Could really use PC buying help :/

I've been trying to get "the dream pc" designed for a couple months but haven't had much luck with picking a good graphicscard; I'd think I found one that was good and then see it complained about here as someone was looking to upgrade away from it.

The goals for the PC would be 1. maxing CoH with UltraMode settings (@ at least 1280x1024), with nothing turned down at all, I've been playing for years now, mostly on Performance/Minimum, I wanna jump to the opposite end of the spectrum with the new PC.

2. High processing speed, I've been looking at AMD processors over Intel, something like a Phenom X4(High end) or X6.

3. 8(or at least 6 if it's intel) gb Ram

4(?) I saw a demo of a side-by-side comparison of an SSD pc's boottime compared to a fast mechanical one, and am now looking for one of those too, the way I've been configuring pc's on sites lately has been 1 30gb SSD bootdrive and a 2TB sata III data drive.

with a highend processor and ram like that can someone just give me the name of the ATI/Nvidia cards required to push all settings to the max? I've read like 5 different detailed explanations of how to interpret GFX card benchmarks but it makes no sense to me, the names would be easier .

If anyone knows a good configuring site and is up for posting a configuration here that'd be incredible. As far as building goes, I have experience assembling a PC from a one-time thing at work so I could probably do it, but I'd be more comfortable receiving something assembled ready to go.

I was hoping to keep the price under $1500ish, but with the SSD and a gfx card that can play coh how I want it that probably isn't possible. Another thing I have been trying to understand lately is Crossfire/SLI; I know it involves using 2 identical cards and raises performance, but (stupid question) can the ports on the 2nd card be used? like a 2 HDMI output setup? And is it really true certain games/apps can choose to "not support" crossfire leaving you with 1 mediocre card to work with for that app? (without fiddling with drivers? I tried updating a gfx driver this summer and got nowhere, I'd like the new card in this new pc to just come working lmao)

Sorry if this post sounds ridiculously needy, but I've been trying by myself and haven't made much progress.

10 50's To Date! Check out Titan Sentinel; it got my CoH presence synced online

At that resolution you could probably reduce your budget significantly especially if you don't need to buy a new monitor.

A tip with SSDs though - do not put your cache files on it - they can be slower to write to than hard drives and will rapidly degrade. TRIM support reduces this degradation a *LOT* but doesn't entirely eliminate it. Do not buy an SSD without TRIM support or you will be reformating it every couple of months to restore performance.
You can get a 40Gb SSD in the UK for around the £60-£80 mark and with typical computer pricing £=$ - two of those in a striped RAID array should give you excellent performance


Oh and Crossfire has never required identical cards. I'm not sure that SLi still does either, However I'd suggest that a single higher spec card is a better option than two lower performance cards in SLi - You will always have the performance even on apps that don't support SLi/Crossfire and still will have the option to add another card(s) later.

Hey, no worries about sounding needy: everyone with a question here needs help and we're all here to try to help one another.

I'll try to be as brief as possible answering your questions or else my replay could go on for pages.

1. AMD vs Intel: you'll probably be able to build an AMD system for slightly less than an Intel system, but with AMD you will have to commit to supporting SLI (multiple Nvidia cards) or Crossfire (multiple AMD/ATI cards) if you choose to go with multiple video cards; where as with Intel's X58 and P55 motherboards you will be able to find motherboards that will support both and be able to switch back and forth down the line if you choose.

2. Processor speeds: this is an apples to oranges situation because AMD and Intel's processors are so completely different. The way their built, at default speeds a quad Core I5 cpu at 2.8Ghz is as fast and powerful as a Phenom II x4 at 3.4Ghz. However, AMD's motherboards will allow you to swap out the CPU down the line for a new generation as they maintain some socket compatibility from generation to generation, whereas Intel does not.

3. If you choose to go for 8gb of RAM and plan on doing any CPU overclocking, go for two 4gb sticks of RAM instead of four 2gb sticks: overclocking is far more stable when only one bank of RAM is filled instead of two banks.

