I'm looking at saving a bit of cash, so will probably leave the IPS for now.
I have decided not to go for the Dreadnought 480 as I believe that the price of this particular card may drop soon. Also, the Dreadnought 580 is seemingly out of my price range
I'm finding it REALLY hard to lower my expectations but I fear I must!
I'm looking at the following 2 systems. The
Ultima Viper and the
Titan Aurora.
If you add Windows 7, 40GB SSD drive and the 6870 (not overclocked) the costs are:
Viper - £1220.33
Aurora - £1018.33
So the breakdown of pros and cons is:
Case:
Viper (I love the Antec 902 for looks and the cooling is better than the Aurora case)
PSU:
Aurora Corsair TX 750W vs Titan Corsair TX 650W
CPU:
Viper i7 950 3.06 GHz vs Aurora i5 750 2.8 GHz
RAM:
Viper 6GB (1600MHz) vs Aurora 4GB (1600MHz)
HDD:
Viper 1TB (7200rpm) vs Aurora 2TB (5400rpm)
The Aurora is undoubtly a better system, but as you say the gaming performance may not equate to £200 better. I do feel it's a better looking system though - thoughts?
Also, with the Viper for an extra £12.77 I could get an OVERCLOCKED 470. I know they are hotter and noisier, but aren't they great overclockers? Would this be a good comprimise?
O right ok, no worries.
Yup as you said the Aurora is a better system overall in general but when it comes down to gaming (which from what you have stated is going to be your main thing/use for the pc), there is really no difference at all between them excluding the GPUs. I am not too sure if I can post some of the review sites on this forum, so if you just type in on google probably something like i5 VS i7 for gaming, triple channel VS dual channel gaming, 6GB VS 4GB gaming and 1156 VS 1366 gaming, you will see other forums and expert reviews on what they think.
Case is down to what you like, both are good enough for cooling and probably roughly the same noise level depending on what you put the fan settings to, although obviously the 902 is better overall. I have an antec sonata with only the 1 default back fan (120mm on low) and for me my temps for the CPU cores at max are around 67 degrees, GPU 73 degrees (haven't cleaned the dust from my GPU for ages now
) and hard drives (3) are around 31 degrees, now those are the max temperatures they go to when playing games and everything is at stock.
PSU, both should do for now as obviously OCUK won't put a crap one in with those systems considering there overclocked as well, and they should both support a 580 if you did buy one in the future although you might need to drop the overclock a bit maybe with the 650W one, someone will need to confirm about that as I am not knowledgeable enough when it comes to overclocking
For the hard drives, obviously the aurora has a faster hard drive (7200rpm), but I am sure that the 2TB would do for games as apparently those new samsung ones perform really well, and you might even put your most played game on your SSD. Plus the hard drive storage would come in handy as well.
Personally if it where me I would save the money and go for the aurora with the i5 750 and if you really want to have the 902 case, you could try giving them a ring to see if they could use that case instead or even another one of your choice.
BTW the CPUs are both overclocked to 4.00GHz.
As for the GPU, in all honesty I think the 6870 would be the perfect card now that you don't want to spend as much and it really should play pretty much all games on max settings at 1920x1080 (with maybe slightly lower AA and AAA, although at 1920x1080, you don't really need to have a large amount of AA on anyway, it's more so for my type of resolution that you would need it 1280x1024)
Yup, I think the 470 is good for overclocking and the performance, but as you and I have stated, require more power, produce more heat and noise, but it would be a better card than the 6870 when it comes to performance.
Suppose what you could try and do is ring OCUK tomorrow and ask them if they would:
1. Let you have the main components from the aurora (CPU [i5 750], motherboard, RAM, cooler, optical drive)
2. To include the 470 instead of the 6870 (if you want it instead)
3. And if you do want the 470 instead then to include the 750W PSU unit instead of the 650W as the 470 is more power hungry and the rest of the system is overclocked, just to be on the safe side (but someone else or OCUK could tell you if that is really needed)
4. And choose your hard drive out of the 2 that you would prefer (if you don't need that much storage then probably get the faster one 7200RPM, if you are going to be installing the majority of games on it instead of the SSD, which is most likely considering the size of it, and 1TB would be enough for just games and the odd video/films etc.)
The i7 and triple channel 6GB RAM really would only come in handy if you do encoding and other really CPU intensive stuff.
Honestly you would see a much better/bigger difference by getting the i5 etc. and getting a better GPU, but again the 6870 really should be good enough for now.
EDIT:
Also I think the i5 1156 setup is more power efficient
I know it is when at stock clocks, but not too sure how it compares to the i7, 1366 setup when overclocked, but I am pretty sure it would still use a lot more power than the i5, 1156 setup.
, very nice saving there indeed, yup better deal than the benq that is now 
), but that is up to you if you want to have those wee extra effects, however it will also drop the FPS by a bit as well, and sometimes apparently the physx effects are not worth it at all e.g. mafia 2
