steveb

Honestly, I think that the extra bit for the 6870 over the 6850 might be worthwhile as the upgrade to the 6850 from a 5770 isn't as significant.

That's my two cents worth. Beyond that, I have nothing to say. Anyway you go, its looking to be a pretty sweet system.

No issues with any of that here. I'm currently running with two GTX 460 1Gb and getting FPS between 35-50 on x4 AA and otherwise maxed settings, depending on how much stuff is going on around me.

Technically, the Asus board is actually the superior board, with a higher end chipset. My recommendations for grabbing a PCIe wireless were based on keeping the price as low as possible for you: the Asus board will actually have a couple extra features that the MSI board won't.

However, due to the fact that the GTX 460 is a dual slot card, you won't have any free PCI or PCIe slots left after everything is in your build: one PCI slot and one PCIe slot will be covered up by the video cards. But you're already pretty much covered for everything that you want in the computer, so it won't really matter if you're all out of extra slots.

Like I said, theoretically, yes; realistically, you're unlikely to see a difference. But due to the motherboard's layout, a PCIe is the best way to go.

I prefer powerline Ethernet myself whenever possible, but it is a far more expensive route to go down.

Its a bit more dependent on your router's speed and range etc, but theoretically a PCIe card should be a bit faster.

You could go with that motherboard, but its another $30 or so just to have Cyberpower mount a PCI wireless card for you. Personally, I'd save the money and grab a PCIe card and just install it myself afterwards. The end cost to you would be the same as with the original motherboard, or possibly even a dollar or two less.

USB adapters are hit or miss: sometimes they work really easily, and other times they're a massive pain. I linked to a USB adapter with good user reviews and a rep for being easy to install, but a PCIe card would probably be the best route to go.

That expansion card totally works for the USB 3.0, so that's a great little addition.

I noticed that you scaled back to the 768mb cards, which was a nice move: left a bit more wiggle room in the budget and you'll still just destroy CoH (and most other games out there) with maxed out settings at 1920x1200. And you upgraded the SSD to 128Gb, excellent move there too: the larger a SSD is, the faster it is. One thing to keep in mind, the BluRay drive there is only a reader: it won't burn discs. I assume you already knew that, but just pointing it out in case you'd missed it, as the BluRay drive is part of the default selections.

One problem that I did find in the build is the wireless card: it's PCI, but with two GTX 460s, your PCI slot will be covered up. Your solution is to skip this from the build from CyberPower and grab either a PCIe wireless card or USB wireless adapter. Here's a couple suggestions from Newegg for either one that will put it at the same price point as what you'd have gotten from CyberPower.
USB: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833704045
PCIe: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833704059
(Note the free shipping on both selections)

Now for your other questions.

The video card settings thing is them asking you if you want them to enable SLI/Crossfire or leave it disabled (disabled maximizes the number of monitors that can be used by the computer, which is why it is asked). Just choose to have them activate SLI.

With Nvidia cards, if you use what they call 3D Surround (which requires an SLI set up), you will be able to game across three monitors all at once by using two ports on the first card and one port on the second card. Its called 3D Surround because it will support 3D across three monitors via Nvidia's 3D Vision kit, but the 3D kit is not required to use the three monitors in 2D.

In my opinion, buying a monitor in a brick and mortar store is always the best way to go. Monitors are too dependent upon personal tastes to leave selecting one to online reviews: you just have to be able to see it in action for yourself. Now, if you see what you want in a physical store, but can buy it online for less, then you might as well go for it. But you should probably be able to grab a 22 inch 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 monitor in your local BestBuy for the same price or less as what Cyberpower is offering.

Last thing, like I've said before, the Nvidia driver that re-establishes SLI in CoH is still in beta and definitely wouldn't be installed on your computer by Cyberpower, so you'd have to upgrade to the 260.68 beta driver in order to get SLI up and running. Nvidia drivers can always be downloaded here: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us.

Honestly, I think you're about ready to hit the buy button. Neo and Father Xmas gave a lot of great ideas, so I'd ask them for any last minute opinions, but that looks like one kick-a** PC to me.