4. I personally find 30 and 40gb SSDs to be useless for gaming computers. The whole point of the SSD is fast load times on your chosen applications, but a small SSD will only have room for your operating system, system utilities and one program (MS Office usually) at most. By going to a slightly larger 64gb drive, you'll be able to get all that in plus a couple games.

Unless you're considering moving to a larger monitor as well, there is very little point having two video cards in your system: the second card will either seldom ever kick in to boost performance, or it will actually slow down your performance.

I'll make a second post with an idea list of parts for you.

Here's my idea/suggestion list for you:

Case: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811119233
CPU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103858
Motherboard (for SLI): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131637
or
Motherboard (for Crossfire): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131631
CPU heatsink: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835103065
RAM: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231308
SSD: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227525
Hard Drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136534 (2TB drives are pretty expensive for anything good, stick with 1TB for now and grab another later if you find you need it)
Operating System: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16832116754
Power supply: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817139009
DVD drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827151176
Nvidia graphics card (two for SLI): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814500169
ATI/AMD graphics card (two for Crossfire): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814150447

SLI build cost: $1452.88
Crossfire build cost: $1,363.88

You could go for higher end single cards and invest in a larger monitor, but either one of these systems will be absolutely kick-@$$. When it comes to multiple graphics card support for CoH, I know that Nvidia has brought it back as of their new 260 driver set, but I'm not sure if ATI/AMD has re-established Crossfire support for CoH, but I know that they still didn't have it back in August when I switched from ATI/AMD card to Nvidia in my computer.

Thanks Gaia and steve, those helped a lot . I was planning on a single vidcard system but was just wondering about the SLI/Crossfire stuff. Gaia what form of cache do you mean? If you mean the system or windows or whatever I didn't know that could be moved lol. And what is TRIM and how do I know which models/brands have it? Cyberpower's "configurator" doesn't have details on the Kingston ones so I'll have to look them up.

If a Phenom II x4 is around i5, what is i7? I see you selected the x6 1075T, is there anything particularly bad about the 1055T? I saw the GHz was less but im not sure what those mean.

Are the 5770 and gtx260 really able to max the ultramode settings (at 1280x1024)? I thought it would take more than that, I think I had been looking at a gtx470 last time I ran through the configuration tweaking things and watching the total price move.

Probably stupid question; I see most of these range cards have 2 DVI outputs and 1 HDMI, is there such thing as an HDMI splitter if I wanted to use 2 HDMI? I use my HDTV as 1 screen and if I get a new monitor for my desk it would be using HDMI too.

10 50's To Date! Check out Titan Sentinel; it got my CoH presence synced online

1 460 or 5770 could easily max out this game at that resolution.

TRIM support is a Windows 7 function that allows the operating system to clean junk data out of a solid state drive. Without this, a solid state hard drive's speed will begin to degrade. TRIM does not work in Windows XP or Vista AFAIK.

I don't think you can split an HDMI connection, but there is no difference between DVI and HDMI in terms of image so you can go with DVI on one of your displays as long as you don't need to have it sending out audio as well. If you really need two HDMI outputs you can get an HDMI/DVI adapter. Slap that onto one of the DVI ports and you'll be able to send two HDMI cables to two different displays.

The difference between i5 and i7 for Intel CPUs is basically whether or not the CPU supports hyperthreading. Hyperthreading is a technology that allows a CPU to theoretically double the amount of threads (workloads) it can process. The actual benefit of this technology is much less than it sounds, and has practically no effect on gaming.

Intel likes to try and confuse buyers by coming up with stupid naming schemes. Here's what you need to know:

Socket 1156 CPUs are considered the "mainstream" class
i5 -does not have hyper threading
i7 -does have hyper threading

Socket 1366 CPUs are considered their high end class
i7 -all of these CPUs come clocked higher and are all called i7

I strongly recommend going for an i5-750 build. AMD CPUs, even the 6 cores, simply can not compete with Intel at this stage. When it comes to gaming, Intel blows AMD out of the water. The I5-750 is not only cheaper than the 6 core AMD previously posted, but faster where it matters, as well.

