Help with new system

[Mosg2]

I have an 1800 dollar budget for a new machine. I'm looking for someone to help me min/max the system

I was leaning towards an I920 with dual GTX285 but I still haven't heard anything definitive about 5x WoW, Windows 7, and dual video cards. Someone care to chime in? I have a 32GB SSD but it's plugged into my current machine and I'd like to get a new one. Other than that, I'm flexible as long as I get the most efficient system possible.

[alcattle]

1800 will buy all you need. Do you play other games? anything else you want to do on this system?

[Mosg2]

Just 5 boxing. I play nothing else at all.

[Ualaa]

i7 920.
12gb of ddr3, faster ram.
I would go with a single card, over 2 cards or an X2 card, for wow.
An ATI 5870 is the top single card on the market now, but a 285 is a strong card if you prefer Nvidia.
And strongly consider a SSD; a generation 2 intel would be quite nice with the OS on it too.


If you are at all looking at the 940, you can overclock the 920 as a better option.

[alcattle]

i7 920.
12gb of ddr3, faster ram.
I would go with a single card, over 2 cards or an X2 card, for wow.
An ATI 5870 is the top single card on the market now, but a 285 is a strong card if you prefer Nvidia.
And strongly consider a SSD; a generation 2 intel would be quite nice with the OS on it too.


If you are at all looking at the 940, you can overclock the 920 as a better option.

I want it so close to my new computer spec. Might have to start slow with 6 gigs and a lesser card, but I will price things out. I am in the same boat as all I do is WoW, I have other systems if needed for webz and e-mail.

[offive]

I run 5 instances easily on an old AMD Phenom 1 (4 core) with 8 gig of DDR2. 280GTX for main screen and an older 8800GTX for secondary screen. I don't bother with affintity and both screens are 24" with native resolution of 1900x1200. Slaves run at 15fps when not active. I recently upgraded to an Intel SSD drive and Win7 64bit.

Your i7 920 should be fine given enough ram. If possible I would save your moola for the i9s next year. I know I always hate investing a large sum only to find out 6 months later that the new and imrpoved model is that much faster! Of course when the i9s hit they will uber expensive, but should future proof you for quite some time.

[Sajuuk]

i7 920.
12gb of ddr3, faster ram.
I would go with a single card, over 2 cards or an X2 card, for wow.
An ATI 5870 is the top single card on the market now, but a 285 is a strong card if you prefer Nvidia.
And strongly consider a SSD; a generation 2 intel would be quite nice with the OS on it too.


If you are at all looking at the 940, you can overclock the 920 as a better option.

Actually it's the top single-gpu card right now, the 5970 came out.

As far as going single vs dual/x2 cards don't forget you can use innerspace to split the load of all your alts for some smoooooth playing. (assuming other parts in your system are good.)

[Sam DeathWalker]

This is the top single gpu card:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd...-cad,8352.html

But it would cost yur whole budget.




http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...0,2154-10.html

[Sajuuk]

Workstation card vs mainstream card. The card being compared is a generation old.

For our needs the 5870 is the better card. And your card vs 5870 is debatable.


AMD tech specs pages:
http://www.amd.com/us/products/deskt...fications.aspx
http://www.amd.com/us/products/works...750-specs.aspx

• Engine clock speed: 850 MHz
• Processing power (single precision): 2.72 TeraFLOPS
• Processing power (double precision): 544 GigaFLOPS
• Polygon throughput: 850M polygons/sec
• Data fetch rate (32-bit): 272 billion fetches/sec
• Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 68 Gigatexels/sec
• Pixel fill rate: 27.2 Gigapixels/sec
• Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 108.8 Gigasamples/sec
• Memory clock speed: 1.2 GHz
• Memory data rate: 4.8 Gbps
• Memory bandwidth: 153.6 GB/sec
• Maximum board power: 188 Watts
• Idle board power: 27 Watts

[thinus]

I believe this is the new top end: http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases...18nov2009.aspx