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[Victoria Stecker]

The only thing you need for SLI is two cards of the same model and an SLI bridge (which comes with just about every card), and it simply snaps between the top of the two cards once they're seated.

Do you know if ATIs require that it be the same model as well? I purchased one with the intent to get a second when the price dropped a bit. It seems that rather than allowing the price to drop, manufacturers simply discontinue the model, as has now happened. I'm am a dozen different kinds of pissed, though I may be less so if it's possible for me to link cards that are similar without being identical.

Rawr.

[Seriphyn]

ATI do "Crossfire" or something, but most cards come with the necessary stuff included I think...?

Also, not sure about those GTX460s. I think they are dated with the arrival of 500 series of GeForce.

[Ken]

If you haven't already, be sure to add up the power draws. 850W feels low to me these days, especially if you're driving 2x GPUs, 2x HDs, and an i7.

Ooh, right!  Yes.  If I'm looking at the right data, the CPU and GPUs would pull 450 normally.  The HDDs I'm looking at are a high efficiency sort and the manufacturer says only ~6W operating draw for each.  But really, 850W is low these days?

Also, not sure about those GTX460s. I think they are dated with the arrival of 500 series of GeForce.

They're a year old-ish, yes, but are happily only 200USD a pop.  And they look like a transformer.

[Casiella]

I put a full 1kW power supply in both of my systems.

[Kyoko Sakoda]

850W is more than safe for that setup. Actual power use won't be more than 600W. But yes, you should always do the math.

[Lydia Tishal]

The wattage rating isn't the important stat. Look at the amperage ratings for each of the rails. The 12 volt rail is the most important. My feeling is that the 70 amps (12 V) on that supply is pushing it for an SLI config. My current card draws about 30 amps by itself. Even if you slide under the threshold, a sudden power spike to your graphics cards can cause problems for the other 12 V stuff in your system. As others have already said, I would look at a 1000 watt supply, especially one with a second 12 volt rail.

[Lyn Farel]

These are the components I'm looking at currently:

Case: Antec Twelve Hundred V3
PSU: CORSAIR CMPSU-850TX 850W
Board: GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD3R LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s
CPU: Intel Core i7-960 Bloomfield 3.2GHz
HDD: 2x Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB 5900 RPM in RAID 1
RAM: CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3
GPU: 2x MSI N460GTX CYCLONE 1GD5/OC GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) 1GB in SLI
Audio: ASUS Xonar D1 7.1 Channels 24-bit 192KHz
Net: Intel PWLA8391GT 10/ 100/ 1000Mbps PCI PRO
OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Professional SP1 64-bit

My thoughts on this :

Looks like a good config.

No need for audio cards imo, integrated ones are perfectly fine. It sonds to me very unlikely to get a difference of quality because we are running on digital systems, so either your sound is 100% good, either it is null (its binary). The quality of the sounds depends on the quality of the encoding put on the sound files themselves, and your speakers/cables ofc. I only use an external audio interface because im running on specific audio equipement (professional monitoring speakers that are self amplified and using RCA coaxial polarized cables -> this shit is totally awesome btw and less scammish than the usual audio stuff). Other than that if you are using composite red/white cables or jack cables yo uwill be perfectly fine with your motherboard. But heh, maybe Im wrong, though I don't think there is a difference here. Motherboards integrated audio stuff is actually quite good as you also have now 5.1 or 7.1 and optical audio ports.

HDD : too slow. 5900 rpm is cheapest, but I would at least recommend 7200 rpm.

850W power supply looks definitly enough for your config. Its a lot even nowadays. But if you want moar... why not.

I can't check your RAM memory, seems that your link points to the power supply. Should be good, corsair is good. Check the frequency, 1600 MHz is slowest (but still good). If you want faster RAM, go for it, it may be worth it.

[Myrhial Arkenath]

If I may, I am going to do a slight thread hijack. My birthday is upcoming in a few months, and since as usual I don't know what to ask, I've been considering maybe updating parts of my current rig. Thing is, for an IT graduate, my knowledge of hardware sucks. I've gotten the basics, understand how my hardware works, can puzzle the pieces together, but that's where I strand, basically. So, questions:

1) Should I consider replacing things already?  I bought my setup two years ago, and in the past I have just ran 4/5 years with a setup until basically I was forced to run games below medium graphics. I don't feel a direct need to play games on maximum settings, but when performance starts to suffer, especially in multiplayer environments, I get sad. I hate hardware holding my performance back.