The simple reason not to go with 32-bit is this: you're flushing away a bunch of money on RAM if you get the 8Gb as a 32-bit system will only use 3Gb.

As for the media card reader, I'd assume that they'll use some sort of adapter, but its tough to say as there is nothing on the website that would stop you from ordering incompatible parts.

And the 955 can be overclocked to the same speed as a 965 pretty easily, but don't start thinking that you can shave off even more by moving down to a 945 as that one isn't a Black Edition and is more difficult to overclock: if you don't mind the challenge its fine, but the $10 savings isn't worth it in my opinion.

Building gaming computers for as little money as possible is my side business, so I know how to hunt down the deals. I just managed to build a friend a Core I3/Crossfire 5770 system last month for a hair over $1000, which is a great deal in Canadian pricing (mail in rebates are my friend).

Here's the thing: I just took a closer look at your Cyberpower build and I noticed a few points where you can knock off a few dollars for things that are just plain useless.

1. The internal USB expansion w/ the Bluetooth dongle: you can grab the dongle at Bestbuy for $15; and the between the motherboard and the case you'll probably have about 8 USB ports already, with the ability to add more via 2 more USB expansion ports left untouched on the motherboard.
Saves: $29

2. The anti-vibration fan mounting and brackets: a properly attached PSU/fan should have no issues with rattling; if it rattles when you get it from Cyberpower, send it back and tell them to put it together properly.
Saves: $14

3. You've chosen the Phenom 965, when the 955 is also a Black Edition and easily overclockable to 3.4Ghz on the stock cooler; with the enahnced cooling solution you're getting from Cyberpower you could easily overclock it 3.8Ghz.
Saves: $20

4. The RAM: okay, you really want 8Gb of RAM, but will you actually use it? At some point, yes, but you're not likely to need it in the near future, so you could scale back to 4Gb. That having been said, you want 8Gb, so lets stick with that; the RAM you've chosen is useless for an AMD build, because AMD chipsets only support DDR3 RAM up to 1600Mhz. Knock that down to 1600Mhz, and that saves $12, or go down to 1333Mhz and you save $36.
Saves: $12/$36

5. Superclocked EVGA GTX 460: Save the money and get whatever generic brand they'll toss in there (probably Asus or MSI); the GTX 460 can be overclocked like a champ by anyone using EVGA Precision or MSI Afterburner; since you're buying a pre-built system, you can also forget about the EVGA lifetime warranty, as I guarantee you Cyberpower is saving $10 a card by buying the two year warranty versions.
Saves: $15

6. The 2TB hard drive: you're grabbing SATA3, which I originally missed when pricing out my parts and why I can in at roughly the same price as your build. This is easily the biggest waste of money in the build: mechanical drives can't use the full bandwidth of SATA2, which makes SATA3 a gimmick. SATA2 speeds should be more than adequate for a storage drive. Seriously, save the cash here and go with SATA2.
Saves: $100

7. Windows 7 Professional: Unless you have productivity software that you need the XP mode for, or other networking needs (homegroup, remote desktop, etc), save the money and just go with Home Premium (BTW: Professional doesn't have the games like Solitare or Minesweeper built in, which kind of sucks)
Saves: $31

By my math this would all add up to a savings of: $221 with 1600Mhz RAM or $245 with 1333Mhz RAM.

That's a huge savings which would cover the cost of the MSI nForce 750a motherboard and a second GTX 460. Or you can just pocket the savings, but either way you shouldn't be paying as much as you are.

As for installing Nvidia's 260 drivers, that's easy: just go to Nvidia's website and in their driver download section, choose the correct operating system and the GTS 450 as your graphics card and you'll be good to go(even though the driver is still in beta, this is the recommended driver for the 450); Nvidia's new driver set up system will take care of the rest, just follow the recommended steps.

Any new desktop system will be a significant improvement in speed over your laptop. Hard drive speed is actually the largest roadblock in every computer that exists these days. Most laptops still use 5400rpm drives, while a standard desktop drive is 7200rpm, which is a huge leap forward. A 7200rpm mechanical hard drive will give you the "well, that's kind of nice" experience over your laptop's hard drive, whereas a SSD will give you the "HOLY ****!" experience.

