There aren't any real good mom & pop stores near me. I live in the boondocks. The only alternative, if you can call it that, is the nearest Best Buy store. That's not an option. Speaking of tech support, I have a long and relatively satsified history with Dell. In the past, if you bought an XPS gaming machine, your tech support was U.S.A. They gave out a separate call number for XPS. Now that they own Alienware, I don't know if they still consider their XPS line to be special enough to warrant a U.S.A. telephone tech support line or if they pass you to India for tech support like they do with home users of the rest of their product line. I'm not Xenophobic. Tech support in India may understand computers but they ARE NOT GAMERS. That's the problem. I've not spoken to a single Indian tech support person (some are women) who even heard of Falcon 4.0 or NASCAR Racing 2003 Season or Ghost Recon. They've heard of the kind of games that are played in Japan, mostly console ports. They are useless to me. That's why when I've bought Dell in the past, I always purchased the top of the line XPS gaming machines so I could get U.S.A. based tech support if and when needed. I've always stayed away from the cheap Inspiron line. Buy one of those and you're doomed to India-based tech support.

There is a guy over on the Aces High BBS that goes by TilDeath and he has a computer shop in the Atlanta, GA area. His website is http://www.tdcomputersystems.com/ and he builds lots of custom rigs for guys who play multiple games and not just flight sims. Although he does build high end and will bend over backwards to help and support you.

He has even gone so far as to offer help to me when I was building my newest system and I did not buy anything from him other than a DVD drive that I couldn't get locally or from any of the other online retailers in time to finish the build. Great service and help.

Just my $.02.

I appreciate the tip, Reschke. But I've been burned too many times by smaller operators. I had a house built by a guy like that. Biggest mistake of my life. So when I had a bouse built again four years ago, I went bigger company, deeper pockets. I've never had trouble getting warranty work taken care of.

By the way, that website link didn't work.

Try the link this way. Not sure why the other isn't working. Just might at the very least give you an idea on some other rigs even if you don't use him.

http://tdcomputersystems.com/

Yes, that link worked. Thanks.

Out of curiosity, why?



Enjoy the GTX 2** series of AA then.

Have quite a few annoyances with my EVGA GTX 260. The bad drivers and ugly AA combined, I will be going ATI next time. Assuming the cards are priced the same at least.

DX 11 will be good because it will be future proof. If you plan on keeping the card for a few years it would be worth it.

After additional investigation, I've decided to go ATi 5870. But no PhysX with Ati without buying expensive add-on card. Sigh! Either way I go, Nvidia or Ati, I'll be missing something.

RSColonel ..."but custom built rigs is still an area where I think finding a good shop in your city or nearby is worth pure gold. If just for the fact you can walk in there and slap people around if things don't work."

Yep i agree with u there....I've used a pc tech store/LAN party business combo just 3 mi away ...they not only give me free advice, they give me free cables long after i've done business with them and when i did take my rig in they charged me half of what regular PC fix it stores have charged in the past and they're really nice people.

again, you're not going to miss much since the majority of games don't support physics acceleration. And out of the ones that DO support physics; more support Havok rather than PhysX; so you're not going to miss much (ATI=Havok, Nvidia=PhysX). And if for some reason you HAVE to have PhysX, Buy a cheap 8800GTS card which is the lowest (to my knowledge) Nvidia card that has PhysX support...it's not the end of the world

IMO physics is overrated as it stands now...I've played maybe two games that supported it and the difference is negligible for eyecandy AND performance. Maybe in the future it will be worth it; but right now it's just a ploy to get people to side with ATI or Nvidia while there's many other things that make a bigger difference

I've played GRAW1/2 with physx.

Made explosions cooler with more debris. That was it though. The debris disappeared after a few seconds anyways.

Both things are over rated. Most games won't make features that half the players won't be able to utilize. Especially when a lot of games are also on consoles.

That said, there is a special UT3 Physx only map. Cannot even find where to download it. Should give that a try.