New Computer

[blackraven]

I just built a new computer for my son for gaming. AM2 AMD64 X2 5600 processor
Asus M2N32 590 SLI deluxe Motherboard, Mushkin Xtreme Memory, EVGA 8800 GTX video card,
Raptor 10,000rpm HD's. It should be a screamer, now I have to decide what 7.1ch speakers to get along with a sound card. He wants Windows Vista and Creative Labs does not have drivers for vista yet. Any suggestions from the computer and gaming geeks out there?

[Rock789]

nice rig,
sorry I can't help ya with vista drivers... although I am sure drivers will be out shortly...
perhaps e-mail Creative Labs about a release date on Vista drivers...

off topic... do the new games support 7.1 sound?

[Robert-The-Rambler]

nice rig,
sorry I can't help ya with vista drivers... although I am sure drivers will be out shortly...
perhaps e-mail Creative Labs about a release date on Vista drivers...

off topic... do the new games support 7.1 sound?

I think all the games that ave the X-Fi logo support 7.1 like City of Heroes. You can get all games to function in 7.1 with a Soundblaster X-Fi but it is done with CMSS that is more like matrix processing than discrete 7.1. It is sort of a compromise. I just bought Jade Empire PC and the audio channels seem less discrete than the Dolby Digital Live Xbox version. As with everything with PC Gaming it depends on the software and your hardware.

[Robert-The-Rambler]

I just built a new computer for my son for gaming. AM2 AMD64 X2 5600 processor
Asus M2N32 590 SLI deluxe Motherboard, Mushkin Xtreme Memory, EVGA 8800 GTX video card,
Raptor 10,000rpm HD's. It should be a screamer, now I have to decide what 7.1ch speakers to get along with a sound card. He wants Windows Vista and Creative Labs does not have drivers for vista yet. Any suggestions from the computer and gaming geeks out there?

Which Soundblaster card is it? They have Vista drivers available through there support section of their website for XFi and probably others, too. Just click on downloads.

http://us.creative.com/support/

[Robert-The-Rambler]

It should be a screamer, now I have to decide what 7.1ch speakers to get along with a sound card.

Are you looking for a PC type all in one system with built in amplification or a more elaborate setup with separate components like a home theater?

[emorphien]

Boy, you must love your son! I would have skipped the Raptors personally, but that's no biggie.

As far as drivers go, I have no experience with Creative for Vista, but you should know that nVidias drivers for Vista are terrible indeed. Vista 32 support is better than Vista 64 though.

[blackraven]

I'm looking for an all in one system. I think we will just use the on board 7.1 sound on the Asus motherboard till creative has good and proven vista drivers for their XFI sound cards.
I tried to talk my son into going with XP or XP64 bit till Vista has been out for a year or so to get the bugs worked out but he wants Direct X 10 and all the new games coming out built for vista.
I made a deal with my son and told him if he would make A's this semester in school that I would build him a nice Rig. He's paying for 1/2 though. The computer costs $1950.

As far as the Raptor HD's are concerned, They have a 16mb buffer and the load times are great. I have a Raptor in my rig and love it. We will be running dual raptors in raid config.

[emorphien]

Vista works great, the bugs aren't in Vista so much as the idiots at the driver companies. I've had no problems with Vista other than missing features and driver issues from nVidia.

XP64 would be a bad idea too, driver support there as I understand it still isn't that great and I doubt it will be focused on as Vista 64 is more important now. And if he wants DX10, you might as well go Vista anyway. The driver issues will eventually be sorted out, but there's no telling when.

I built my new system for working with images primarily, once I load in to RAM I don't care about the hard drives. Factoring in the OS & Office (OEM and educational pricing) it costs about the same as yours sons system too. I've used Raptors before, definitely fairly quick. I'm using an E6600, 4gb RAM, 560GB of storage (likely to increase shortly) and a 7950GT (I don't game) in a silent case. Unfortunately nVidias drivers offer no automatic fan control yet and I haven't found a manual override that works in Vista yet so the silence is shattered by the whiny fan on the vid card spinning at full speed. You're likely to run in to similar problems with Vista for a little while longer until nVidia gets their act together. From what I've read nVidia doesn't even have proper support for dual cores written in to some of their software, which there is no excuse for at this point.

[Rock789]

what ram do you guys use?
I've liked corsair, and a buddie uses geil in his rigs

[emorphien]

My preferred brands have been Corsair and Crucial. I have also used Kingston, but Mushkin is also generally quite good. My new system has Corsair XMS2, however my old desktop has 2gb of Patriot DDR400 in it which I bought for the tight timings and low price. It actually overclocks about 25mhz on the stock timings, so I'm very happy with it for "cheap" ram.

Although I generally prefer to stick with Corsair or Crucial first (then Kingston or Mushkin), the other brands are well received as well. Patriot seems to be pretty good both based on what I've read and my experience, Geil is also supposed to be pretty good.

[basite]

there should be drivers for vista, for the xi-fi cards at least...

but don't expect much driver support from creative when it comes to updates...
7.1 should be a logical decision for games and so in the pc world, personally I have these speakers for my pc:

http://www.creative.com/products/product.asp?category=4&subcategory=25&product=240

there is a bigger 7.1 version of them, the gigaworks s750 (yes I know, they are quite expensive for pc use) and they should keep him happy for quite a while...

Keep them spinning,
Bert.

[N. Abstentia]

Raptor drives are still very fast, but I also would have skipped them and went with Seagate perpendicular drives. Just as fast, also have 16mb buffers, and for the same price you get 400 gigs instead of 36.

[blackraven]

If you check www.tomshardware.com you can check and compare the speeds of just about any hard drive in different apps. The Raptors win out just about every time. This is a gaming computer so storage space is not much of a concern

As far as memory is concerned, the latency timings of the Mushkin PC6400/800 extreme memory is lower than Corsair XMS and the mushkin is much more stable at higher voltages for overclocking.

[N. Abstentia]

Corsair is the only memory I've ever used that truly junk. Be glad you got the Mushkin. Maybe all the Corsairs I had were flaky or something, and it's been a few years since I've used Corsair but that really soured me on them.

[Rock789]

I haven't had a problem with Corsair memory which I have used in my past 3 rigs, but have had Crucial, Kingston, and some other brand die on me... (the Kingston was bad out of the box...)

it'll happen with them all... just some more so than others ;)

[audio_dude]

N. Abstentia, the raptors are 150gigs now...

yes, they do beat all the drives on speed, and for a gaming rig, thats GOOD.

Although i would have gone with a Core 2 duo for the proc, the X2 5600 you chose is plenty fast.
I also applaud your choice to get the 8800GTX, DX10 is here, and you won't have to upgrade for at LEAST a year :P

[emorphien]

N. Abstentia, the raptors are 150gigs now...

yes, they do beat all the drives on speed, and for a gaming rig, thats GOOD.

Although i would have gone with a Core 2 duo for the proc, the X2 5600 you chose is plenty fast.
I also applaud your choice to get the 8800GTX, DX10 is here, and you won't have to upgrade for at LEAST a year :P
Yeah the 150gigs are fast, but too noisy for me. Besides, in games in my experience good perpendicular recording drives load almost as quickly and with enough RAM, you don't have to go to disc that often anyway.

The 8800GTX cards are great, hopefully it won't take months for the drivers to catch up to the hardware's potential.

[N. Abstentia]

Yeah the last test I saw showed the perp drives actually faster than the Raptors on many tests. The rest of the test showed the Raptors were a few ms faster, and that was on the 500 gig perp drives!

[emorphien]

the perp drives win on data density which helps keep transfer speeds high. The Raptors have lower access time.