Gaming Spec £1500

Bawbagius

Bawbagius

Bawbagius

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Joined
8 Nov 2010
Posts
8
Hi Folks,

Long time lurker, first time poster. So i've finally talked myself into a new build.

It'll primarily be used for gaming and i'm looking to spend about £1500.

It has to be Intel and nVidia, personal preference that can't be rationalised :rolleyes:

I've thrown together this build. Aiming to overclock the i7 to 4GHz. I'd appreciate your thoughts :)

tsUK1.jpg
 
Scrap the SSD and buy a 2nd GTX470.

SSD's prices are too high at the moment plus the performance boost would be better from the SLI option.

Why that board too by the way?
 
Sycho said:
Scrap the SSD and buy a 2nd GTX470.
Click to expand...

No - SSDs give a tangible performance gain and are great to have. Scrap the pointless benchmarker's mobo and then SLI the 470. Or go i5 as i7 is no faster in games, drop the silly RAM, and save even more for other things (mouse/keyboard/monitor/OS?), or keep in your pocket.
 
They are good to have yes, depending on what you doing as some situations benefit more than others(game load times didn't really change much for me in most games however some were quite a fair amount better), if you want one for gaming you need 256GB at least i mean if you playing a lot of Steam games on it otherwise 60gb SSD is fine.

I agree with the above, sabertooth, 1600mhz ram, SLI gtx470s and 60gb SSD is perfect.

Just get a large SSD next year or so.
 
Cheers for the responses. No concious decision behind the mobo choice, I literally just threw this build together from parts I've read about.

If I drop the Mobo for the one Stulid posted I can get another 470 and it only brings it to £20 over budget, not an issue.

I'll be sticking with the SSD, OS + WoW + a couple games should leave me with a bit to play with.

Storage isnt an issue, I'll be pulling 2x 1TB out of my current rig. Got myself Windows 7 Pro free from MSDN and I'm content with my G15, G9 and Dell 2407WPF.
 
Your power supply, while high quality in that it's ripple, noise and voltage regulation are all quite good, IIRC, the efficiency is somewhat of a weak point and it only has about 850 watts on it's 12V rails.

Sapphire don't have much of a reputation in the PSU business, but apparently all their units are based on Enermax units, so should be high quality (as long as Sapphire have tinkered with them too much) and they all have higher efficiency. This one has more power on it's 12V rails, is more efficient and around the same price: Sapphire Pure 950W 80Plus Silver Modular.

If you want to stick to something more established, then you could get the XFX 850W Black Edition, which only adds about £10 to the price of the PSU.

Considering a higher efficiency power supply is likely to pay for itself through saved energy bills over the life of a PSU. At least according to a few articles I've been reading lately.

+1 to the Sabertooth.

SSDs don't give a tangible performance gain in terms of performance in most games, they are a few exceptions where games are disk bound, but those are mostly MMOs. Otherwise it's just booting and loading times.
 
Bawbagius said:
Cheers for the responses. No concious decision behind the mobo choice, I literally just threw this build together from parts I've read about.

If I drop the Mobo for the one Stulid posted I can get another 470 and it only brings it to £20 over budget, not an issue.

I'll be sticking with the SSD, OS + WoW + a couple games should leave me with a bit to play with.

Storage isnt an issue, I'll be pulling 2x 1TB out of my current rig. Got myself Windows 7 Pro free from MSDN and I'm content with my G15, G9 and Dell 2407WPF.
Click to expand...

best of both worlds then!!! SSD and SLI GTX470!!!!
 
Aretenon said:
Your power supply, while high quality in that it's ripple, noise and voltage regulation are all quite good, IIRC, the efficiency is somewhat of a weak point and it only has about 850 watts on it's 12V rails.

Sapphire don't have much of a reputation in the PSU business, but apparently all their units are based on Enermax units, so should be high quality (as long as Sapphire have tinkered with them too much) and they all have higher efficiency. This one has more power on it's 12V rails, is more efficient and around the same price: Sapphire Pure 950W 80Plus Silver Modular.

If you want to stick to something more established, then you could get the XFX 850W Black Edition, which only adds about £10 to the price of the PSU.

Considering a higher efficiency power supply is likely to pay for itself through saved energy bills over the life of a PSU. At least according to a few articles I've been reading lately.

+1 to the Sabertooth.

SSDs don't give a tangible performance gain in terms of performance in most games, they are a few exceptions where games are disk bound, but those are mostly MMOs. Otherwise it's just booting and loading times.
Click to expand...

The PSU is always a bone of contention for me, my knowledge falls down and I worry about everything getting enough power.

Will XFX 850W Black Edition be able to cope with 2x 470 in an i7 setup?
 
I would stick to an Antec TruePower personally as I own one. However you won't need 1200W, I think about 850W to 1000W should be fine. Antec PSUs are made by Seasonic whose quality are known to be excellent.

Btw... I think a single GTX 470 requires 300W on load, so total 600W for SLI, factor in your extra hard drives, drives, pci-e cards etc... I would leave some headroom.
 
The XFX is also made by Seasonic, so if we are using OEM as a measure of quality, then it's hard to beat.

I haven't checked figures for GTX 470 SLI setups for a while, but last time I did I came to the conclusion that a 750W PSU could do it, with a nice safety margin. If you're going to go crazy overclocking then I would up my recommendation to a good 850W PSU.
 
A few things, that maximum is probably something that most people would see their system rise to only when stress testing, which is not at all typical. Second that is the power consumption of the whole system, including an overclocked i7-920 (to 4GhZ).
I believe the i7-920/30 and 950 all have the same TDP, so have similar power consumption, even when overclocked I think it would be fair to say. So that 541 will probably be similar to the maximum that you yourself could draw from your own system.

And lastly usually these tests disable any power saving functions.
 
Intel Core i7 950 3.06GHz (Bloomfield) (Socket LGA1366) - Retail

2x Gainward GeForce GTX 470 "GOOD Edition" 1280MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card with MAFIA 2

OCZ Vertex 2E 120GB 2.5" SATA-II Solid State Hard Drive (OCZSSD2-2VTXE120G)

Corsair Dominator GT 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-16000C8 2000MHz Triple Channel Kit (CMT6GX3M3A2000C8)

Asus X58 Sabertooth TUF Intel X58 (Socket 1366) DDR3 Motherboard

Antec 1200 Twelve Hundred Ultimate Gaming Case - Black

XFX 850W Black Edition Modular Power Supply

LG BH10LS30 10x BluRay-RW / 16 x DVD±RW Drive - Black (OEM)

Corsair H50-1 High-Performance CPU Watercooler (Socket LGA775/1156/1366/AM2/AM3)

Stuck with the RAM, seemed like a good price. Will post some photos when built :)
 
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