(Mario Petrinovic) wrote:

> Well, I am used to Nvidia, never used ATI before, I hope they
> look the same on screen.

I think fanboys exaggerate the differences. When I moved from Nvidia to ATI I
noticed no obvious differences. They both work. I think anal retentive types might
disagree, but this machine has my old GTX260 in it, and my games machine has a 5870.
The biggest difference between the two machine is the quality of the monitors, not
the graphics cards.

> I need at least 100 fps on three screens, I think I'll go
> for two cards (ATI 6950, or GTX 560)

I'm not sure how well iRacing deals with two cards. In general I always think you
are better going with one faster card than two slower ones. Life is so much simpler
then, because driver support is guaranteed.

> Regarding procesor. I'll go for the best, i7 2600.

Remember you want the K version of whatever processor you buy, for overclocking.
Personally I'm not convinced there's any need for the i7. The only time I'd
appreciate it is probably when editing video.

> I'll go for 2x4GB of RAM

That seems sensible. I have 12Gb in my machine because I thought it might give me
more room when editing, but in truth I have never seen more than 4.1GB of RAM being
used at any time. Fortunately RAM is very cheap now, so I don't mind the fact my
extra 8GB was a waste of money. :-)

> and 120GB SSD.

I remain unconvinced by SSDs for most use. Nice luxury item, but you can get a much
cheaper boot speed increase by reinstalling Windows regularly. :-) I have an SSD
(bought in a moment of weakness!), but I took it out of my desktop and put it in my
CULV laptop, where it made a much bigger difference to my normal use. On my desktop
machine I just don't need applications or iRacing tracks to load more quickly. They
all load quick enough already.

But obviously SSDs are nice to have. They're just not -- in my experience -- worth
the money yet.

> Right now I have 416 GB free on my, IIRC,
> 500GB disk (says 465GB in Windows), so this
> should be enough.

You might want to consider a Z68 motherboard, buy a 64Gb SSD, and use that for
caching your 500GB drive. Essentially the 64GB drive disappears and you gain a much
faster 500GB drive once caching drive had learned your patterns of data use.

Andrew McP