If you're going to upgrade to a monitor of 1920x1080, i'd suggest going SLI with two 460s over a single 460. I'm running two GTX 460s myself and there is a huge difference between running one versus running two in CoH. With only one running, I slow down to a near slide show of about 20 frames per second in the open world (using Grandville as a reference area) with everything maxed; with both of my cards running CoH, my frame rate is about 55 frames per second in the open world and over 60 in missions. I run at a resolution of 1920x1200. (SLI is only available through Nvidia's 260 series drivers, which are still in beta at the moment, and will probably not be WHQL for another couple weeks). Even a single higher end card like a Radeon 5850/5870 or GTX 470/480 will struggle at that resolution compared to a multi-GPU set up like dual GTX 460s. I wish I knew more about the state of Crossfire for CoH, so you might be able to look at a couple of Radeon 5770s, but no one has reported if Crossfire support has been re-enabled since the launch of Going Rogue.

Be warned though, if you're going to go with AMD/Nvidia SLI graphics, your choices in motherboards is quite limited.

Here's the list of what is available:
Asus nForce 750a: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131637
MSI nForce 750a: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813130235
Asus nForce 980a: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131636
MSI nForce 980a: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813130236

The PSU you linked to earlier, the Corsair TX750, will be more than sufficient for two GTX 460s. A strong 650 watt PSU should be fine for two GTX 460s in SLI, but that would leave no room for expansion down the line, so a 750 watt is a better plan. Corsair arguably makes the best power supplies on the market today, so that unit is an excellent choice.

As for additional fans to help cool the video cards, that's difficult to say. Will you need them in a case like the CM 690 II? Probably not. An additional 120mm fan on the side panel for an active air intake to help cool the video cards wouldn't hurt, but I don't think that you would need it.

Okay, so you're in Europe, so that obviously does change pricing significantly.

As for your aversion to ATI/AMD: that's fine by me, I'm no brand loyalist (I leap from Nvidia to ATI/AMD as the mood suits me), and given your history, I completely understand.

In my opinion, I do think that a GTS 450 is your best long term bet.

I did mention that review sites considered ATI/AMD cards a better value at the price range when all factors such as price, performance and power consumption were concerned, but do not think that the GTS 450 is not a highly capable gaming card: it completely keeps pace with its direct ATI/AMD competitor (Radeon 5750), and many of these reviews were also coming from the perspective of expecting more out of the card given the surprising performance of the GTX 460 introduced in July. This is cutting edge technology and represents a huge leap forward in mid-range graphics cards from Nvidia. A card like this should net you a 100 to 115% increase over your current performance across all games.

Conversely, both the GTS 250 and GT 240 represent technology that is essentially two graphics generations out of date: both cards use G92 variant chips, which are two generations old despite the cards themselves being from Nvidia's previous generation. These cards will net you probably 15 to 35% performance increase across all games over your current 8600 GT (the GT 240 will net about 15 to 20%; the GTS 250 will net about 30 t o 35%)

My philosophy is that if you're going to upgrade, then you should try to grab the newest technology whenever possible for the longest possible practical lifespan (able to play new games at mid-range settings for several years to come).

Now, given the type of pricing that you're looking at, you could also consider waiting another month or so for Nvidia to release its GT 240 replacement, which will probably be called GT 440. It will take over the current price point of the GT 240, and still come close to doubling the type of performance that you get out of your 8600 GT, and will also get you a longer practical lifespan. From a price standpoint, that might be your best option, unless the money for this upgrade is available now, but might not be in a month or so.

Slightly on a side note for anyone with an 8600 GT, replacing it as soon as reasonably possible is a good idea. The 8600 GT was replaced by the far superior 9600 GT in under a year for good reason: a little known fact about these particular cards is that they have one of the highest failure rates for any graphics card released in the last five years; cracked capacitors being the most common problem. The problem is not isolated to any specific brand but rather comes from design flaws and poor component choices by Nvidia made during the design stage.