My turn for a new system ,but not much of a clue

A friend has suggested this

Any comments ?

i would go for 4GB or ram, and maybe a quad core?

It´s a fast machine for gaming. But you could choose CL 5 RAM, instead of CL 4, because the performance leap is minimal, choose 4 GB of CL 5 RAM instead.

The simple ASUS P5Q should be enough.

If you don´t want to overclock the E8400 cpu, which is unnecessary at the moment, could be purchased boxed, i.e. with the standard cooler.

By the way, I have a E8400 and the P5Q and it´s running fine!

Looks ok, but I would recommend more RAM, and a Q6600 instead of the E8400.

Looking to run XP, and really only play LFS.

Would the above suggestions still apply ?

Looks fine as it is.

You don't need a QUAD core, the E8400 is way more than enough and the QUAD core will only help in certain situations, going with the Q6600 could even cost you performance with most games and apps. 2GB RAM is fine and you could even drop the after market CPU cooler if you wanted to, the one that comes with the CPU is good enough, I'm using it.

My PC has about the same specs as the one you want to buy, E8400, Asus P5Q Deluxe, Radeon 4870, 3GB OCZ RAM, and it's an excellent system in every way, in gaming or just general usage.

In regard to the Q6600, I've read many reviews on the web which conclude that the E8400 is better. Smaller production process (45nm vs 65nm) and higher clockspeed (3ghz vs 2.4 ghz) have put them on par in multithreaded benchmarks and put the E8400 ahead in gaming benchmarks, which depend more on clockspeed rather than number of cores. Believe it or not, the 6-month old dual-core CPU is better than the 1.5 year old quad-core CPU. It's just the way technology evolves over time.

4 gig of ram and it'll be fine.

Q6600 is only going to be better (maybe?) if you do alot of video editing work while listening to music while burning DVD's while watching TV while talking on MSN.

If you're using it for games, E8400 is the way to go.

Eitherway, get 4 gig of ram or the ram could possibly bottleneck. - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/ ... duct.php?prodid=MY-086-OC

Also check out Nvidias GTX280, may be more expensive but I've heard it's better.


Or alternatively get a GTX260, which is 80% of the performance of the GTX280/4870 but for 50% of the price. Besides, any of them will run Farcry 2/Fallout 3, etc etc etc at high, if not max graphics on most screen res' up to around 24"inch or something monitor size with 4x AA smooth enough

(And no, I'm not an nVidia fanboy, I've never had one apart from the 6200 that came in a PC I bought a while back, I've had 3 ATi cards since then and they've all be great value, good performers, good for smallish overclocks (normally to the next model speed + 5% eg XT > XTX (+5%) speeds on standard fans with no problems), quiet and reliable. I've still got my old X1900XT in the drawer somewhere.

4GB of ram is nice, and with today's prices you might as well - however 'only' 2GB isn't a problem. If you take a little look at RAM usage when loading up a new game, Far Cry 2 for example, you'll find it'll fill maybe 1GB but rarely any more. Leaving another GB for everything else, which is more than enough.

Of course this isn't great future proofing, but don't feel it's a big problem if you can't stretch to 4GB.

I have 4GB, and more would be helpful, but then I work with massive Photoshop files on a daily basis and a fair amount more apps at the same time (Safari is using 550MB RAM atm :schwitz. For normal desktop use you're not going to encounter this problem.

I wouldn't call 2GB of RAM a bottle neck at all.

You wont notice the difference between 2 and 4GB, even if you did it wouldn't take you long to get used to it and think it's too slow again.

From Asus site" When installing total memory of 4GB capacity or more, Windows® 32-bit operation system may only recognize less than 3GB. Hence, a total installed memory of less than 3GB is recommended."

Dont do much photo or video editing ,really only for playing LFS ,work Excel,music,mail and browsing etc.

With dual core at 3ghz, must be better for single threaded app's than quad at 2.4 ?

By the time LFS goes multi threaded I'll be needing a new pc

Plenty room for overclocking on dual compared to quad ?


