Good day.
If you could build the ultimate PC...for gaming ect...how would you build it(what are your proposed specs)...and let us say you had no financial restriction? I'm in the process of upgrading my computer, so all ideas please?

Thanks in advance!

quad core processor running @ 4.0 GHz (intel builds them specifically for gaming)

2Gb SLI graphics card (2 running @ 1Gb each) i think nvidia's got some of those...

8Gb RAM

blu-ray rom

windows XP (Vista is too crappy for gaming)

4Tb hard drive (so you can store as many games as you want)

bluetooth wireless adapter, to increase your gaming experience...

and loads of money to buy all of that...

The new iMac looks real cute.

Macs are overpriced...
They look nice from a distance but up close you see the cheap plastic, the poor workmanship, etc.
The same spec hardware (and in many cases the same exact hardware) in a standard case running FreeBSD (on which MacOSX is based) costs you maybe a quarter of what Apple charges for it...

How well are gaming engines taking advantage of multiple cores these days? I know writing an engine to do that is a pain...

i don't know, but, the higher the number of cores, the higher the performance...

try playing Crysis in a computer with the specs i wrote... it must be heaven!!!

Ah, the typical effect of good marketing (remember the P4 and "higher clock rate = better performance"?). If you have a single-threaded game engine (as most were, at least up until a couple years ago), multiple cores are a waste of silicon. You'd do better with a single 6GHz core than a quad-2.0GHz core (assuming equal work per clock tick). However, when you're running several apps, or multi-threaded apps (as many programs are moving to), the multiple cores give you a greater advantage at lower clock speeds.

Unless software is specifically written to take advantage of multicore processors it won't do so to any great degree.
So for most games today the only advantage you'll see is that Windows background processes will get shifted to one core and the game to another.
That may or may not make a huge difference depending on how you use the machin (what's running on it) and how CPU hungry the game is.

Few games (but getting more) are optimised for multicore systems at this stage, and most that are don't make optimal use of more than 2 cores.

Can XP handle 8 Gb RAM?

I haven't looked at the specs, but I have at least heard (I can't comment on the reliability of the source) that it can't handle more than 2Gb.

Edit: Sorry make that 4, but effectively only about 3.5.

XP 64bit can handle up to 64 GB of ram pretty efficiently.


On what type of system I want...
Just ask Dani what her computer is. I'll take that.