Video cards are likewise much more voracious today than in days past, and the current state of the art (nVidia's 280 and ATI's 4870) consume from 150 to 200 watts under full steam all by themselves.

Throw in a multi-GPU setup, a couple hard drives, optical drives, and the need for a robust and efficient power supply doesn't look like the luxury it once did. If you're in the market for a new build, you're going to want to equip yourself with enough juice to drive everything you'll have in the box, with enough room to spare to allow for future upgrades, as well as not tax your PSU to the limit.

One of the more fun-to-demonstrate facts of life about power supplies (and electronics in general): Running at the full rated power is really hard on components. It is bad for longevity and efficiency, so don't do it. Letting the magic smoke out gets expensive.

Let's say you're going to put together a QX9450-based system with a single nVidia 280 video card and a single hard disk and optical drive. Throw in the power draw for the motherboard, fans, and so forth, and you're looking at needing a minimum of 600W to operate comfortably. Power supplies are happiest and most efficient operating around 50% of their rated output. Some new models contain clever switching and internal controls that broaden the bell curve for this efficiency sweet spot dramatically. If you're looking to upgrade to SLI with your annual bonus in a couple months, you'll want another 200-300 watts worth of output, putting you up around the 1kW segment. Fortunately, there are a lot of players in the 600-1200 watt range, so you'll have plenty of options. If you're in the market, definitely do some homework to make sure you're getting a quality unit.

One other factor to consider when shopping for a new (or, if you're unlucky, replacement) power supply is the efficiency rating. Going green, or just being cost-of-operation conscious, has been made substantially simpler with the advent of the 80plus certification program. Many of the units listed by 80plus will also carry SLI/Crossfire certifications as well, so make sure to cross-check that the unit you've got your eye on meets all your needs.


Rafe Brox spends his days wielding a phone in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. When not causing friends and enemies alike to /facepalm electronically, he can be found extolling the virtues of the weird peripherals in his life, from kettlebells to the Trackman Marble. If you also share an unhealthy passion for PC hardware or know a good place he can get help for this addiction, the target coordinates are rafe.brox AT weblogsinc DOT com.

Tim Allen wasn't precisely the same flavor of hardware guy that we are, but his Tool Time mantra, "More Power!" certainly resonates with a lot of computer enthusiasts. Not only do the games we play and the applications we use require more and more computational chutzpah to perform well, but the silicon bits themselves are not shy about sucking down the wattage to do it.

If you're considering an upgrade or a new build, you're going to need to feed that beast. Onward, to the supplies of power!

EA Mythic has released the minimum system requirements for Warhammer Online, and the bar to entry, while not egregiously high, is certainly going to give folks due for an upgrade ample excuse to do so. To get your WAR on, you're going to need some decent hardware, especially to cope with that rather, shall we say, robust hard drive space they're looking to take up.

In the wake of this week's big hardware news -- nVidia's launch of the 200 series of graphics cards -- we, the hardware enthusiast community, are pushed one step closer to an approaching and annoying precipice. There is, unfortunately for those who want the best of both worlds, an impending schism between Intel and nVidia, which is liable to leave users in the unenviable position of having to make a fairly large choice or compromise.

Do you want to use the most powerful CPU soon to be available (Intel's upcoming Nehalem) or the most powerful video card implementations (nVidia's SLI)? However, if the current corporate stalemate doesn't resolve, you can have one or the other, but not both.

Let's all take a few minutes to say a few things that shouldn't be heard by polite company. I'll wait. Hell, I'll offer suggestions.

As gamers, unless you're a Minesweeper junkie with an epic Peggle jones and no further aspirations, you're going to have to have a dedicated video card in your rig to get any kind of decent graphic performance.

Wait, what?

The short answer for why that's the case is: "Math is hard; let's go shopping." However, it's not us saying that, it's the CPU.

I know what you're thinking. "BI, the central processing unit... all it does is math!" Or perhaps, "You cheap bastard, you still owe me five bucks for your share of the beer last week." You're right, of course (about the CPU, anyway...). In terms of raw computational horsepower, a modern processor is a potent customer. However, of necessity, it's also a generalist.

