A couple of weeks ago my computer became very unstable with random crashes in games and even sporadic blue screen errors. It’s a problem I’ve never had before, but after some testing it became apparent that my motherboard was dying. The cheap solution would be to scour the web for a simple socket 775 motherboard to replace it, but instead I took the opportunity to completely overhaul my system with brand new hardware. That meant finally upgrading to a quad core setup and inserting a powerful new video card for good measure.
This means that I’ll be covering the latest PC games with fully up-to-date hardware. It also allows me to capture gameplay footage with only a moderate hit to performance so that I can now effectively add gameplay footage to my future impressions articles and reviews. I hope to be able to add footage of each game I cover in the future to present a more complete picture of what these games play like and how they look in motion.
Read on for the full new system specifications as well as my first impressions of its performance, particularly the difference between quad core and dual core for gaming.
Specifications
My goal when assembling this system was to put something together that didn’t cost much, but could both run the latest games and record them at the same time. This meant looking for a quad core setup to get fraps running on those additional cores, but little did I know that many recent games actually do see a major boost from running on quad cores over dual cores. So after looking through countless benchmarks on reputable hardware review sites like Anandtech and Tom’s Hardware, this is the selection that came out:
- Intel Core i5 760 quad-core processor
I chose this processor because it comes equipped with the new Turbo Boost technology, which automatically overclocks cores according to demand. As a result it outperforms most Core i7 processors while carrying a lower price tag and energy consumption rate. - ASUS P7P55 LX motherboard
Chosen purely for pricing, this socket LGA1156 motherboard is about as standard as they get. The key thing to note here is that with the Core i5 / LGA1156 combination I saved well over 100 euro in comparison to a similarly powerful Core i7 / LGA1366 socket motherboard setup. - Radeon 6870 video card
This proved to be a difficult decision, but the combination of low power consumption with high performance made the Radeon 6870 stand out. It can be used on my old 550 Watt power supply, while performing similar to the Geforce 470GTX which comes in at roughly 100 Watt and 100 euro higher. What really sealed this deal was the activity AMD has shown recently in terms of driver updates. - 4GB PC10600 DDR3 memory
These were the least expensive DDR3 memory modules I could find and you really don’t need anything other than a reputable brand when it comes to this component. The LGA1156 motherboards do not support triple channel memory, so more than 4GB seems futile. A cheap upgrade to 8GB is always possible should the need arise, given how memory prices have dropped ridiculously quickly these past few months. - Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB hard disk drive
I needed storage over speed, so this high speed 7200rpm Western Digital was my disk of choice. Those fancy Solid State Disks may cut loading times in half, but I’d rather wait until the prices drop some more. You still get a lot more bang for your buck with those good old hard disk drives.
An excellent score in 3DMark Vantage
Performance
Nowadays games don’t tend to push the limits of the latest hardware, so this system is more than capable of running anything recent. The only massive performance difference I noted was in Call of Duty: Black Ops which runs perfectly smoothly and barely hits 30% processor usage. It certainly seems like that game was geared exclusively towards quad core processors. Meanwhile other recent games like Mafia 2 seem only to benefit from the superior video card and completely neglect the quad core processor. It looks like it’ll be several more years before games are truly properly optimized for quad core processors.
The more powerful hardware does let itself be known in general application performance. The computer handles multi-tasking so much better with a quad core as I can simultaneously unpack a large .zip file and watch a 1080p video without the load affecting the media playback. Similarly there is very little performance impact when letting fraps record footage while gaming, because it’s simply relegated to the unused cores.
See the screenshot included above for my 3DMark Vantage benchmark on this system, which indicates a high performance setup. It also scores a 7,3 on processing power and 7,1 for graphics in the Windows Experience Index. This is certainly more than enough to run Crysis.
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