Building a PC - suggestions?

[Lyra Blackthorne]

Building a PC and want to optimize for SL,,,,particularly SL photography. Would like to build for best performance/quality vs what just works, so that it is obsolete later vs sooner.

Kirsten, offered up a list of best graphics cards some time back but I could not find it.

Suggestions and warnings both appreciated.

[Ariel Vuissent]

My suggestion is to post this over in the main forums Answers moves so fast some days that your question will probably be overwhelmed very quickly; and it's more of an ongoing question, rather than one with a single, specific answer. I think it might do better over there.

[Lindal Kidd]

Any late model PC with a mid to high level graphics card should run SL all right.  To run shadows and depth of field for photography, pay attention to the graphics card.  NVIDIA cards have the best reputation for running SL well because of their strong OpenGL support.  A GTX 560 or better should do the job for you.

If you are a real graphics hot rodder, get two cards and gang them together with SLI.  If you do this, also pay closer attention to your PC's power supply and cooling system.  This isn't needed for SL, but it gives you bragging rights when other gamers come over to see your new machine.

Have enough memory.  For Windows 7, I'd want a minimum of 4GB, and preferably 8GB or more.

Consider a solid state drive as your system drive.  This doesn't help SL per se, but your computer will boot like lightning.

Have a good internet connection, and use an ethernet cable, not WiFi, to make any local network connections.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Concise and accurate. Wish I could be as brief. The only thing I'd argue with is the nVidia vs AMD/ATI...........both cards handle OpenGL quite well. However, AMD/ATI did have issues with OpenGL a couple years ago and it persisted for a very long time......they still suffer from that problem because of that (unfairly, in my opinion). And for the record, I'm and nVidia fan.

[Irene Muni]

Totally agree with Ariel. Your question is very interesting, but this Answers forum it is not the best place for a constructive dialogue.

[Nalates Urriah]

I suggest you read through How To get a Faster Second Life. I cover most of the aspects of hardware performance that affect SL frame rates.

I left out memory speed. More memory, quantity, is always better. Memory speed is another aspect of memory performance. Serious gamers that tweak their systems for competition get interested in memory speed. Of course faster is better. But, memory speed makes only an invisible difference in SL.

I recently tripled my memory speed with an upgrade. I can only the the difference in benchmark numbers not SL frame rates. I suspect most of the reason for an invisible difference is from the caching that CPU's do. Newer CPU's are even better.

As I read the update notes for the Lab's viewer I see more multi-threaded code being added. As we get more of it, multi-core CPU's will be more important. The new i5 and i7 Intel quad core CPU's are excellent choices. They provide much more performance then the older Core2 quad cores. The new hyper-threading in the i-series Intel CPU's is much better. 

However, the latest super-computers use AMD 16 core CPU's, which says something for using AMD. I think Intel is better when it comes to gaming, but if your serious about getting the best, you'll Google the latest AMD/Intel reviews.