OT; New PC and OS question

P

peashooter

Guest
Hello all,
Well I have decided to take the plunge and purchase OFF:BHaH, and being the tax man has been very kind to me this year, I'm ready for a major 'puter upgrade. Here is the rig I'm looking at, and its overkill I know, but I have a son starting collage this summer for Gaming Design so it has to pull double duty and I want to be future proof as much as possible. But the CPU/Memory/OS is causing me some hesitation I'm just going to list the main items
Intel Core i7-920 2.66ghz 8m L3 Cache LGA1366
Asetek liquid CPU cooling system
High Preformance Thermal compound
Gigabit GA-EX58-UD4P Intel C58 Chipset 3 way SLI support
3GB DDR3/1600Mhz TCM (Corsair w/heatsink)
800 watt XF800S Quad support power supply
Maxtor 500GB SATA-II 3.0GB/s 16MB cache 7200rpm
2 -nVidia Geforce 9800GTX 1gb 16x PCI express cards

Now I can get a Intel Core 2 Duo 3.0ghz with 4GB DDR2/800 Corsair with all the other items listed above for way less then the i7 unit above (or a Quad Core with a little less savings). With the Core 2 Duo system I could leave it as is and keep the savings or upgade the video cards or add more memory (maybe both?). Like I said I know the i7 system is probably the future, but for the Core 2 Duo (or Quad Core) pulling the same double duty I mentioned above ,about how many years will the Core 2 Duo or Quad Core system be a viable gaming /school rig?

Second is the OS for either rig. Right now I'm using Vista Home Premium 32 bit and I do like it, I really have not had the troubles some have had with Vista so I would like to stay with it. My question is should I stay with Home Premium 32 or go for 64? I've heard Vista 32 has limits on the ram it will let you use and I heard some real horror stores about Vista 64 can anyone offer any advice (please be unbiased and give facts I would highly appreciate it)
:ernae:
 
If I was doing the upgrade, I'd go with the i7....if only for the DDR3 and triple channel benefit, but we've heard of issues right here on this forum with certain motherboards and triple channel/sound related issues. Jury is still out on that one. As far as the OS is concerned, Polovski runs Vista 64...with about 8 million Gig of RAM. Hopefully he'll chime in with a bit of input. Me?? I'm still living in the dark ages with XP-32.

I have to admit....I really like your initial choice of hardware. Lookin' like a smokin' rig from my perspective.


Cheers,

Parky
 
I have a brand new rig (courtest of Parky's advice) and I stuck with XPSP3.

I like what works, I don't have time to experiment.

OvS
 
If you go the I7 route i would go for 6 gigs of RAM and a 64 bit OS. (Visa then)

Me I'm running a three week old Core i7 920 with 6 gigs of ram and a Geforce GTX 280 on Vista ultimate 64. Havent done too much OFF yet after i discovered how the view system works (as in, it doesn't, lol, CFS3's fault, not the OFF guys) so am waiting for my Trackir which should hopefully come in tomorrow, before i delve in it some more

but what i have seen it ran fine and i had sound too.

Good luck with your choice. I dont know how good that water cooling set is but you could probably pump that i7 up to 3.8 or 4 ghz, then it'll scream.
 
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