While my Macbook Pro (2011) with its i7 and 6750M GPU is a great companion for Bootcamp & gaming, it’s time I stepped up and bought an actual PC for the first time in at least 3 years.
Battlefield 3 runs fine on my Mac but I have to turn down some settings to make it look a little extra sweet. My housemate also has a killer system, so it makes sense that I one-up him.
Looking at the various resellers, component shops and online merchants I think I’ve settled on going with a somewhat-upgraded build from overclockers, which is a component seller from the UK who do tailored bundles and builds for their customers.
I’ve been looking at the “Titan 8300i Supersaurus“. The stock machine is nice but the GPU is undercooked. The core product here is the Intel i5 2500K processor which is overclocked to 4.60GHz, which is obviously a beastly number for a processor (especially given the price). The 6870 GPU (Sapphire brand) seems to be the best GPU when considering raw power versus cost, and it’ll easily churn out Battlefield 3 or any future iterations of that engine, or the CryEngine 2.
The other major upgrade is an SSD. These can be a bit costly but using an SSD in my Mac has changed the way I use it. No more am I reluctant to restart the system after an update. The less-than-10-second boot time is so good it’s worth restarting now and then just to clear out the cobwebs, and with OS X Lion’s ability to remember what I was doing in an app before shutdown it’s all remarkably convenient. So on the PC the idea would be to run Windows and any important applications on the SSD and all of the content and “meaty stuff” would go on the bigger hard drive. For example, Steam would run on my SSD but I would use the Windows equivalent of symlinks to have it read the game files from a folder on the other drive.
I haven’t purchased it yet, but knowing Overclockers don’t do Christmas sales is quite useful as a device for temptation…
