Originally Posted by
Pycno
My rig costed about 10,000 $ when I bought it around two years ago, I know alot about computers but my build was far from perfect. Very far from perfect. My budget was unlimited but I ended up gimping my computer regardless :P
The CPU was a 6-core monster, it was a waste as the heaviest "work" I did was 5-box WoW and cpu-usage was never above 30%. A single quad-core would already be overkill. This didnt gimp my performance but it didnt help it in any direction either.
Go for a quad-core, at least for WoW. You could buy a double-cpu motherboard and go 12core instead of 6 core but whats the point? Same thing applies to quad-core and hexa-core, its just not needed.
Ram - I went for 6x2gb sticks of ram for a total of 12gb. I thought 3x2gb would be sufficient but it was not, I ended occupying all 6 ram slots and took a relatively big performance hit as my ram had to run at 1333mhz instead of its rated 1600mhz. 1333mhz is enough of course but its just stupid to spend 1000 bucks on a CPU and then slow it down with the ram sticks. My motherboard was the only board available to support the 6-core cpu but it could not run 6 ram slots at 1600mhz.
Gpu: I bought a 5970 (card with dual 5850 chips), I dont think there was any documentation available anywhere that stated Innerspace did not support using both GPUs on the 5970 card. My 10,000 dollar machine had a bottleneck as it could not perform better than a single 5850 in WoW, I ended up adding a 5850 to run my slaves on but the combination 5970+5850 proved to be unstable. Even though I needed the monitor outputs on the second card I ended up just giving it away and learned to live with low gfx settings.
Buy one GPU, if its too slow then add another.
The only thing I will consider using multiple gpu for again is rendering slaves on another monitor. The drawbacks of multiple gpus in general gaming is so great I would pay a premium price to be able to use a single gpu again.
NIC: I bought a killer pro network card, it was supposed to be great but it was the worst networks card I have ever used. Second perhaps only to another model of Killer pro network card that I had tested years earlier. I ended up tossing it in the garbage and using the onboard network card and had no trouble after.
Use onboard NIC, or buy some good quality intel Nic. Do not buy a killer nic.
Harddrives/SSD: I was considering going for a large amount of ram (20-30gb) and mount WoW into the ram-drive to eliminate loading times. It was important for me to get my team into the same group in battlegrounds. Im glad I didnt, my 2xX25-M 80Gb drives in raid-0 loaded everything near instantly. I always occupied the first 5 slots in battlegrounds, not even in AV or IoC could anyone load a toon faster than I loaded all mine. SSDs are definately the way to go.
The difference between a 2-3000$ computer and a 10,000$ gaming computer is not much to show for at all, you get very little back in return.
My suggestion? Go for a 3000$ computer and buy some furniture, sofa, home cinema, stereo, audio equipment, professional headset or something for the 7000$ - that would give you entertainment on a whole new level. Paying 7000$ to be able to bump up anti aliasing another notch isnt really that jaw dropping :P
Enjoy the computer, I had a blast upgrading from my 3 lesser computers to one imba one. My slowest computer was a slide show in dalaran and took 1 minute or more to load it xD
By the way, BUY A 120hz monitor! its crazy to buy a beefy gaming rig without it.
