new computer for gaming

S

sandcracker21

Member
My primary gaming computer bit the dust, and im getting a new one. Thanks to a good friend's generous discount with dell, I am going to get an alienware pc (would nv pay full price!)

The basics:

Sandy bridges i7-2600k oc'ed to 4.2 ghz
nvidea gtx 590 3gb gpu
875 watt psu
8gb 1333 ram
WD 1tb 7200 hdd 32mb cache
Alienware aurora case with liquid cooling
I will also be adding my ht omega claro sound card


Dell wanted 300$ more to bring the ram from 1333 to 1600! That crazyness is why my ram is only 1333. I might also add a ssd in the near future.

What do y'all think? Its primarly for gaming and also a lil media. I want it to be able to max games out for as long as possible.
 
I agree with Wolfeking. The GTX 580 is in a class of its own, because the 6970 competes with the 570. The 580 performs better in quite a few benchmarks compared to the 590, as well. If you are going to be running more than one monitor at a high resolution, I would recommend the GTX 580 with 3GB of RAM, because of the headroom for the buffering of the machine code that graphical games produce.

Also, get the lowest amount of RAM from DELL config that you can, and then buy some 1600 RAM from Newegg.
 
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What games are these you all are talking about, that a 580 will match/beat a 590?

And true some might have SLI issues, but its really rare. I have ran both SLI and C/F on a bunch of systems and hardly ever had any issues.
 
supprized nobody said yet that a 2500k is just as fast and by the time it is past by the 2600k in games it would be time for a new mobo/cpu/ddr4/pcie 3.0 if not even higher than that stuff.

might want to build your own, will save you hundreds as dell and other build your own sites are normally ripoffs or horrable support.
 
I am going with gtx590 bc that card is a BEAST (the 580 is great too).

As far as the ram goes, I remember reading somewhere that the sandy bridges cpu likes 1333 speed ram and wont work well with anything higher. I don't think that is true however.

If I just buy 8gbs of 1600 or 1866 ram is it just a plug and play? Will I have to tinker with bios to get the speed up?
 
if you leave the 1333 in and buy a 1600 kit the 1600 kit will run at 1333. SB will run just fine at 1600, or even 1866.
You will have to remove the 1333 kit to get the 1600 kit to run at 1600, but it will do so as just plug and play.
 
yeah, the i's don't "support higher than 1333" but if the mobo does it can make the cpu do it too and you will get the faster speed, idk why they don't say it does or anything.
 
Not sure what mobo alienware (dell) will use, how will I know if it takes 1600?

Also would it be worth it to upgrade to 1600? I found some cosair 8gb 1600 at 1.5v for 60$ on newegg.

Thanks for all the input!
 
Build your own system, never buy a dell. You'll get no name parts that are supposed to be the most important (Motherboard, RAM, PSU)

Building your own will be cheaper and actually building one is quite simple. It's like mechano or lego.
 
the whole point is that yu can always build cheaper then you can buy. A alienware computer has about a 200% markup. Knowing that, if you can get a 45+% discount, you will be getting a deal. Anything less and you are still paying too much.
 
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