Who's Playing MW3?

Never buy anything pre built. Sit down and plan it, then order the components. Here's what I do:

I always build intel because they outperform AMD, period. I decide what I'm gonna use it for. Games and regular Internet usage don't use hyped threading, so an i7 is a waste of money. If I'm gonna be doing video editing, rendering, or things like that, you definitely want hyper threading. So, let's assume a gaming build

Intel i5. So we're gonna need a motherboard. We wan the newest chipset, that's the z77. So we are gonna look at z77 mobos. MSi has a poor reputation for mobos, so we avoid them. Asus is generally recognized as the top dog mobo. So, now, we decide form factor. Let's say we want a regular sized system, no micro build. That's a standard ATX. Now, how many graphics cards? One or two? Standard ATX is fine. Want three? You're gonna want an extended ATX or eATX. So let's say we want three cards. We've now found our mobo. Asus Maximus eATX Z77 chipset. Now, we need to figure what cards we want. Decide of you want nvidia or radeon. People will argue this, but in the end the difference is minor.eta say we want the newest nvidia card. That's the GTX 680. So now we buy three of them. Now we need a power source big enough. If we were just running one card on an i5, 700w would be more than adequate. I we want run three cards? I wouldn't go less than 1200w. Any PSU made by seagate or corsair is best. Look closely, many companies sell branded PSUs that were manufactured by seagate. Those are fine. Now we need memory. Your board determines this. Most current boards are DDR3. Dont cheap out on RAM. Buy sticks from either GSkill or patriot with a CAS latency of no more than 8 or 9 at 1600 MHz. Hard drive? Any reputable brand. Solid state drives are a different story. You can google all you need to know about them. I recommend crucial branded ssd personally. Pick up a cheap DVD burner drive, blu ray if you want it. Find a case that fits eATX or whatever size board you go with. Monitor, keyboard, mouse. You've now got a system. If you wanna overclock it, I recommend at least a noctua d14 heat sink fan.

I'm not even gonna try to break down building a water loop on here. If you're interested in tht, PM me your phone number lol.

 

No, you build around the CPU and graphics cards. They determine every other component. I wouldn't go for anything less than a quad core intel, personally. Multiple graphics cards just increases your graphical capabilities. The more cards, the easier your computer can handle graphics intensive tasks. Average gaming computers are ideal as just a single high end card. Multiple cards require understanding crossfire/sli, and installing crossfire profiles for new games you install. Not to mention multiple cards tend to be buggy as hell the first few months of a game release until the developers tweak the profiles. Multiple cards are NOT recommended for rookies. They can prove difficult at times, especially three of them. Lol.

As for ram. It's better to have two 8 GB sticks than four 4 GB sticks. Less sticks are easier on the memory controller. When I said CAS latency, that's the amount of cycles before its ready for the next instruction. So, if you have a cheap stick of 10 CAS ram, it has to wait 10 system cycles before its ready again. Obviously the lower the better. It's directly correlated to frequency. 800 MHz ram naturally has a lower latency than 1600 MHz ram. If you get ram with a frequency of 1600 MHz or more, and a CAS of 8 or less, that's good ram. Us overclockers can go in and manually tweak our frequencies and timings. I personally find better performance from under clocking my ram back to 1333 MHz and dropping my CAS to 7 or less.

 

I have multiple. I have Slackware Linux 13.37, windows 7, windows 8 beta, and Apple OSX for giggles thanks to virtual computing.

 

Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

 

Depends. Do you want something that is a little more involved but much more stable and secure, or do you want simple plug and play? Not a lot of main stream programs have direct native ports, but it's getting better. Also, most video games won't run. If you're just using it for every day browsing, it's ok. It's 90% built to be a pure server platform.