As you can see in this review: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3674/a...55t-reviewed/9 the Core i5-750, even at 2 cores and 500mhz less than the AMD, still outperforms it handily in most game benchmarks. As you can see by the Dawn of War and Dragon Age benchmark (two very CPU hungry games) the 4 core 750 crushes the 6 core AMD. To put it another way, the AMD needs 2 extra cores and 500mhz extra just to make it fair. At close to $50 more expensive than the i5, there is pretty much no value there. In the rest of the benchmarks, using heavily multi-threaded programs, the AMD matches the i5 in some tests, and in test where it outperforms the i5, it's only by a slight margin. Only programs that are specifically designed to make use of as many CPU cores as possible, does the AMD represent good value.

So unless you plan on constantly running heavily multi-threaded applications (video rendering, encoding and such), there is absolutely no reason to go with the AMD X6. Those extra cores have very little "real world" benefit. Keep in mind ALL of these benchmarks leave the i5 at it's stock speed of 2.66ghz. A little bit of overclocking and you can have that thing running at 3+ ghz. Speaking of multi-threaded applications, you might be wondering if gaming will make use of those extra cores. The answer is no.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpu...o-games-need/1

As this article points out, even the most modern games are basically maxing out their CPU use at 2 cores. This makes the extra cost premium of the AMD for gaming even more pointless. Save that money and put it towards a new monitor.

All it takes to turn the i5 into a monster that kills the AMD in every possible way is hitting the delete key when you boot up your PC, go into the bios menu, and change 1 number from 140 to 170 and you end up with your core i5 operating at 3.4ghz for free. That will further stomp the AMD into the ground. If you want more info on overclocking, feel free to ask me.

For a video card, I recommend waiting a couple of weeks. AMD is set to announce their new line-up on Oct. 12th. Their new mainstream card, the HD6770, is rumored to be faster than the nvidia GTX460 and launch at a similar price. While AMD may be lagging behind Intel in CPU power, they definitely have nvidia by the balls when it comes to video cards. Other than the GTX460 (nvidia's latest, and a true gem) this generation of AMD video cards have been just as fast, use less power, generate less heat, and cost less.

I would suspect the newest AMD cards will be available by November, but if you can't wait that long, go with the GTX 460.

So my final recommendations:

CPU: Intel Core i5-750

Mobo: Asus P7P55D Pro socket 1156

RAM: At least 4gb of DDR3 10666 rated memory. I prefer Corsair or G.Skill brand.

Video Card: Nvidia GTX460 1Gb OR wait for the Radeon 6770. Either way, you're gonna be able to totally max out this game at the resolution yous said you were playing at. You absolutely do NOT need SLI for 1280x1024 gaming. Total overkill.

Power Supply: CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W. A good PSU is important. This one has enough juice to power this system.

HDD: Whatever you need. 2Tb drives are pretty cheap these days.

SDD: If you want a solid state drive for loading Windows/games on, the Corsair C300 is the fastest one money can buy. You will -need- Windows 7 for TRIM support. I don't really see this as a worthwhile purchase, though. You'll shave a few seconds off your load times, but this thing could easily be the single most expensive item in your build, and unless you are constantly moving around huge files, it's not really a value driven purchase.

CPU Cooler: Coolermaster 212 Plus. You need the "plus" edition to fit on this motherboard. You COULD go for the Thermaltake Frio if you want better cooling and are prepared to spend a little bit more. This is only really necessary if you plan on doing lots of overclocking on your CPU though.

Case: HAF 932. The HAF 912 recommended by the poster before me is a good alternative, but if you're gonna have all this high end gear, you might as well put it in a bigger case with better cooling ability.

Finally, I would suggest getting a new monitor. If you're gonna get all this high end gear, get yourself a nice big 1920x1080 widescreen monitor and push that videocard to where it was meant to perform.

You can always take a gander at my $1375 rig link and use it as a starting point. Yes, it's currently no where near that price due to the current video card price war and the drop in memory and 1 TB hard drive prices.

