Tomorrow's the big day.  My Alienware Area 51 machine is being delivered and I can finally venture back into the world of PC Gaming that I have been forced to ignore due to my current rig being a bit on the shabby side.  Anyways, I'm looking for games out there that require a lot of machine in order to play on max settings.  I want to experience the PC gaming porn that I've been missing.  Any suggestions?  So far, I'm going to be playing Rift (preordered through Steam), and Dragon Age 2 (but not until March 8th).  Any suggestions though for games to pick up? 
 
Thanks!

Oh really?  I know that Metro 2033 is being offered free by preordering a game on Steam.  I might try that.    

crysis, bulletstorm actually stutters on my gtx 460 768mb :/

Minesweeper son!

Maybe crysis warhead, arma 2 games are taxing too even though they aren't that good of a game.

Cryostasis, not exactly great looking, just poorly optimised D:
 
Anyway, it's a great game regardless.

" crysis, bulletstorm actually stutters on my gtx 460 768mb :/ "

Minecraft

1. Rome total war
2. Skirmish
3. 8-player AI-only
4. Max Army
5. Full Graphics
6. A small map with a dense town in the middle

" @ttocs: 

1. Rome total war
2. Skirmish
3. 8-player AI-only
4. Max Army
5. Full Graphics
6. A small map with a dense town in the middle

= CHAOS "

Dirt 2 looks awesome maxed out. Plus it's a solid racing game if you're looking for one.

" Dirt 2 looks awesome maxed out. Plus it's a solid racing game if you're looking for one. "

" @wolf_blitzer85 said:

" Dirt 2 looks awesome maxed out. Plus it's a solid racing game if you're looking for one. "

I actually didn't play Dirt 2 yet.  My brother said it was good, but I never got into it.  I've never played a racing game on the PC before.  How are the controls?  Do you need a racing setup (wheel, etc.) to play it correctly? "

What are the specs of the new rig? and of the old one? Just for curiosity's sake and to see how hey will compare.

" What are the specs of the new rig? and of the old one? Just for curiosity's sake and to see how hey will compare. "

" @ttocs said:

" @wolf_blitzer85 said:

" Dirt 2 looks awesome maxed out. Plus it's a solid racing game if you're looking for one. "

I actually didn't play Dirt 2 yet.  My brother said it was good, but I never got into it.  I've never played a racing game on the PC before.  How are the controls?  Do you need a racing setup (wheel, etc.) to play it correctly? "

I recommend at least a wired xbox controller. "

" @Cirdain said:

" @ttocs said:

" @wolf_blitzer85 said:

" Dirt 2 looks awesome maxed out. Plus it's a solid racing game if you're looking for one. "

I actually didn't play Dirt 2 yet.  My brother said it was good, but I never got into it.  I've never played a racing game on the PC before.  How are the controls?  Do you need a racing setup (wheel, etc.) to play it correctly? "

I recommend at least a wired xbox controller. "

Yup, this would do just fine, and actually it wouldn't be a terrible idea to have a 360 controller on hand as it makes a really nice pc controller too especially with all these console ports out there. I find there is less headache when I just play the game with a gamepad as it was developed in mind for rather than wrestle with broken proper pc controls. Not all games are like this, but like I said, it's good to have that controller on hand when you run into problems like that. "

" @Halopower67 said:

" What are the specs of the new rig? and of the old one? Just for curiosity's sake and to see how hey will compare. "

I'd like to know that too. You intrigue us by saying you've bought a massive powerhouse and then don't tell us what's under the hood. That's not very sporting now is it? "

Intel is wise to keep Hyper-Threading an integral part of its high-end processors. Our analysis shows that many applications can benefit significantly from the extra logical cores. The feature is naturally most effective in threaded apps. Software developers know where parallelism stands to benefit the performance of their titles most profoundly, and over the years, a majority have optimized their products to utilize the almost-ubiquitous ecosystem of dual-, triple-, and quad-core CPUs. Fritz, 3ds Max, Cinebench, MainConcept, and 7-Zip are but a few of the apps able to capitalize on the feature and demonstrate improved performance. Even clock speed increases can't yield these performance boosts, unless you really crank up the overclocking. In this regard, Hyper-Threading does a great job by further improving performance via augmented utilization in the workloads that need it most.
 
