the customer comments on newegg, people are really impressed with FX 8 cores.

It's just my opinion all I can do is point out customer reviews and that thread that shows FX is pretty good when OC. And is better at multitasking. Weather he buys 8120 now and ebays it for 100$ when Piledriver comes out or spends 350$ on an I7 price won't be much difference.In the end I think Piledriver will stomp Sandy bridge 4 cores. Win8 will make it even worse. 

In the end people have a vested interest in their platform of choice. I prefer to embrace multithreading because I don't need insane single threaded performance. I get plenty of FPS on my x6 @ 4ghz. I will continue to enjoy it as games get more and more threaded.

Rosewill hive review. Even though it has some Teapo caps they are 105c. Ripple was fine he said even overloaded 780w. he gave it excelent rating/value

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/Rosewill-HIVE-650-W-Power-Supply-Review/1460/1

And ya I wasn't thinking about crossfire for gaming because as an avid FPS player I would never use it due to microstutter.

The point I'm making about FX-8 cores is when Win8 comes out and newer games tend to use more cores it will be better to have an overclocked FX than any 1155 chip. Older games not heavily threaded won't be bottlenecked by Bulldozer, especially with a nice OC and cooler. Win8 uses core parking so power usage will drop also. If you looked at thoes benchmarks in the anandtech thread you would see even OC bulldozer does very well vs 2500k. 

Why should the OP plan on socket 1155 especially when Both Win8 and industry trends are moving toward more threads. Even if he popped 350$ down on a 2600k/2700k he is still stuck at 4 cores with worse multitasking than 8120 for 5 years. 

If you wont be replacing your comp for a long time I have made a build that should be good for quite a while.

Motherboard ASUS M5A99X EVO AM3+ AMD 990X SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 145$

Processor  AMD FX-8120 Zambezi 3.1GHz Socket AM3+ 125W Eight-Core 200$

Ram  G.SKILL Sniper Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 60$

Hard drives HITACHI 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB SATA 6 | OCZ Agility 3 60GB SATA III MLC (SSD) 170$

Power supply Rosewill HIVE Series HIVE-650 650W 85$

Case Rosewill CHALLENGER Black Gaming ATX Mid Tower 55$

OS Windows 7 home Premium 100$

CPU heatsink, XIGMATEK Gaia SD1283 120mm Long Life Bearing 30$

Video card, SAPPHIRE 11196-00-40G Radeon HD 7950 3GB 384-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 450$

Total 1295$

Some notes on components

FX 8120/8150 have smoother gameplay than the 4 core Intel 1155 processors. Don't pay attention to benchmarks they really are better than the Intel K series. And you will be upgrading to Piledriver 8 cores anyway. Windows 8 with SMT will boost gaming even more. 

The Rosewill PS is excellent and can pull more 750ish watts

The heatsink will pretty much let you OC to your hearts content, Buy another 120mm fan for the back of it if you need to.

The SSD hard drive is big enough for your OS and a few regularly played games, all you need. The speed is worth it.

IMO do not get socket 1155, Trust me if BF3 shows us anything is that new games will use more cores, and Intels K series hiccups when it has too many threads, and 1155 is EOL no processor upgrades past 4 cores. You said you are planning on the system lasting 5 years. Intels 4 cores will not age as well as the AMD 8 cores.

Some FX8150 overclocked benchmarks, it does very well.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2225753

SLI and Crossfire have what is known as microstutter. Unless you are running Eyefinity/multiple monitors it isn't reccomended.

If you do build your own PC I would not reccomend socket 1155(I-2500k/2700k..etc) With games having more and more threads Hyperthreading really sucks due to it wiping the primary threads cache whenever it is idle/waiting for dependencies. And with 1155 you are stuck with 4 cores so any future upgrade will have to include a new motherboard.

AMD's FX-8150 has lower IPC per core but with 8 cores and Windows 8 supposedly comming late 2012 going with FX-8150 over the 2500k would be a serious bonus to the longevity of your system. Especially with Piledriver due out in a few months.

And I agree with the 2tb drives Quiz pointed out. Unless you have a serious need to download every anime and keep them on disk no one needs that much space right now. it'd be better to invest in a fast OCZ vertex 3 SSD.

With newer dual fan direct pipe heatsinks there really is no reason to water cool. My Phenom x6 at 4ghz hardly breaks 50c.