If you really want a AMD CPU, then go with the faster quad core over the slower hex core. Better 4 core performance at a lower price.

Start with my $1375 rig and swap out the i5-760 for a 3.4GHz Phenom II X4 965 or a 3.5GHz Phenom X4 970. Personally $24 (15% more) for 3% better performance doesn't excite me.

Then swap out the motherboard for either one of these if all you ever plan for is a single video card or one of these if you plan to go Crossfire now or down the road.

Then double up on the memory since you want 8GB.

If you get an SSD I'm not sure what's better. Using it for the OS drive or using it for a "current games I'm playing" drive. We are talking about $3 a GB for a good performing SSD. Check reviews before buying, SSDs are evolving rapidly.

Great Replies ! HDMI=DVI quality I didn't know. I also found "mini HDMI", those are just HDMI quality that need an adapter right? How about DisplayPort/Mini DisplayPorts, are they also HDMI/DVI quality? Flipping through graphics cards I found one with 6 mini DisplayPorts on it and nothing else and was curious .

Nice call on the X6 thing, I knocked $90 off the PC total going to the X4 965 Black Edition which I didn't know was actually faster. In terms of just opening CoH, firefox, photoshop or anything how fast will that be? Like "OMG this thing is insane" or just "oh, thats faster than what I had before" (What I had before being an Intel Centrino Core 2 Duo for reference)?

My current 19" HDTV maxes at 1600x1200(I just checked). But my old LCD Monitor from like 2004 is only meant for 1024x768, so I decided this looked good on cyberpower for $200; '22" Widescreen 1920x1080 ViewSonic VG2227WM'. Can the 460 handle those resolutions in CoH at max too or will some things need to be dropped a little?

This thread has been awesome, I actually am confident in things I have selected now lol. Well now I'm off to set my res to that 1600x1200, raise the DPI so I can actually read stuff on the screen and load CoH and laugh at how pathetic my current computer is lmao. (At 1280x1024 in windowed mode I can't turn on occlusion or I crash, and environmental reflections takes me to 2fps and I can't move the mouse to get it off again easily. I play on Minimum regular settings usually for 20ish fps, but if I close EVERYTHING else on the PC I can manage like 13-15 in Recommended I recently found out)

(If my system sounds weird it's because it is lol. My laptop's screen died so I've been using monitors to continue using it. There's the old monitor on my desk next to the laptop, and then a VGA/3.5sound cables running under the bed to the VESA mounted HDTV with a wireless keyboard and mouse, so there's essentially 2 access "terminals" to the 1 computer. Since the laptop only has 1 VGA and no HDMI I have to manually switch the plugged in monitor cable when I want to go to the other screen. I just realized these desktop cards can have both at once, woot .)

10 50's To Date! Check out Titan Sentinel; it got my CoH presence synced online

I'm pretty much in total agreement with Neogumbercules and Father Xmas, except on one point.

While Intel CPUs score higher on artificial benchmarks, that's exactly what they are: artificial. Ultimately, going down the AMD route is unlikely to have any noticeable difference to you the end user than Intel. Sixty frame per second is sixty frames per second: that's what your monitor probably maxes out at, and thus that's all your system really need to be able to achieve.

Yes, Intel's CPUs do currently outperform AMD's in some very significant ways, but you have to answer this question: are you animating a movie like "Shrek" on your computer, or running complex floating point calculations like folding@home? If the answer is "no", then you don't "need" a Core I5 or Core I7 build. That route generally just costs more money than an AMD Phenom build for a level of power that 99% of mainstream users will never utilize; most people seldom ever even get to placing more than 40% load on a Phenom II X4, so what difference would an I7 make?

I'm not trying to push the OP away from Intel, and I don't have some sort of anti-Intel bias: I'm presently typing these words on a Core I7 system. But I'm just trying to add a bit of balance to the point of view that Intel somehow destroys AMD's offerings at the mainstream level and that the OP would completely regret an AMD built system: it doesn't, and he won't.

