Somewhat Quick Question

[darkrisen2003]

On May 15th I will be getting a decent paycheck and will have roughly 800-1000 to spend on my last 2 parts. Given the fact that im also wanting to buy Vista with them I am curious how this is going to work out. Im looking at buying the Q6600 and either an 8500GT or 8600GTS and an OEM copy ox Vista Ultimate. Just cuious how well this system is going to perform. This is my first real upgrade since my old p4 3.2 with 1 gig of ram and a PNY 5900 SE Video Card so im hopeing this will be a nice upgrade.

Full System Specs
Asus Striker Extreme
Antec 900
Thermaltake 850 Modular
2 gigs Corsair ddr2 667
2 x 250 gig WD Sata HD's
Sceptre 22inch Widescreen LCD
LG 16x Dual Later DVD Burner

P.S. I am a gamer and would like to be able to play my games at the monitors native reso of 1680x1050 or whatever and get decent enough frames to be able to play ( im not at the house to be sure that the reso numbers are right )

 

[Roguestar]

Spend more money on video card compared to CPU, seeing as you're a gamer. Your order of priority for games performance increase is GPU>CPU. Get a better graphics card and a dual-core CPU instead of a medium one and a quad core. Two or three of those cores will be lying around while your graphics card struggles to feed high details at high framerates at high resolution. Get a better GPU now and you can upgrade your CPU to quad-core down the line (if a dual-core like the E6600 somehow starts limiting you...).

Bottom line: graphics card more important than quad core. Quad core not used entirely in most games.

 

[darkrisen2003]

I appreciate your feedback. The main reason I was thinking of going Quad is that I was hopeing to not have to replace CPU for a while and just replace little stuff like video or ram etc. Most of my friends at work are saying that CPU would be more important then GPU but I'll take all the advice I can get.

 

[stoma]

If you're a gamer, grab an 8800 GTS (may be price cuts in about a week or two) and grab a dual core with the rest of the money.

 

[darkrisen2003]

any ideas on how much they possibly might drop. I realize this is a silly question but would you think that the 8800 gtx might finally fall below 500?

 

[Captante]

Quad -core won't help gaming performance much at all, while an 8800GTS instead of an 8600 will make a huge difference ... save money by snagging a dual-core instead... at 1680x1050 the 8600 will let you down quickly.

 

[jkresh]

I would suspect an 8800gtx will be below 500 (though not much below) by the end of the month, with the ultras and ati's cards out (even if the 2900xtx performs badly unless its priced over 500 it will put pressure on nvidia to lower the 8800gtx a little). You might want to consider getting a e4400 or something cheap and picking up the q6600 for $250 in a couple of months after the next price drop (then either sell the cheap chip or keep it as a spare), the couple of hundred you save by going that route should make it easy to fit the 8800gtx into budget. Also based on the prelimnary reuslts on teh 2900xt the 8800gts should drop a little when that comes out and either would be a solid alternative to the 8800gtx (and fine since you are not running at insane resolutions).

 

[darkrisen2003]

ok so with keeping your suggestions in mind I priced out the evga 8800gtx, with the 6420 c2d and vista ultimate for under 1k. sounds great but im hopeing the price shoots down just a bit more so I can throw in a new DVD burner without cutting it too close. Any reason everyone suggests evga over pny?

 

[Roguestar]

EVGA have a step-up program.
http://www.evga.com/stepup/

 

[stoma]

Originally posted by: darkrisen2003
ok so with keeping your suggestions in mind I priced out the evga 8800gtx, with the 6420 c2d and vista ultimate for under 1k. sounds great but im hopeing the price shoots down just a bit more so I can throw in a new DVD burner without cutting it too close. Any reason everyone suggests evga over pny?

A dvd burner isn't gonna cost much (less than $100)...assuming you don't mean a blu-ray burner or something crazy like that.

You can't go wrong with any brand of 8800 really, just look for what you want. Some brands have higher overclocks/better warranty/games. I personally have a Foxconn 8800 GTS 640mb and it's great, but you can't go wrong with EVGA or PNY either.

 

[dbdynsty25]

I've got the PNY 8800GTS (320mb) and it's been outstanding. I jumped from an Athlon 64 3500+, 2gb DDR3200 and an ATI X800 Pro to my current e6600, 2gb DDR2 800mhz and 8800 GTS (mobo upgrade was negligible) and I couldn't be happier. Significantly upgraded my rig and spent less than 800 bucks. Can't beat that.

I would definitely agree to get the 8800 (in some flavor) and go with the Dual Core processors. They can be overclocked like a mother too...so you're going to outperform the quad anyway!