2) How do you go about identifying what parts of your PC are the bottleneck? I understand graphics performance is mostly GPU, but CPU and disk speed can also contribute to it, right?

3) What tweaks not including overheating (that shit scares me, had a PSU burn out due to old age, no thank you melted hardware o_o) would you consider "mandatory"? I have diskeeper to keep my drive happy, kill everything that doesn't need to go on at startup, remove unused software and run CCcleaner to get rid of junk and clean the registry.

4) I am currently on Windows Vista. I hear Windows 7 is a lot more stable / user friendly. Should I consider upgrading? Any known performance gains in doing that?

5) What are good places to start educating myself on hardware? I assume following news sites is the way to go. What do people have in their daily / weekly reads for this?

6) That PhysX card which I basically got free with my rig, how much of a difference does that make? More and more games use a PhysX engine, but I won't gain performance unless the developers work with nVidia for it, right?

As last, here is a quick overview of my current rig. Worthwhile to know is probably that I ordered this from Dell as an XPS 630i, currently no modifications have been made, although they did replace my graphics card as the old one broke down within the warranty period.

Case: Dell XPS 630i case
PSU: Unknown, 750W
Board / Chipset: Dell / nVidea nForce 650i SLI
CPU: Quad Intel Core 2 Q9300 3.50GHz
HDD: Hitachi HDS721075KLA SCSI 700GB / 7200 RPM
RAM: Samsung 4x DIMM DDR2 1GB (2x 400MHz)
GPU: 2x nVidia GeForce 9800 GX2 in SLI + AGEIA PhysX 100 series PCI Express Card
Audio: Creative SB X-FI
Net: nVidia nForce Network Controller
OS: Windows Vista Home Premium Service Pack 2 32 bit

[Seriphyn]

I can't answer all your questions but W7 is definitely better than Vista. In fact, I love it, and think it's fantastic. You should definitely consider upgrading to that. I can say you might want to consider upgrading to 8GB RAM, as well as your GPU (GeForce 9 series is outdated), but I'm sure more experienced folks can put you on the right course for that. I also noticed you got yourself a Dell XPS; in future, when you consider buying a new rig altogether, I would avoid brands altogether...for example...my rig...

Intel Core i7-2600K @ 3.40ghz
ASUS P8P67 Pro
8GB RAM @ 1600mhz
2x nVidia 580GTX in SLI
Creative gaming X-Fi soundcard
Windows 7 Home Premium
1TB HDD and BD-RE

All of that cost £1911. Meanwhile, the most expensive Alienware (Area 51 ALX) costs £2399 with a processor from Oct 2009, 6GB RAM and an inferior pair of graphics card. Trying to match the above computer via Alienware's customization options put it in excess of £3000. Suffice to say, either build a computer by yourself or get a custom shop to do it \o/

[Casiella]

As much as I dislike Windows overall, Win7 >> Vista many times over.

[Andreus Ixiris]

Technically, putting gaming rigs together is one of the services in my job description, and is one of my favourite things in the entire world. I usualy only get to do it for myself, however, because most gamers know enough about PCs that they don't need to call in a technician to put together a rig.

Mine's pretty fucking pimp, though.

[Lyn Farel]

@ Myrhial :

1) Depends of your budget, whims, personnal tolerance for performance and good graphics, etc. I usually change my GPUs at least every 2 year, or even 1,5 year sometimes. Its evolving fucking fast and getting outdated very fast too. Generally you can keep your motherboard / cpu at least twice that time before it starts to get a little old. Changed mine recently, the previous ones were almost 6 year old (core 2 duo, etc).

2) For games, always GPU. GPU is primary. Then CPU. You just need a decent one to handle the most recent games : games need a lot of calculations, depending on the game, but it really becomes a limitation when your cpu is a little old. RAM memory is important too. Was running on 2Gb RAM before changing my core config recently and noticed that I was able to handle Starcraft 2 pretty good with max details with my new GPU card, but after a little time the game started to get "heavy" on loadings, overwhelmed by the limitations of my memory (in size mostly). 4Gb now is mandatory. 6Gb for confort regarding the future. 8Gb is useless (unless you run a crapload of hungry stuff at the same time), when we will come to that standard, you will probably be running on future new RAM technologies, and not the current one you will buy now. The quality/speed of the RAM is also something nice, but not mandatory (you can definitly buy the slowest, size is the most important, not speed). Though it will help in loading times and general performance, in particular. Also note that heavy super high quality textures in some games are directly linked to the RAM because basically, all the 3D assets are loaded and stocked here when playing to something.