But to one other point Neo brought up that is extremely significant and that too many people don't spend enough time on: the computer case. In my suggestion list (tossed together in about 5 minutes, if you spend another 5 minutes looking, you'd probably easily be able to shave $100 off either build), I listed the Cooler Master HAF 912. I suggested it because it is extremely easy to work with and nothing else at the price point comes remotely close to its cooling capability. However some consider the HAF series to be ugly as sin (not me: my case is a HAF 922 and my next build is going in a HAF X), and you have to ask yourself if the look of the case is going to drive you crazy. Keep in mind, a case like the HAF 932 is roughly 22 inches tall, 10 inches wide and 24 inches deep: that can be an overpowering sight in your room. Consider your case options long and hard, because the last thing you want is to look at your computer two weeks you've spent over $1000 building it and saying to yourself: "good lord, that thing is ugly". If you prefer a more conservative looking case, take a look at the Cooler Master 690 II, Antec's Sonata series, Corsair's Graphite 600 or the cases from Lian Li and Silverstone.

DVI/HDMI/Display Port are all digital interfaces. DVI is video only while the other two allows audio to be multiplexed along with the video.

Display port is relatively new with Apple embracing it for their monitors. Few PC monitor manufactures have yet to hop on the DP train choosing to go HDMI for now. There appears to only be one at NewEgg with a Display Port connector.

AMD/ATI has started to use DP out on their EyeFinity 6-port video cards because they can mount 6 mini-DP connectors on a standard height card. HDMI or DVI ports are simply to large to use that many. And since there are adapter cables to convert DP to DVI or to HDMI it is appearing on more video cards as a way to add an additional output port in the space available.

steveb is right in some regards. Once you hit 60fps, everything else is gravy. He's also right that most games are GPU bound and once you hit that, it doesn't matter how fast the CPU is, frame rate isn't going to get better. However CPU performance does matter on multiple GPU rigs since the CPU isn't idling waiting on the GPU to finish rendering the frame it's working on but is feeding the 2nd GPU data to work on the frame after that.

Best example of this is at Tom's Hardware today. They compared two $2000 rigs. One with a six core Intel i7 with a pair of GTX 460s and one with a six core AMD Phenom II with a pair of GTX 480s. While a GTX 480 utterly crushes a GTX 460 in one on one performance, the higher performing Intel CPU with slower graphics was able to soundly beat the AMD rig with faster graphics, even when both CPUs are overclocked to the same 4GHz.

This wasn't a vote of confidence for six cores over four or even Intel over AMD, it's more about spending all your money on the CPU or the video cards. The Intel six core was half their budget on one rig while on the pair of GTX 480s was nearly that much on the other rig. Tom's had a number of articles talking about balance between CPU and GPU and in all of them, except for the lowest end CPUs they tried, CPU performance only significantly mattered on multiple GPU set ups.

steveb is right about SLI 460s being a great set-up. These cards scale -incredibly- well when you SLI them. It might be worth looking at getting the 768mb 460s if you're gonna do SLI, though. You'll save a lot of money and you'll get much better performance than a single GTX 480. The problem I'm thinking about, though, is that CoH ultra mode is incredibly poorly optimized. You'll be spending so much more money to max out the graphics in a game that is only difficult to max out because the graphics engine is poorly optimized. That stings a little.

For example, I can pretty much max out Crysis with my single 460 at 1680x1050, whereas CoH still causes it to chug when I crank up Ultra Mode in zones like Cap and Grandville. I'm sure you're aware that Crysis is a bajillion times prettier than CoH. Also worth keeping in mind is that the second you go into a mission map, all of those pretty ultramode graphics go away and all of your extra horsepower goes to waste.

The good news is with sli 460s you'll be able to absolutely max out every other game you might be playing.

