Since the beginning of my gaming career I have staunchly preferred the handheld and console scene. PC Gaming was what people who had more money than me participated in. Thats not to say I didn’t play any PC Games. I dabbled in Starcraft occasionally and played the crap out of the first three Myst games, but my primary focus was various iterations of the Game Boy and one console per generation since the PlayStation One. So finally, after graduating from college and getting a job that actually gave me the income to justify purchasing a computer that could do more than play Myst, I decided to build my first true gaming PC. Oh I almost forgot, I finally got tired of the pestering and ribbing from a certain member of the staff, *cough Blake *cough. So for my inaugural post on GamesAreEvil, I decided to write about my experiences building a Core i7 based gaming PC.
To start things off, yes I know the Core i7 is overkill. But I really wanted it and refused to build a machine without the i7 at it’s heart. For the one person who reads this article and has no clue what I am talking about, the Intel Core i7 processor is Intel’s latest in the Core series of processors and represents a minor shift in architecture design. For those of you not interested in processor design, skip to the end of this paragraph. The i7 is based on the Nehalem microarchitecture which is capable of higher performance for both single and multithreaded tasks. This architecture also has an estimated 15 – 20 % increase in performance clock-for-clock over the Penryn-based architecture of the Core2 series of processors. The i7 can only use non-ECC DDR3 Tri-Channel memory and has completely dropped the Front-Side Bus in favor of the Intel QuickPath Interconnect interface. Estimates place the performance increase of almost double that capable on the 1600 MHz FSB used in the X48 chipset. The final piece is the entire Core i7 line reimplemented Hyper-threading. Each of the four cores on the CPU is capable of executing at most two threads simultaneously, causing the OS to view the CPU as having eight cores.
So how does this all translate to real-world performance? I will get to that shortly. First we need to discuss the composition of the machine I built. Obviously for starters I used the Core i7 processor, specifically the Core i7 920. The rest of the components are as follows (with links to each part on Newegg.com):
- Intel Core i7 920 Quad-Core Processor
- EVGA X58 ATX Motherboard
- EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Graphics Card
- Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1333 SDRAM
- Corsair CMPSU-750TX Power Supply
- Western Digital Caviar 500GB SATA Hard Drive
- Samasung 22x SATA DVD Burner
- Raidmax Smilodon Extreme ATX Mid Tower Case
When choosing the individual components I set out three simple goals:
- Only purchase parts that were rated well
- Build a machine that would last me at least 3 years
- Spend less than $1200 on the machine itself
I am happy to say that I met all three of my goals. To fully utilize the 6 GB’s of Ram, I installed the 64-bit Windows 7 Beta that I had been running on my previous machine, a Dell Latitude D630 laptop. The installation was quick and painless and the first boot really opened my eyes to the performance capabilties of the machine. After installing a few applications I set out to benchmark a computer for the first time. Unfortunately the graphics card conspired to keep my score a little lower than it could have been, but I choose the one I did because of my self-imposed monetary limit.
Gauging the overall experience gaming is a little more difficult for me, simply because I have no comparison other than my laptop. So I will attempt to be fair. Overall I was pleased with my results. I am able to play Mass Effect, a favorite of several staff members, at the highest settings with no issues at my monitors native resolution, 1680 x 1050. I was also able to play Portal with all settings maxed at the same resolution. I have not had the opportunity to play the full Crysis, but I was able to run the demo on High with no Anti-Ailasing with no issues.
Overall my experience has been great and I look forward to being able to play more games on the PC. So if any of you have any suggestions for games that a former console / handhelds only gamer should try, leave me a comment. To help guide the posts, I like most games but am particulary fond of games such as Fallout 3, Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, Halo, Dead Space and Peggle.
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