Hey all,
I'm going to buy a new pc really soon (place my order within 2 days). Only this time, I'm getting a monster. I've been so out of touch of hardware developments these past few years for various reasons, and every person I try to consult has given me different answers. Anyway, I've made up my mind about most things but there are two things that concern me now:
1)Graphics Card: Is it worth buying a 500 euros card, or should I settle with something less (like GTX 260)? I think that's what I'm going to do, because getting the top-of-the-line hardware just never seems to be wise. Still, I
2) Cooling. Now I'm pretty paranoid about cooling, especially because it was never enough for any of my previous computers (and I never overclocked anything), and also because the system is going to be pretty heavy. Now I'm buying a case with 4 built-in fans, and I'm trying to decide whether I should install a watercooling system or not. Keep in mind that I plan on expanding the system as time goes by (place additional RAM and graphic cards {when they become cheaper})
Is that even safe? I shudder at the thought that it could leak. I thought about putting a radiator on the side which I suppose is safer than directly putting watercooling mods on the actual components. And is that even useful, or should I only care about it once I do upgrade my system with more graphic cards? Or is it still going to make a substantial difference?
Thanks in advance!
As for the cooling, I have a pretty fast rig and I can tell you that liquid cooling is not a necessity in general. I have all-aluminium full tower case - which means that the heat is better absorbed and that there's plenty of space there. + 2 fans - one in front where the HDDs are and one in the back behind the CPU fan. Result - 50-55°C idle and about 70-80°C when high-performance tasks are running. IMHO sufficient. FYI, the case I bought is ThermalTake Shark silver, check it out, it's some of the coolest out there ;)
Watercooling is for overclockers. Air cooling will be fine.
For a GFX card, you will not need anything more powerful than a GTX 260 or a Radeon 4870.
When I had watercooling, I liked an external solution, which near to noiseless - like this: http://www.kailon.de/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=35&products_id=132
Last year I bought a mac mini, which is actually the best computer I've ever owned :)
Btw. shelling out 500 bucks a graphics card is never worth its money. You're top notch for 2-3 month, after that, the cheaper cards are getting as fast as your card. And after a year, you're getting a more silent card with less power consumption for less money.
if you plan on hooking your pc up to a tv (as secondary display) to watch movies or play games fullscreen then it's a waste of time getting an nVidia card as they've disabled at the hardware level now due to some crap about screen size copyright issues or some such nonsense, whereas AMD/ATi haven't.
but if you do intend on going with nVidia then it'd probably be worth getting the 9800 GTX/GTX+ or for a bit more oomph the 9800 GX2 over the more expensive GTX 260.
and yeh, i wouldn't worry too much about cooling, and an aluminium case does help.
i used to be paranoid about overheating to the extend i left a sidepanel off the case and had a large tower fan blowing inside the pc constantly but now i don't bother.
Thanks everyone, I guess I won't try to get any additional cooling unless I discover it's not enough.
Quotei used to be paranoid about overheating to the extend i left a sidepanel off the case and had a large tower fan blowing inside the pc constantly but now i don't bother.
That's exactly what I'm doing for my current PC :P but then again, my processor's fan broke down a couple of years ago and I've not bothered to fix it ::)
The case I ordered is ThermalTake VA8000BWS Armor Black, I found its features intriguing (like, for example, the 4 built-in fans) even though it looks very ugly from the screenshots.
I don't intend to have TV-out, but I ordered a Samsung SyncMaster 2053BW, which features a TFT 20" wide-screen, 8000:1 contrast, 2ms response time and 1680x1050 maximum resolution. That's more than enough for me...
And I suppose I'm going to get a GeForce 260.
I have at least two years of gaming to catch up to ;D
I'm running on a single-core 1.8Ghz Sempron (a souped-up Athlon XP with a new memory controller) and I got the cheapest card I could get a year ago (40 euro, nVidia 8400GS) and I've been able to play everything released so far. Fallout 3 runs a charm, and so did Far Cry 2 for the 2 hours I bothered with that piece of shit.
Sure, I run them at 800x600 because at higher resolutions I can't run on full detail, but I'm just trying to say that a video card worth 500 bucks willl age just as fast as that 150 bucks one (which is still at least 8 times as fast as my shitty card :P), and for that price you can replace the cheaper one twice when the old one's not pulling its weight anymore.
Just my $0.02.
I have a similar problem with my graphics card and hard drives with cooling them. After about 2 - 3 hours of gaming my games start to lag and crash so I need to turn my pc off to cool. I have 4 internal hard drives as well. Nice big case which cools well. All in all I have 2 case fans but limited room to add any cooling solutions so I usually stop gaming after an hour and a half. Get stuff to monitor temperature inside your computer as most people wont need anything significant to keep things chilled.
Well, if you're planning to have many drives there and generally, lot of stuff inside the case, than it could be a problem. But as long as you keep it to one GFX and two hard drives, nothing can possibly go wrong with the temperature.