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Build me a computer, she says.

Raijian

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My girlfriend wants a she-beast of a computer so we can play L4D2 together and possibly Dead Island and other new-ish games as well as World of Warcraft.
She's currently running a 6-year old HP with an nvidia 6600, 2 gigs of grandmother ram and a dual core processor that sits at like 1.9 ghz or something.

It doesn't need to be as high end as mine, but here's what I've thrown together very quickly just to get a price estimate for her.

Antec Three Hundred Case
Gigabyte GA-990XA AM3/AM3 + Motherboard
Hawk Radeon 5770 HD 1GB
Antec BP550 550W Continuous PSU
G. Skill Ripjaws 2x2GB 240p DDR3 1600 Ram
AMD Phenom II x4 3.2ghz Black Edition


If anybody can scout cheaper equivalents or perhaps a better deal on a higher end part (Happens all the time) let me know! I just want some feedback on a decent but sort of inexpensive build.

This is probably overkill for what she wants.

Price range, under $800 CAD

Any help is greatly appreciated.
 
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just to make sure you know the '840' isn't actually a phenom II like the rest, it's exactly the same as the athlon II x4, it lacks l3 cache the like
 

Raijian

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Memory 12gb G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3 1600mhz
Video Card(s) ATi Radeon HD 5870 1GB + ATi Radeon HD 5870 [Crossfire]
Display(s) Samsung 25" LED
Case Coolermaster HAF 932 Full Tower
Audio Device(s) ASRock VIA HD Onboard 7.1 Audio
Power Supply Kingwin Mach 1 1000W
Software Windows 7 x64 Professional / Backtrack 5
Doesn't it really boil down to the processor speed? I mean a quad core running at 3.2ghz should handle WoW and some steam games pretty easily.
 

Black Haru

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Doesn't it really boil down to the processor speed? I mean a quad core running at 3.2ghz should handle WoW and some steam games pretty easily.

yes, it should be able to handle those games. but technically no, a lot of different elements go into how much a processor can handle.
 

Raijian

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Memory 12gb G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3 1600mhz
Video Card(s) ATi Radeon HD 5870 1GB + ATi Radeon HD 5870 [Crossfire]
Display(s) Samsung 25" LED
Case Coolermaster HAF 932 Full Tower
Audio Device(s) ASRock VIA HD Onboard 7.1 Audio
Power Supply Kingwin Mach 1 1000W
Software Windows 7 x64 Professional / Backtrack 5
yes, it should be able to handle those games. but technically no, a lot of different elements go into how much a processor can handle.

Okay. She said that she wants it to be under $800 CAD, so I can upgrade that to a Phenom II x4 BE maybe.
 

qubit

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You really need to pay attention to the graphics card. Any reasonable CPU can drive a game at good frame rates, but it all comes to nothing without a decent graphics card. Therefore, I think that 5770 is a bit low end for achieving consistently smooth frame rates. It's also been discontinued.

A GTX 560 Ti will provide a serious improvement in performance for not that much more. Also, the fans are really quiet on the reference models. Check out the review on TPU.

EDIT

I just did a bit of comparing with the reviews on TPU and it turns out that the 5770 is considerably slower than even a GTX 460. This means that the 560 Ti will more than double your performance for much less than double the price. A no brainer.
 
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JrRacinFan

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Any possibility she can wait a few more weeks? Got bulldozer right around the "corner" and it should help facilitate with saving a few bucks here and there.

If building now and can't wait look at Sandy bridge, maybe can squeeze a i5 2400 into the budget, or Llano.
 
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Yeah, still have a lot of extra budget in my proposed build in my previous post...you can get a i5 2400 and/or a different board if it has to be bought immediately...
 

Raijian

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JrRacinFan

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Last edited:

Raijian

New Member
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177 (0.04/day)
Location
Canada
Processor AMD Phenom II x6 1090T 3.9 Ghz
Motherboard ASUS Crosshair IV Formula 890FX
Cooling Thermaltake Frio + Additional Fan
Memory 12gb G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3 1600mhz
Video Card(s) ATi Radeon HD 5870 1GB + ATi Radeon HD 5870 [Crossfire]
Display(s) Samsung 25" LED
Case Coolermaster HAF 932 Full Tower
Audio Device(s) ASRock VIA HD Onboard 7.1 Audio
Power Supply Kingwin Mach 1 1000W
Software Windows 7 x64 Professional / Backtrack 5
No, under $800 is the limit, but I was just thinking, she really doesn't need something to play every game out there, it's just way overdue for a change. That was her budget, but she knows nothing about the value of computer parts so that was just a guess.
 
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That's actually almost a hundred more

Because you're comparing the one in your first post without an HDD and the one I listed which includes one worth $75.
 

JrRacinFan

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