In order to obtain truly prodigious performance, we need to bring in a specialist. That specialist is your video card. Think of it like this -- an Olympic decathlon competitor is in phenomenally good shape, and a world-class performer in ten different events, but in any single one of those, their lunch will be summarily eaten by someone who makes that their sole pursuit.

We here at Big Download naturally assume you like free stuff. That's why we've got that enticing heap of files up there, batting its eyelashes seductively at you (or maybe I need to switch to decaf that isn't laced with wormwood). But, chances are, free (as in beer) stuff is lurking on or under your desk right this moment. No, not the cans with the five cent deposit. No, not that copy of Daikatana you forgot to take to the pawn shop, either.

Unless you're already at the bleeding edge, got exceedingly unlucky, or are highly risk-averse, there's extra performance to be had out of the components you've already got by running them faster than their rated, factory-set speed. This practice is known as overclocking, and has grown from a lunatic fringe cottage industry into big business, frequently with the tacit approval of component manufacturers, and occasionally engaged in by some brands themselves.

In a nutshell, overclocking allows you to get the performance of a more-expensive part -- CPU, video card, or RAM module -- out of a less-expensive one by the strategic application of brains, willpower, voltage, cooling, and luck.

Mass Effect deploys for the PC with a bit less hoopla than last week's medieval juggernaut. Fortunately for the folks who have been awaiting the non-console version, it looks to be a lot less onerous in terms of the hardware you'll need to climb aboard the SS Normandy.

Jay Watamaniuk, their Community Manager, laid out the salient info last month:

Minimum System Requirements

• Processor: 2.4+GHz Intel or 2.0+GHz AMD
• Memory: 1 GB (XP) / 2 GB (Vista)
• Video: nVidia 6800GT or better / ATI 1300XT or better (X1550, X1600 Pro and HD2400 are below minimum system requirements)
• Hard Drive Space: 12 GB

Recommended System Requirements

• Processor: 2.6+GHz Intel or 2.4+GHz AMD
• Memory: 2 GB
• Video: nVidia GeForce 7900 GTX or better / ATI X1800 XL series or better

It's nice to see such modest (relatively speaking) specifications -- a wider user base can jump right into playing without having to visit their parts store of choice to get on the upgrade bandwagon.

It's really too bad that some muscular purple elf is already using this as his catchphrase, because, looking at the hardware recommendations for Age of Conan, a whole lot of folks are not prepared, at least when it comes to being able to turn up the bells and whistles when they visit Hyborea, whether it's just for 250 hours or a whole lot longer.

From the pre-release notes' FAQ (question 1.10):

Required

• 3GHz Pentium IV
• 1GB RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce 5800 or ATI 9800
  

Recommended

• Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz (E6600) or better
• 2GB+ RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce 7950GX2 or better
  

Sorry, Mom, that vintage eMachine I gave you so you could check your email just ain't gonna cut it. I don't think that iMac you got to replace it is going to work, either.

On NPR this morning, there was a delicious little item talking about something that is, canonically, Big Iron. IBM has taken the wraps off of bluefire, their latest supercomputer. After its shakedown period, it's expected to be one of the 25 most powerful supercomputers in the world, capable of 76 teraflops (76 trillion floating-point operations per second).

To get there, it sports the new POWER6 microprocessor, which has a clock speed of 4.7 gigahertz. "So what?" I hear some of you saying, "Supercooled home PC systems have been topping 5GHz for a while now." The difference here is that bluefire consists of 4,064 processors, 12 TB of memory, and 150 TB of disk storage. That's certainly impressive, but not enough by itself to land bluefire here at Big Download's hardware HQ. No, what caught our attention is what sets bluefire apart from other supercompters, including the three (!) it's replacing, is that it's water-cooled. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, one of the open secrets of home-brewed system tweaking has hit the big time. IBM reports that the move to watercooling has allowed them the double bonus (which many of us already enjoy in our home boxes) of being able to run faster processors, while at the same time, saving energy to keep it running at a stable temperature. IBM says that bluefire uses 33% less energy per rack than the equipment it's going to replace.

"We're especially pleased that bluefire provides dramatically increased performance with much greater energy efficiency." -- Tom Bettge, director of operations and services for the National Center for Atmospheric Research; Computational and Information Systems Laboratory.

