[olug] Advice on a new rig

[John Vogel]

I would say wait another 6 months or by a $50 GPU.
Waiting could help reduce the prices of 1600 Mhz DDR3 RAM.


1. Power Supply

Are you considering using SLI or Crossfire for your GPU?
You may need a better power supply to use either.

2. Processors

The Intel Core i7 seems to have the better performance than 45nm Phenom II
that will be released soon (at least until AM3 boards are used).  Although
it is to
early to compare them yet.

Either way cheap cheap CPU + board combinations won't be around for the
newest CPUs.

3. GPUs

I would wait until more GPUs come onto the market with Displayport (and
HDMI)
since it is the standard that will eventually replace DVI.

But beware of the NVIDIA hardware problems in the GeForce 8000 series which
may have carried over into the GeForce 9000 series (see
why-nvidia-chips-defective<http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/09/01/why-nvidia-chips-defective>
).

4. A reason to have 8 gigs of RAM

Use the extra 4 gigs as a ram disk to cache data and store temporary data.
Could help speed up the encode/decode of multimedia files.