Need professional advice!

[grimzz R]

Im trying to get the parts to my first build. my uses would mainly be for competitive gaming on CoD4, WoW, SC2, Quake, and Counter Strike.

So far i came up with this:

GPU
CPU
Board
RAM
OS
Case
HDD
Drive
PSU

Any problems?

 

[btarunr]

A
Don't buy a sound card. If you remove that $89.99 sound card and $99.99 H67 motherboard off your cart, you're left with $188 to buy a motherboard. Buy a good one that supports SLI for future GPU upgrades.

Here: MSI P67A-GD65 (B3) LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s U...

B
If you insist on buying an addon sound card, instead buy this: ASUS XONAR_DG 5.1 Channels PCI Interface Xonar DG ...

That will add $60 to your motherboard budget. You'll still be able to get a P67 board that supports SLI: MSI P67A-GD53 (B3) LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s U...

 

[Flibolito]

Seems pretty balanced. Depending on resolution the GPU might get it ass handed to itself in games like SC2 when the transparency hits. Also if you are comfortable overclocking sandy bridge a unlocked processor would really let starcraft fly its very clock speed dependent. Once aware of that the other games should run fantastic with this build.

Don't buy a sound card. +1

 

[DanishDevil]

For competitive gaming, you need a good sound card. I've been there, and any edge you can give yourself is well worth the investment.

I would try to get a GTX 460 768MB. Those are very well-balanced cards.

Get a 2500K and a P67 motherboard for the possibility of overclocking. Not much of a premium.

As far as RAM, I prefer lower latency 1600MHz sticks. Look for something around 6-8-6-24 for a nice set of "set it and forget it" sticks.

And I paid $60 for my Xonar DX. Do a little more shopping around. Although I have to say, as much as I hate their drivers, an X-Fi sound card will give you better positional audio in games (because of the software support) than any other solution.

 

[grimzz R]

I already have the Astro Mixamp for my xbox, would this be good enough for PC?

 

[btarunr]

If it's PC-compatible, it should be perfect. You won't need a sound card at all.

 

[micropage7]

If it's PC-compatible, it should be perfect. You won't need a sound card at all.

i agree for all in use you could skip soundcard. recent soundcard is enough especially on highend motherboard.
so you could save and you could add some for better motherboard
and dont forget if you use big ram and better resources like cpu, vga etc take 64 bit os on that

 

[Completely Bonkers]

Confirming what others have said. Modern chipsets have great inbuilt audio. The need for a separate audio cards is a throw-back from the 1990s with MIDI ins/outs and MIDI GS soundsets. Back then the CPU was not powerful enough to do audio sampling without affecting the performance of the other tasks it was supposed to do. That is not true today esp. with multi-core CPUs. A dedicated soundcard is not necessary today except and unless you are doing pro-audio work and need to do multiple input D/D or D/A recording simultaneously. But then, these cards are upwards of $400 and they DO NOT improving single stream playback in the typical desktop or gamer situation.

Don't be fooled by the need for EAX ADVANCED HD Audio nonsense. It makes no real perceptible difference. In fact, back when the original GTA3 was launched with software-CPU-driven-audio Miles Fast Audio that was just as good as hardware soundblaster-audio etc, if not better.

The time for soundcards is over. Just like the time for floppy disks is over.