*is still surprised no monitor snobs showed up yet to tell you to buy a $750 monitor*

The CPU speed I wasn't thinking about for CoH, just for a fast PC in general that's why I'm aiming so high. How mainstream is SLI usage? Does that get used automatically when your system recognizes you have it setup or do apps have to "look for it"? 1 Highend videocard I'm ok with, but even 2 mediocre ones is alot more expensive than 1 single and CoH is the only game I play. I'm really interested in knowing if Crossfire is supported by CoH now, 2 5770s is cheaper than 2 460s, and AMD SLI motherboards are all sata II. I would rather get the 1 videocard setup to keep the sata III and USB 3.0, even with the 2TB internal HD this will come with I still expect to be moving around/backing up to externals (like always), and it is never something I look forward to for transfer times. (My current external datadrive is starting to scare me and i've been backing up to an old one, I set it to copy a huge folder right before bed so I don't have to sit with a computer unable to do anything else it bothers me that much). I know for full 3.0 speed I'd need to start using 3.0 supported externals, but 3.0 supposedly upscales what it can from a 2.0 cable/hd and I've seen tons of reviews saying that the upscale is better than you'd expect.

As a personal preference of the scale of things I might not even like the display of the max res on the new monitor; if the 460 can handle 1280x1024 maxed easy but struggles with the 1920x1200 how high would you guess it can go before you have to adjust things? Normally I wouldn't ask such a specific question but you actually own one lol.

Would upgrading to the GTX 465 or 470 single be worthwhile? The 480 is kinda higher than I'd like to go, but the 470 1.2gb pre-superclocked version is $70 less than 2 460 768mbs and doesn't require the SLI motherboards.

(Between the SSD (and 2TB datadrive), Monitor, 8gb ram and bluray player the GTX 480 would raise the total to over $1800, I'm trying to get it to stay around $1,500ish if I could.)

If everyone's wondering how their advice has helped here is my design so far .

10 50's To Date! Check out Titan Sentinel; it got my CoH presence synced online

Ouch... Just saw you're going with Cyberpower to get it built: that makes it very pricey. Companies like Cyberpower and Alienware tend to charge a pretty hefty price to build you a computer system: generally speaking it would end up costing you anywhere from $100 to $400 more than building it yourself. The reason why most of these sites don't price each component individually is so that people don't realize that they're paying $5 to $30 more per part than through a company like Newegg or Fry's. to give you an idea of how much you're being overcharged there, I just built an identical system to yours at the NCIX website for the same cost; however, I'm in Canada where prices are on average 10 to 20% higher than American pricing, and I intentionally choose no parts that were on special and did no combo pricing: if I had, I could have easily shaved $200 off the price which would have covered the cost of a second GTX 460. With Cyberpower, you're paying probably 15% more for the build.

Now, I'm not going to be one of those guys saying "you HAVE to build a computer for yourself", but I will say that you'll probably be able to save a lot by checking out your local computer parts shops and getting an estimate from them. Many shops will let you pick out any part from what they have available, thus they're far more customizable than even Cyberpower, and then they only charge you for the parts (most places try to stay as close to Newegg in pricing that they can), and a small assembly/testing fee, usually $50 to $75. Before committing to buying from a company like Cyberpower, just check out what your local shop can do for you: supporting a local business is always a good idea and if it can save you hundreds of dollars, that's a no brainer.

For your question about the max resolution a single GTX 460 could handle maxed out with playable rates: probably 1360x768. I tried it out at 1440x900 when I first got my 460s, and before Nvidia brought back SLI support, and it struggled at that resolution to stay above 30ish in the open world, which is about what is required for smooth game play. But if you're going to get a new monitor to go with the new system, then whatever you choose for graphics should be able to support that monitor fairly well, or you should choose a monitor that will be well supported by your graphics cards.

As for "upgrading" to a GTX 465: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! The 465 actually performs worse than the 460, while sucking up way more power and producing way more heat. There may have been more poorly reviewed graphics in the last five years than the GTX 465, but off the top of my head, I can't think of one. A single GTX 470 is a better purchase than a 465, but will still struggle with CoH at resolutions of 1600x900 or higher, but everything does: as Neo pointed out, a huge part of the reason that CoH is killing everyone's systems these days is poor graphics optimization.

If you're still looking at ATI/AMD cards, you should send a PM to je_saist, who's sort of the resident ATI/AMD guru: he'll be able to tell you if Crossfire support has been re-enabled for CoH in the last few driver sets, but considering no one has come onto the forums here to announce it, I kind of doubt it.