Behind every single one of the games we love, it lurks. The lucky ones never fall prey to it. Some can barely escape its grasp. And it changes and evolves with every new title that comes to market.

What is this modern Grue, waiting to devour the unwary or unprepared? What rough beast, its hour come 'round at last, slouches towards NewEgg to be born?

The system requirements to play your favorite title, or the hottest new game coming down the pipe.

If your PC can't deliver a decent level of performance, it's all but impossible to enjoy playing a game. Fortunately, there are several factors that have come into play to allow the vast majority of us, the gaming public, to do so. At the very beginning are the minimum and recommended system requirements published by the game developers themselves. These specifications aren't drawn up out of the blue, but are laid down by the devs in order to make sure that anyone who wants to play their game can do so with the expectation of a decent level of performance.

Here in the Big Iron room, we're going to be throwing around a lot of computer acronyms and terminology. So, for those folks who may be new to the notion of taking a screwdriver in hand to see what's inside their system, or when it's time for you to upgrade for the very first time, here's a quick list of the components we'll be making reference to and what their roles are.

CPU: Central Processing Unit. This is the processor itself, the expensive bit of silicon that performs a bunch of math very, very quickly. Intel's Pentiums, Celerons, and Xeons, along with AMD's Athlons, Durons, Semprons, and Opterons. Most of us are going to have some flavor of Pentium or Athlon (yes, even Mac users have Intel chips under the hood nowadays, though you PPC folks are a bunch of die-hards). When referring to processor speeds, we'll typically be speaking in terms of gigahertz (GHz), or billions of cycles per second.

Both Intel and AMD have, independently and somewhat confusingly, moved away from coming right out and saying how fast their CPUs are in terms of raw clock speed. Instead, each of them has come up with an arcane and obscure "performance rating system" that sort of, kind of, using a perverse combination of marketing, advanced differential calculus and a lot of handwavium, gives you a vague idea of how your new CPU would stack up to a first-generation Pentium IV. This may not, in fact, adequately express how arbitrary and confusing this practice is, and I'm going to stay well clear of that particular morass. You'll be getting clock speeds in this space for the sake of everyone's sanity.

Cores: Recently, both Intel and AMD have begun offering CPUs with more than one processor tucked into a single package. Such dual-core or quad-core (and, in some cases, triple-core) chips allow the system to do two (or three, or four) things at the same time, and more games -- and applications in general -- are beginning to take this into account with their programming -- a practice known as multi-threading or symmetric multi-processing (SMP).

RAM: Random Access Memory. This is where your system stores the information its actively working with, and is typically measured in Megabytes (MB) or Gigabytes (GB). There are two main types of RAM in most current PCs today -- DDR2 and DDR3 (DDR stands for Double Data Rate -- the practice of transferring information on both the "up" and "down" cycle of the memory clock. More detail for those who really want to investigate it is in the links).

HDD: Hard Disk Drive. Main storage, measured in Gigabytes (GB), and occasionally in Terabytes (TB). This is where everything is saved - from operating system files to games to music - everything that takes up space when it's saved.

Video Cards: Arguably, the single most important component when it comes to determining how well a PC will perform a video game in terms of frame rate (often called FPS -- frames per second -- not to be confused with the same acronym used to refer to first-person shooters). There are two major players in this arena - nVidia and ATI (which was recently purchased by CPU maker AMD). The players in this field have also been engaged in a bit of marketing and naming chicanery, but at least they're numbering their offerings sequentially, so you can be pretty confident that a 9-series card is faster than an 8-series card from the same manufacturer most of the time, for instance.

SLI / Crossfire: The respective "multiple video cards in one PC" implementations supported by nVidia and ATI.

There are a lot of variables that go into building and optimizing a gaming rig. It's our hope here at Big Iron to demystify some of what goes on under for you, and allow you to share in the hardware enthusiasm. There's a lot of pride in craftsmanship when you do build your own PC. Hop in, it's a hell of a ride.


Rafe spends his days wielding a phone in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. When not causing friends and enemies alike to /facepalm electronically, he can be found extolling the virtues of the weird peripherals in his life, from kettlebells to the Trackman Marble. If you have any hardware, performance, or upgrade-related questions you'd like to see in future editions of Big Iron, the target coordinates are rafe.brox AT weblogsinc DOT com.