3) Not a lot of things. Can't even think to something I use, except maybe sometimes some stuff furnished with the motherboard (motherboard utilities).

4) Vista is crappy. Seven is imo the first decent windows, quite nice actually (but still a windows). Very more stable indeed, and very less hungry in performance.

5) Dunno. I did it by starting to build my own rigs with my father when I was 14 (asking a new motherboard for christmas for example and watching/helping to insert it). Then I had the help of a friend buying and building rigs for people when I wanted to build my own new shiney one. He accompanied me to the various shops to buy the stuff, after having looked on the internet what to take and where. Then I did it regularily for myself and because I already knew the basics, I learnt it pretty fast. It is not really hard and quite fast to get used to. Though each time I want to do that, I need to recheck the new technologies and what is going on in this little world to get updated.

[Ken]

Any thoughts on using an SSD to store the OS and a traditional HDD for data?  Is it a good idea/worth it and would it be a hard thing to configure?

[Kyoko Sakoda]

Any thoughts on using an SSD to store the OS and a traditional HDD for data?  Is it a good idea/worth it and would it be a hard thing to configure?

If you want to do this, get a small SSD. Unless you're a hard drive thrashing whore like me (read: uncompressed audio/video), system software is all SSD is good for at the moment.

[Kyoko Sakoda]

1) Should I consider replacing things already?  I bought my setup two years ago, and in the past I have just ran 4/5 years with a setup until basically I was forced to run games below medium graphics. I don't feel a direct need to play games on maximum settings, but when performance starts to suffer, especially in multiplayer environments, I get sad. I hate hardware holding my performance back.

Based on your current hardware? Yap. It's probably a good time to buy a new mainboard, as the new chipsets from Intel and AMD have been released. The only thing I don't know is whether Ivy Bridge (22nm Intel) will use the same socket. I know AMD plans to use AM3+ for a while.

2) How do you go about identifying what parts of your PC are the bottleneck? I understand graphics performance is mostly GPU, but CPU and disk speed can also contribute to it, right?

Some benchmarking software will do this for you, but I'm not aware of specifics. I just look at hardware trends. For the gamer your main bottlenecks will be GPU and RAM so long as your CPU is moderately fast.

3) What tweaks not including overheating (that shit scares me, had a PSU burn out due to old age, no thank you melted hardware o_o) would you consider "mandatory"? I have diskeeper to keep my drive happy, kill everything that doesn't need to go on at startup, remove unused software and run CCcleaner to get rid of junk and clean the registry.

Disable Windows Search indexing service for performance purposes:

1) Run services.msc
2) Find the service "Windows Search"
3) Stop the service
4) Right-click to Properties and change Startup type to Disabled
5) Indexing should be disabled immediately

Disable SuperFetch memory caching for performance purposes in memory hogging applications:

1) Run services.msc
2) Find the service "SuperFetch"
3) Stop the service
4) Right-click to Properties and change Startup type to Disabled
5) On next reboot SuperFetch will be fully disabled

Manual registry tweak for SuperFetch/Prefetch

Open regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box and browse down to the following key:

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\
       Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

Find the EnablePrefetcher key on the right-hand pane, and change the value to one of these:

    * Disable Caching: 0
    * Cache Application Launching Only: 1
    * Cache Boot Files Only: 2
    * Cache Everything (default): 3

You'll have to restart your computer before this takes any effect. You could consider clearing out the \Windows\Prefetch folder after making this change to start with a fresh cache, but keep in mind that the next boot will probably be slower since Windows will have to cache everything again.

4) I am currently on Windows Vista. I hear Windows 7 is a lot more stable / user friendly. Should I consider upgrading? Any known performance gains in doing that?

W7 is more stable, more use friendly (to experienced users), and has a smaller RAM footprint. Definitely upgrade. My preferred version is Pro.

5) What are good places to start educating myself on hardware? I assume following news sites is the way to go. What do people have in their daily / weekly reads for this?

www.anandtech.com
www.theinquirer.net
www.fudzilla.com (nVidia biased)
www.semiaccurate.com (AMD biased)

6) That PhysX card which I basically got free with my rig, how much of a difference does that make? More and more games use a PhysX engine, but I won't gain performance unless the developers work with nVidia for it, right?

PhysX recently went to SSE for CPU simulation (thank god), but it is still nice to have a cheap nVidia GPU in your system. There are some hacks that can be found for getting AMD and nVidia PhysX drivers to work together. But if you're only worried about cloth simulation (Incarna), you can go with AMD no problem. The really GPU-intensive stuff includes particle effects and multi-body mesh collision.