Got three identical lcd's waiting to get hooked up .Shall try SoftTH first ,but might go down the TH2go route .
Will nVidia card give a higher resolution with TH2go than ATI ?

Thanks for your help so far guys

With dual core at 3ghz, must be better for single threaded app's than quad at 2.4 ?
Correct. QUAD's only pull away when the software makes use of all 4 cores.

By the time LFS goes multi threaded I'll be needing a new pc
That sounds about right.

Plenty room for overclocking on dual compared to quad ?
Both the same really. I wouldn't put the thought of overclocking into your choice, there really is no need at all.

Got three identical lcd's waiting to get hooked up .Shall try SoftTH first ,but might go down the TH2go route .
Will nVidia card give a higher resolution with TH2go than ATI ?
Wouldn't have thought so, guess they'd be about the same.

Quote from Turbo Dad :

Got three identical lcd's waiting to get hooked up .Shall try SoftTH first ,but might go down the TH2go route .
Will nVidia card give a higher resolution with TH2go than ATI ?

Or you could get one of these video cards.

Radeon 4850X2 ftw

Don't they do a 4870x2 as well? :o

Yes but it doesn't have 4 DVI outputs. The point is that you can run 4 monitors with only 1 video card or 8 monitors with 2 of these cards, without any additional software. You would easily be able to recreate the monitor setup used in Swordfish.

Would like to be able to bolt on a TH2Go at some point .

On reading the Matrox specs ,to get the max resolution out of the TH2G0 you need to use a nVidia set-up?

If so how does this look ?

lol forgot the attachment !!

That's almost the same spec as mine. Only that I have E8500.

2gb seems enough for me actually.

Quote from shiny_red_cobra :

Yes but it doesn't have 4 DVI outputs. The point is that you can run 4 monitors with only 1 video card or 8 monitors with 2 of these cards, without any additional software.

So I wouldn't need TH2go or softTH to run three monitors for LFS?

Well you wouldn't need TH2go for sure. TH2go is like a middleman, where you connect the 3 monitors into it and only 1 cable goes to the video card. With this card all 3 monitors connect directly to the video card. I'm not sure about softTH though. Theoretically you shouldn't need it because it assumes you have more than 1 video card, so it only renders on the primary one, whereas this setup consists of ONLY 1 video card, so that concept seems to be thrown out the door. But like I said I don't know for sure, there's no way to know until you try it. But it's free so who cares, if it doesn't work without it then there's no harm in installing and using it! Anyway, that video card will not dissapoint you, it even beats the more expensive 4870X2 in a lot of benchmarks, and the 4 outputs are an attractive feature which the 4870X2 doesn't have.

SoftTH needs 2 video cards on dual-head cards such as the GTX260 - if he wants 3 screens off one card then it needs to have the capability of running 3 outputs - the GTX260 certainly doesn't have that

So you're saying SoftTH definitely wouldn't work with the Radeon 4850X2? It shouldn't matter though because the card can drive 4 monitors on its own anyway.

(Bumped a bit, but this thread was linked to from a recent one.)

SoftTH will be needed using the 4850X2. What's more it will be running as two totally seperate 4850 cards in 3 screen mode (as SoftTH can't use SLI or crossfire), meaning only one of the 4850 chips will actually be rendering the scene, the other will only be displaying the scene rendered by the other card and as such will be mostly idle.

Although a card with enough outputs will render a normal desktop on multiple screens quite happily, it's a limitation of the drivers and DirectX that means you can't natively have hardware-accelerated 3D graphics spanning multiple screens. nVidia's drivers can do two natively, but not three.

The TH2G gets round it by fooling the card into thinking it's plugged into one massive monitor (this means crossfire and SLI work with it) and SoftTH does very clever things with rendering three screens seperately in a buffer. You will need one of the two to play games on three screens.

The e8400 is a decent processor but you can get a AM2 6400+ pulling better performance and the am2 amd processors overclock quite well, mine is running 600mhz more than standard from 2.71ghz to 3.29ghz

The E8400 is waaay faster than the 6400, and, compared to the Intel chips at least, the AMD's overclock like crap...