I suppose it will be, but definitely not now. Maybe in a year and a half it will have a better price/performance ratio because games will actually take advantage of hyperthreading, might even take longer than that, but definitely not now. For a primarily gaming PC at this time, the extra $100 you spend on the i7 is practically $100 down the drain, unless your investing that $100 so your ready for future PC games that will take advantage of this then I suppose that could be an option, but by then Intel will have even better hyperthreaded CPUs for the same price. It's a decision worth considering I suppose.While many games don't profit from the hyperthreading of i7 CPUs and some even perform lower with hyperthreading enabled, there are some games which can profit from it and the future there will certainly be more since better multithreading/multi-core usage is the only way to increase the performance substantially (single core performance is going up relatively slow). Sure i5s have the better price/performance ratio (I have a i5-2500k myself) but i7 can be great for games too (if you have the money).
ASRock certainly haven't been a premium brand in the past, but NOW they are the most reliable. But I do agree with you that their software is not as good as ASUS, MSI or Gigabyte boards.While the Extreme 4/6 are very good boards and have an excellent price/performance ratio, in the last 2 years, I had less problems with ASUS boards (didn't use any Gigabyte boards) and found their system software superior to ASRock. So it's a trade off.
I suppose I was misinformed, not my fault but I definitely should have checked my facts.No, TW games don't use CUDA. The pathfinding, AI, animation, ... related to the units are all calculated by the CPU (and essentially a single core) which is why the performance goes into the knees when too many units are trying to get across a bottleneck like a bridge for example. If I remember correctly, according to the benchmark comparisons I have seen, it seems that MSAA runs better on Nvidia cards and when it's enabled they usually win but without MSAA AMD is often faster.
Except for the CUDA section where you mix up a lot of stuff completely, you are mostly right but I would just be a bit more careful with your statements.
I suppose those are unavoidable software problems though, and S2 definitely went though a long period of constant patching which was a nightmare. Hopefully CA release a complete title this time.Regarding building a PC before Rome 2 is out, consider these facts....
I remember when I was playing S2 multiplayer campaign with my brother right after release, the game would screw up constantly, thinking it was his turn when it was actually mine, and neither of us could do anything. CA should just take their time on Rome 2, and not get all excited and announce the release date so early, so that it gives them more leg way to improve the games bugs. Off topic, but necessary
I know my younger brother had troubles with ARMA 2, but he just needed to update and optimise his driver settings. Not the same game, but I'm just saying software is equally as essential as hardware. But I suppose you just got unlucky.I made that mistake once - to get a decent rig for arma (a month before it's release) and it just didn't work - every other game worked on that rig like cheese - just not arma - no matter what i did/changed.
And the definition of tutorial is to pass knowledge/information from one person, to another. It's not a strict step-by-step procedure like you are implying.
EDIT: poll scores: 20 want written form, 13 want Youtube form, 8 don't care.