Building a new PC, need input.

[Crichek]

I am building a new pc and I have read several threads on graphics cards and other various specs and just needed some honest input. I have read about alot of problems with certain Graphics cards and need to make sure what I need to get and if its going to work for SL or not. The specs are as follows.

Corsair Carbide Series 500r case

16gig of Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 Mhz (Installing another 16gig for a total of 32gig next month.)

Corsair Professional Series HX850w PSU

Corsair H80 High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler

Asus M5A97 Motherboard

AMD PhenomX4 965 Black Edition Deneb 3.4 Ghz Quad Core

MSI Nvidia GTX 570 Twin Frozr III (Powered Edition)

And I also have a 20+ Mbs ISP Connection

My question is, would this be a stable enough system to run SL? Because I have read so many problems about nvidia cards crashing numerous times, that they get low fps, cannot view mesh, etc. Should I stick with what I have or go with Radeon or a lower quality card? My budget of course will not allow me to purchase anything of a higher caliber than a GTX570. Thanks in advance for your time and input.

[Alazarin Mondrian]

Sounds like you could run 4 avatars / SL viewers simultaneously on that machine with no probs! In my experience the speed / power of the main CPU doesn't really matter half as much as the graphics card / GPU. I build / repair / upgrade PC's in my spare time and have found that you can get a perfectly fine SL experience using a refurbished Dell Optiplex GX280. Spec as follows:

3.2GHz Pentium-4HT [640] CPU

2GB PC2-4200 RAM

Stock Dell / Foxconn mobo [i915G chipset]

250 GB SATA-I HDD

Stock Dell 350-watt PSU

ATI Radeon 2600XT [w/256MB RAm] graphics card

 

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

Can't disagree with that, but when I upgraded hardware last year I noticed it seemed to be bottlenecking at the system I/O level ethernet and hard drive. Any time textures started to arrive, frame rate slumped. I then found that upgrading to Windows 7 fixed that, almost by magic.

I have heard there are issues with OS versions on the Mac, but if you're still on something old, an OS upgrade can pay off.

You can get some powerful graphics hardware without spending a lot of money. People will argue, but in the brand-debate it does look as though LL dropped the ball on keeping track of Open GL changes, and nVidia made this obvious, just about the time Mesh was launched. Most of that has been fixed.

It's the new lighting system, "Atmospheric Shaders", which will load down your graphics card, not Mesh. 

[Crichek]

Well the new pc will be running Windows 7 64bit Home Premium. Atm I am currently on a Toshiba Satellite M305-S4910 Laptop.

Running Windows Vista 64bit Ultimate

• Intel Core 2 Duo T6400 2.0 GHz CPU
• 4 GB PC2-6400 DDR2 SDRAM
• Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD
  
• and I'll tell ya I'm luckiny to run on low settings.
  

[Flea Yatsenko]

Hey, just so you know GTX 660 TI and GTX 670 are both coming out very soon. You would be way, way better off either grabbing whatever one of those fits in your budget or going AMD, but people don't usually like to swtich sides so I respect that. Estimated release date for those two Nvidia cards is may 10th. Don't know if you can wait that long but it would definitely be worth it.

[Crichek]

I could wait till one of those comes out, but the only problem there is my budget wont allow me to spend more money on the graphics card, And I would suspect that those cards being new and of a higher caliber than the GTX570 that the price would be higher.