I'm going to be building/buying a high-end gamer system similar to:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883227063
Wanted to get opinions. Also, is one graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce
9800GX2 1GB) better than the performance I could get with two in SLI?
I just do budget gaming machines under $500, so take my advice w/ a
grain of salt.
You will be able to build a similar computer yourself for quite a bit
cheaper, so you'd probably be wise to build it yourself.
Vista x64 is useful since you have the 4GB of RAM, but there's alot of
older games that have problems with the 64 bit, and occassionally
older hardware still doesn't function properly with Vista. I'd
personally dual boot w/ Win XP 32x. The quad processors shouldn't have
too many problems, as long as you're ok with forcing certain games to
run on one or two cores.
As far as specs go, this seems like a pretty sweet machine. The next
upgrade to a machine like this I'd use is a non-integrated sound
card.
You'll get a boost with two cards, assuming you're not just cutting
the specs of the one card in half (I.E. using 2x 512MB cards instead
of 1x1024MB cards), but you probably already know that. Adding a
second 9800GX2 probably won't improve your beast all that much at this
point, since you'll be maxed out, but you can add a 2nd once the games
catch up and the price comes down a bit. Unless you like obscenely
high resolutions, then get one now.