You really built it cheaper from parts? I tested both newegg and tigerdirect last month putting a wishlist together of every single same-model parts I used from cyberpower and it was $200+ higher with the parts before I was even finished adding everything. As far as I know we don't have much to choose from for computer stores out here, when someone has a problem with a computer they make a 20min trip to Best Buy for the Geek Squad . And I'm not really comfortable assembling a computer by myself, in a work setting where I got some experience with it was one thing, but I wouldn't risk it on parts I spent over $1,000 for for myself. My thinking is it may be $200-300(?) cheaper as parts, but if I fry the motherboard or break something assembling it the whole pile of parts isn't worth anything at all lol.

10 50's To Date! Check out Titan Sentinel; it got my CoH presence synced online

CyberPower isn't as bad as it use to be, I would say about 10% above what the parts would cost on NewEgg. They also play it safe by getting you to buy a much larger power supply than you need.

More elite boutique shops like Puget Systems charge a lot more but has an excellent reputation and highly touted support. You can't really spec an inexpensive system there. Something similar to my high end rig, which at NewEgg is currently under a bit under $1200 due to sales is nearly $1700 at Puget and at CyberPower it's shy of $1300.

Building from parts means you can control all aspects of a build instead of settling on compromises from places like Dell or HP where you can get a lot of memory, or a really fast CPU but have a very limited if any choice of low end video cards, simply because they don't bother equipping most of their systems with a reasonably size power supply but install one that can guarantee to work with the system as built, with little room for upgrading. I never tell people that building your own is "cheaper".

As far as your question concerning the 460, 465, or 470, just get the 460. The 460 is actually faster than the 465, and while the 470 is marginally faster than the 460, it's not worth the extra money it costs, power it drinks, or heat it creates.

If CoH is all you play, and you intend to get a 1920x1080 monitor, a single 460 will do you perfectly fine. You may not be able to fully MAX out your graphic settings without slowing down (ambient occlusion is the killer) but, let me reiterate, that's mostly due to UM being poorly optimized. It will run great at high levels of AA, with all of the other UM and standard settings cranked up, but Ambient Occlusion will slow it down. That's really only in certain zones or when you're doing something like flying and your card is rendering the entire zone all at once or something. CoV zones tend to lag a lot more than CoH zones, but that's always been the case. Once you're in a mission and the UM graphics aren't doing anything (except I think character model reflections) you'll be pushing 150 FPS, easy. Even with 8 people and tons of power effects going off you'll be well above the 60fps mark.

I wouldn't call SLI "mainstream" but it's easy enough to get to work. As far as I understand it, all you do it plug them in and go. Drivers do the rest.

If all you intend to do is play CoH at those settings and resolutions, you can seriously cut down on your budget.

Edit: Curious about how Ambient Occlusion degrades performance, I ran around some and took note of my performance. Maybe this will help you decide. Just for reference, my computer specs:

Intel Core I5-750 operating at 3.4ghz
Nvidia GTX 460 1GB
4GB G.Skill 10666 DDR3 RAM

My settings:

1680x1050 resolution
8x Anti-Aliasing
16x Antisopteric Filtering
200% world/character
Max everything else
Max UM settings except for Ambient Occlusion
AO set to "performance" setting.

I found that setting AO to performance actually looked the best to my eyes. Anything higher than that and the world begins to look way too dark.

So I ran a mission first and then ran around outside Imperial City watching my framerate the whole time. I turned off vsync so it wouldn't limit my videocard to 60fps.

On mission map: 110-120FPS solid. Never saw it drop below 100.
Imperial City: 35-40+fps when you're in enclosed areas. 30-35 when you're out in the open and you're rendering more objects. Totally playable. Not bad for a sub $1000 computer. Zones like grandville and Cap will be a bit slower, but in the long run, is it worth it for you to spend $x hundred more dollars just to get a few more FPS out of a poorly optimized game?