Unfortunately, these types of applications aren't necessarily universal on mainstream desktop PCs, and therein lies the rub. Many of the titles used in this article can't take advantage of additional parallelism. Gulftown’s six cores already provide plenty of performance, and whether Hyper-Threading is switched on or off doesn't make a ton of difference (until you start looking at power consumption, that is). Enabling Hyper-Threading clearly increases peak power. Conversely, disabling the feature helps to lower peak power.  

In the end, efficiency increases with Hyper-Threading on Intel’s quad-core Core i7-975 Extreme Edition because many applications scale well at up to eight cores (or threads). The new Core i7-980X shows little benefit from Hyper-Threading, though, and even takes a slight efficiency hit. The conclusions we drew in our initial review hold up here. This isn't a gaming processor, and it's not particularly well-suited to the desktop at all. Rather, it's a workstation processor best suited to content creation, rendering, and other parallelized workloads. If you're not doing that sort of heavy lifting, a quad-core CPU like the Core i5-750/Phenom II X4 965 or even a Hyper-Threading-enabled quad-core chip like the Core i7-930 makes for a smarter buy. 

What I understood from this article is that in the case of the Alienware PC that the OP bought his gaming performance would increase if he had opted for an i7-975 (4c/8t) instead of the i7-970 (6c/12t).

" @HitmanAgent47:  Outdated in the sense of GTX4xx previous gen cards and GTX5xx current gen cards.
 
It would be interesting in seeing how a selection of the games you play show processor utilization on ProcessExplorer as I have only been able to test my own AMD rig. 
 
I do know that software that has not been threaded such as iTunes shows no performance gain from using extra cores and that an i7-980x (6c/12t) was 0.01s slower than an i7-975 (4c/8t) in transcoding the same track. And I have been led to believe that most games are not created as Hyperthreading enabled applications.
 
This is what Tom's Hardware had to say about the performance gains of a six core CPU over a 4 core: 

Intel is wise to keep Hyper-Threading an integral part of its high-end processors. Our analysis shows that many applications can benefit significantly from the extra logical cores. The feature is naturally most effective in threaded apps. Software developers know where parallelism stands to benefit the performance of their titles most profoundly, and over the years, a majority have optimized their products to utilize the almost-ubiquitous ecosystem of dual-, triple-, and quad-core CPUs. Fritz, 3ds Max, Cinebench, MainConcept, and 7-Zip are but a few of the apps able to capitalize on the feature and demonstrate improved performance. Even clock speed increases can't yield these performance boosts, unless you really crank up the overclocking. In this regard, Hyper-Threading does a great job by further improving performance via augmented utilization in the workloads that need it most.
 
Unfortunately, these types of applications aren't necessarily universal on mainstream desktop PCs, and therein lies the rub. Many of the titles used in this article can't take advantage of additional parallelism. Gulftown’s six cores already provide plenty of performance, and whether Hyper-Threading is switched on or off doesn't make a ton of difference (until you start looking at power consumption, that is). Enabling Hyper-Threading clearly increases peak power. Conversely, disabling the feature helps to lower peak power.  

In the end, efficiency increases with Hyper-Threading on Intel’s quad-core Core i7-975 Extreme Edition because many applications scale well at up to eight cores (or threads). The new Core i7-980X shows little benefit from Hyper-Threading, though, and even takes a slight efficiency hit. The conclusions we drew in our initial review hold up here. This isn't a gaming processor, and it's not particularly well-suited to the desktop at all. Rather, it's a workstation processor best suited to content creation, rendering, and other parallelized workloads. If you're not doing that sort of heavy lifting, a quad-core CPU like the Core i5-750/Phenom II X4 965 or even a Hyper-Threading-enabled quad-core chip like the Core i7-930 makes for a smarter buy. 

What I understood from this article is that in the case of the Alienware PC that the OP bought his gaming performance would increase if he had opted for an i7-975 (4c/8t) instead of the i7-970 (6c/12t).

"

" Minesweeper son! "

I usually test out my new system by running Half-Life at 800x600.

" I usually test out my new system by running Half-Life at 800x600. "

" Oh really?  I know that Metro 2033 is being offered free by preordering a game on Steam.  I might try that.     "

" @ttocs said:

" Oh really?  I know that Metro 2033 is being offered free by preordering a game on Steam.  I might try that.     "

Thing is that Metro 2033 isn't an accurate display of what your computer can handle as it's veeery poorly optimized. "

" @MrOldboy said:

" I usually test out my new system by running Half-Life at 800x600. "

That's extreme gaming for you. What sort of frame rates are you getting? ;) "