When High End Gaming Machines Fight 63
mikemuch writes "Games for Windows Magazine and ExtremeTech teamed up to determine which prebuilt high-end PC delivers the ultimate game performance in terms of frame-rate and ability to yield the highest game quality settings on large displays. The winner, VoodooPC's Omen, features an Intel Core 2 Duo QX6800 processor and two Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX's in SLI configuration. It delivers over 15,000 3DMarks (as do a few of the other contestants), but 'only' costs $5,700 — in contrast with some of the other machines that go for close to eight grand."
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Re:Fight?! What fight?! (Score:5, Interesting)
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There is no way that either of the systems would cost anything like $300-$500, even at wholesale. My wholesale account at Ingram Micro indicates that the two GeForce 8800 video cards alone would cost nearly $1200 (and they don't even have any available) and the processor almost $1000. The fact is that on an older system, you might, by biding your time and doing reba
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Re:Fight?! What fight?! (Score:4, Funny)
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Seriously, that's a huge market that for some reason apple has completely missed. Their Mac Pro line is not far off from an ultimate gaming rig, drop in a decent video card (make OSX recognize any PCI express video card properly!), a decent soundcard (which I think they have?), apply 10 minutes of that apple case engineering to make it look pretty and keep cool and voila now you have the ultimate geek
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Admittedly I may be out of date on that, if that's changed I'm all for buying a mac pro with a 7300 video card and dropping in an 8800 or R600 Upon release.
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Thanks, I'll be here all week.
except... (Score:2)
The Mac Pro is a damn nice workstation but for games where better video and faster memory is more important than more CPU cores - it isn't really the right mix of hardware.
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If you look at the performance numbers for other (ie non neutered) apple hardware like their notebook line it is comparable to the equivalent wintel OSXless machines, so that's where I premise my arguement.
If I could get the same (high end) performance from a Mac as I can from a PC on games
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Really, where? The only time I've seen anything like that is in response to the inevitable "anything you can do on a PS3 you can do cheaper on a PC" where the response is that you can't buy a sub-$600 PC that outperforms a PS3.
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http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201751&c id=16517957 [slashdot.org]
A reasonable person would argue that the PS3 is a more cost effective performance set up
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In the second, the poster of the same article posts, in the thread, a breakdown which is specifically a cost effectiveness comparison, though the initial comment seemed more general.
If those are the best examples you can find, I'd suggest your "rebutting" a strawman.
$6000 == $600 ? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Honestly (Score:2, Insightful)
What would you guys do? Build your own or buy from some random manufacturer?
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Re:Honestly (Score:4, Funny)
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Why do they have all the money???
Poor me.
Oh wait. I AM white!!!! YES!
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Lucky you! Eventually statistics will catch up with you.
I'm actually pretty happy to not have to build another system. I don't really have it in me anymore to keep up with what ram timings work with what cpu and motherboard and what the optimal configuration is and lord knows what all. You can find plenty of places that will build you a good system from actual name-brand parts for very little o
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It's a geek's treasurehunt!
Spending some quality hours just reading reviews, finding bargains, I love it all.
Now only if I had the money to do it more often...
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circle of life.
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The same point about statistics can be said about pre-built PCs though. Last person I knew who ordered a box from dell had a problem where the PC would lock up every now and then... which he eventually noticed was more likely to happen if he bumped the pc. I popped the side of the case off and looked around found out the main power cable wasn't snapped into the motherboard all the way. When the pc was getting bumped or whatever it was shorting t
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I understand the feeling though. First I spent 8 hours wondering why the damn thing wouldn't boot (I didn't push hard enough on the intel core 2 duo heatsink pins, a much worse configuration than AMD, which is relatively easy). Then I do a memtest, everything is find, install the OS, then everything starts going haywire. I do another memtest and find out one of the sticks of RAM is bad.
The part that sucks is that the memor
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i remember on particular net retailer that used to do a buirn-in for you, but they cant match the newegg prices...
small inaccuracy (Score:2)
lots of dell systems have 90 days as a starting point.
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What kind of guy builds a gaming machine from scratch ?
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People are obviously buying these $5,000 PCs based on the mere fact that Alienware is still in business (in some form). When Dell makes specialized gaming
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In a word: Yet
http://www.younewb.com/index.php/2006/11/16/pc-gam er-leaks-gears-of-war-pc-photo/ [younewb.com]
I suspect that GoW takes advantage of some Dx10 functionality and microsoft is using it as an exclusive to spur holiday 360 sales and then will use it to spur vista sales to geeks who feel the 360 is a loud, ugly prone to failure piece of dung.
If you compare the horsepower of a 8800 GTX/GTS with a core 2 duo processor and a 360/PS3, the PC wins, so expect better visuals and h
Yeah, but ... (Score:1, Offtopic)
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