System Builder Marathon: High-Cost System - Page 2

I think it was an episode of SNL I saw a while back; two people going back and forth using "literally" when they really meant "figuratively". Was funny though...

Am I wrong though?

no.. they meant to say literally... they just overused the crap out of the word.. which is what the poster was doing. They would also stress the word and make motions while they said it.


Dagger... I can't think of a single game where 4 GB of memory is "necessary."

Wrong word there.

I am truly, truly disappointed in this build. I realize that two 8800GTX cards are about the same speed as two 8800GTS G92 core cards are. But, really, why go with two 8800GTX when two 8800GTS are coming it at $500? Why not the 3870 X2, sure the drivers weren't stable but then again, wasn't the GTX seeing action when it wasn't fully ready yet?

Whats more, the case. The Case was a misstep. No one buys that case. Really.

Third, the memory. Why DDR2 when DDR3 is now available?

And why (for the love of god) the Caviar drives? Is Western Digital ponying up money here? Raptors are still faster, and at this price range if you had bought two 8800GTS cards (same performance as two 8800GTX cards) and had bought a more sensible case, you could've afforded a Solid State Drive, which offers way more performance.

I could go out and eat your everything again Toms, but for now, I think I'm going to head to Anandtech.

One of the ideas behind the build was to play Crysis at very high quality, 1920x1200, with AA enabled. Take another look at the 8800GTS, it doesn't perform as well as the 8800GTX at super-high settings. It wins at lower settings, which isn't really the point of a quality system.

As for the early results of 3870X2 Crossfire configurations, they didn't use the 8800GTX for high-end systems before it was ready either.

It was the best case for the task. It was the only stock case that would hold a big radiator, other than the Thermaltake cases that come with radiators. Read the previous marathon to find out why they fled from those cases after trying one.

Tom's took a position of leadership here, and you expected what of them, to be followers?

790i SLi wasn't ready yet either.

Solid state drives...and then? They should have used Samsung F1 drives. A fairly obvious slip-up once it was brought to their attention. How many solid-state drives would it take to make 1.5TB or more? Or maybe 10 Raptors? Maybe 12 Raptors and a PCI-Express x8 RAID controller, in RAID 50? The Samsung F1's would have been the correct choice for a multi-purpose gaming and content creation machine, which is what this build was. By comparison, the Caviars aren't really that bad.

Tom's will still be here when you get back.

^ Agreed. The 9800X2 is limited by both the bus AND the RAM (which is 512 per core).

There's never any direct comparison to the 8800GTX, at least not anymore. nVidia has been throwing hissy fits about sites comparing newer cards to older ones.

Most pros believe the quicker drop-off on G92 based cards is more about the memory bus width than the memory capacity.

The GTX has a lot more bandwith than the GTS 512 or GTS 1024. The amount of memory would make a very small impact, however the increased bandwidth of the GTX would make a very large impact at 1920x1200.

In short, the GTX is the better card for higher resolutions, regardless of the amount of memory the GTS has.

The third option is that you're making some assumptions.

Nobody's saying the GTS isn't a strong card, but when price is no longer a factor the GTX is a viable option. Even in the benches you provided two GTS cards achieved parity with the GTX or had a very small advantage; in the benchmarks that were bandwidth limited, the GTX got a notable advantage.

The 1GB GTS card from Palit is fast, but it's also more expensive - and overclocked quite a bit, which likely accounts for it's performance increase more than it's 1GB of RAM does. Pit an overclocked 8800 GTX against an overclocked 8800 GTS 1GB, and they're going to trade blows.
But the 1GB palit is $380, you can get a GTX for $340. If money is no object we could have picked 8800 Ultras too, I guess. But nothing you've said negates a pair of 8800's in SLI being a viable choice for a dream machine.

I agree on the waterblock. 8800 Ultra is kind of a waste.

^ dude... look at the date Toms did the article. 9800GTX werent out yet let alone 9800Gx2. I myself would have went with 8800GTS and 2 7200.11 in RAID 0.

With WD's last 3 reliability ratings in the 4th, 5th and 12th percentiles on storagereview.com's reliability database, I wouldn't put WD in anything ATM. The WD6400 can compete with the Seagate 7200.1 and thr Samsung F1 in most application benchmarks but it's small buffer (16 MB compared to the other's 32) and 16.4 ms access time give me cause for concern.

But if ya read the "Tom's References System"Article from a few weeks back, we see that WD gave TH 15 free HD's. So I guess all recommended builds for the foreseeable future will have WD drives.

No water cooling of the video card? My BFG version of the 8800GTX has an integrated water block. Seems a better way to go than the air cooled version, no?