Join Mark on his quest for eye candy as he delves into the world of PC building.
Not so long ago, I sat down to play Battlefield 3 for the first time. I was nervous. After all the hype, the anticipation, the promise that this was to be one of the most ambitious and beautiful shooters of all time, it couldn't possibly live up to the hype. I was right. As the game opened up before me, the truth became clear. The teaser trailers I had once coveted were a lie--at least for me, a humble console gamer. As stunning as trailers like the one below were, they all featured footage from the PC version of the game. The Xbox 360 version in front of me was a poor imitation, rendered with all the elegance of a ham-fisted crayon sketch. I knew what I had to do. Something that I had said to myself I would never do again: build a kick-ass gaming PC.
Sure, it looks awesome, but this footage is all PC.
The Xbox 360 version in front of me was a poor imitation, rendered with all the elegance of a ham-fisted crayon sketch.
It has been a long time since I built my own rig. I stopped after my Counter Strike addiction was getting out of hand--that and I'd just started university, where money wasn't exactly easy to come by. Though I did dabble a little last year when I worked on the Greatest Gaming Rig, it--while awesome--was an exercise in excess, not practicality. This thing had to be practical, and above all, it would have to run Battlefield 3 on at least high settings, maybe even ultra. Anything else, and I might as well just go back to my crayon sketch. Time to delve into the murky world of processors.
The last time I built a rig for myself, AMD's Athlon 64 was the David to Intel's Pentium 4 Goliath, offering better performance with less power consumption, less cash, and the knowledge that you were helping out the little guy. My, how things have changed. Intel's latest Sandy Bridge chips perform consistently better than AMD's Phenom range. Hell, they best even the latest 8-core AMD Bulldozer chips in all but the most multi-threaded of applications. With longevity in mind, I didn't want to chump out on the chip, so I settled on Intel's brand-new Core i7 2700K. It's quad core, it features hyper-threading (allowing each of those cores to execute two threads at once, effectively turning it into a pseudo 8-core chip), and it runs at a speedy 3.5GHz. It's also multiplier unlocked, which means it's built for overclocking--great for letting me eke out a few extra frames per second from Battlefield.
With the processor in hand, it was time to give it a home--a simple task, you might think. Unfortunately, choosing a motherboard is about as fun as being beaten with a brick at Celine Dion concert, and just as confusing. As I soon discovered, there are hundreds upon hundreds of motherboards on the market, all with meaningless product names like GA-Z68XP-UD3-iSSD and Z68MA-ED55-B3, with little to no explanation about what the product does. There are multiple chipsets to choose from too: H61, H67, P67, Q67, Z68. The difference? A mystery. At least until I underwent a research mission the likes of which NASA would have proud of. It turned out that Z68 is the current king of chipets. It's the latest from Intel that's designed for high performance computers. It has a long list of incomprehensible features, but one in particular caught my eye: Lucid Logix, which switches between the integrated Intel GPU and whatever discrete GPU is installed, depending on the task--a power-saving measure that appealed to me.
Not a pleasant shopping experience.
Choosing a motherboard is about as fun as being beaten with a brick at Celine Dion concert, and just as confusing.
But even as I settled upon a chipset, the motherboard market kept trying to make my life as difficult as possible. At first I thought about going with one of Gigabyte's well-reviewed Z68 boards, but then I saw the above. There are no fewer than 22 different types to choose from on Gigabyte's website, with no easy way of telling what on earth the difference is between them. Clearly, they weren't interested in selling to the average Joe. While no motherboard company I came across offered clear, simple explanations of its products, ASRock came close. They too have several motherboards on offer, but the model names aren't completely absurd, and there's some explanation as to the differences between each model. I settled on the Extreme 4 Gen3. It has all the features of the Z68 chipset (some boards do not), SATA 3, USB 3, and Firewire, and it even supports Intel's next-generation Ivy Bridge processors and PCI Express 3, meaning that if I fancy an upgrade next year, I can just drop a new chip in. There are also enough PCI Express slots to run a dual, or triple, SLI setup should I ever have way too much money to burn. It even looks damn sexy with its all-black PCB and gold plated capacitors.
Is it wrong to find a motherboard sexy?