Also worth pointing out is the higher resolution you are running, the less anti-aliasing you need to reduce the appearance of jaggies. At 1920x1080 you can actually get away with 4x AA and not tell the difference. It'll give you a good performance boost.

With just the 1 460 at the 1900 resolution I guess it'd be about where I am now in Praetoria/Redside; 15-20 fps(albeit 15-20 fps on performance/recommended with no other apps open and UM as off as it can get so it'd be an improvement). The way I maintain computers they last for ages, I've never had a desktop that was picked out/built for me, if I'm giving up the portability of a notebook I really want to get the absolute best out of the desktop. If I lower the 460 from the 1gb to the 768mb and put in a second one it will take it from OK to super?

I can't believe Steve made a newegg wishlist/cart with my specs cheaper than my saved PC on cyberpower, I literally copy/pasted item brand/names/modelnumbers from cyberpower to newegg and made a wishlist and the total was over $200 more for the parts version before I had everything added.

Being able to walk into a PC shop and pick everything out at reasonable prices and paying their flatrate fee to assemble it for me sounds nice but I don't know of any around here, and if I haven't heard of it I bet their stock wouldn't have the high-end stuff like this anyway.

Edit: Is using drivers from the 260 for SLI support normal/safe/easy to do? If it's something I think I'd mess up i'll look into the singles more lol

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I picked Windows 7 Pro for the XP compatibility thing, I've never touched a Windows 7 PC before though so I dont know how many programs are incompatible with 7 Home. Sata III really won't do anything at all? Why do they make it then lol? What does the Mhz of RAM cards mean? I actually don't know. Without the overclocking what is the difference between the 955 and 965? Is the 965 faster? From what I've heard here AMD is pretty slow compared to Intel, but they are way more expensive and harder to find 8gb ram accepting-intel-motherboards on cyberpower, where I kinda live now hahahhaa.

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Unless you've got some stuff that you use for work on your PC, XP mode isn't all that useful. Games won't run in the XP mode, so if there's an older game that you're trying to keep using, that won't work. But Google is your friend to find out which programs you have that won't run on 64-bit Windows 7. The biggest issue for the average consumer is having older Adobe programs (Photoshop, Acrobat) which cost them $400+ and replacing them is not a favored solution: unfortunately, many of these programs tend to also be the same programs that will not run on XP mode. To the average consumer the only reason to have Windows 7 Professional is if they are running systems with more than 16Gb of RAM (Home Premium is capped at 16), or for the enhanced networking options.

When I wrote SATA3 is not useful, I really meant that its not useful right now, and won't be for a few years to come because there's nothing that can use that sort of speed at the moment, not even solid state. All sorts of tech sites can show various benchmarks on how SATA3 vastly outperforms SATA2, but then they'll also admit that these are differences that no human being can possibly detect. By the time that SSDs replace traditional hard drives, probably another four to five years down the line, SATA3 will most likely be the standard interface being used, but it doesn't mean that the devices using it will actually utilize the full power. Since nothing can come close to using it right now, why pay a lot more for something that will never be able to fully utilize the power of the interface it's hooked up to.

The speed difference between a Phenom 955 and 965, the difference isn't huge, but can be measured in gaming performance to some degree. However, since both are Black Editions, they are both built to be easy to overclock. The difference in the stock speeds can easily be made up for with a very slight overclock to the 955, which as I stated before, could easily be done with the stock cooler for an AMD CPU: the closed loop liquid cooling in your build wouldn't even register a difference.

oh, I have a 3.5" memorycardreader on that cyberpower list but the case doesn't have a 3.5 bay, do you think cyberpower would use an adapter(if it's possible with the case) or just say there's an error in my build? I looked at the fan controllers since some have memorcard readers, but the 3.5 reader is $10 and the 1 5" bay fancontroller/memorycard reader is $38 .

Edit: so the 955 can be easily overclocked to match the 965 performance? ewwww my photoshop won't work on 64 bit?? I guess it's time for a new question lol; why should I not flip the little toggle to 32bit and keep all my apps?(what does 64bit do besides screw everything up? haha)

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