New £1300 S/B Gaming Spec.

viewaskevv

viewaskevv

viewaskevv

Associate
Joined
18 Nov 2010
Posts
11
Ok guys, so after months of waiting for Sandy bridge's arrival, putting off upgrading my old ageing Core 2 Duo/8800GT machine and trawling through the myriad of information available on this and other forums, its time to build a new rig that will last me a while. D-Day is around February the 27th as thats when my work slip a nice bonus into my bank account. Im giving myself £1300 to work with, but I can be moved a little either side of that regarding price. Hopefully some prices will drop in the next month or so but im not expecting much. Also I'm assuming theres nothing major coming out between now and the end of February that will make me change any of my decisions.

Im selling the entirety of my old machine to a friend so I have no parts to transfer over, allready bought the mouse (Mionix Naos 5200) and monitor (BENQ G242OHDBL) over Christmas. Could use some help choosing a decent gaming keyboard though.

Heres the spec.

deathstar2000.png


Reasons for choosing such are as follows.

GPU: Figure I can get near enough to 580 performance with an overclock and save some £'s

Motherboard: Love the specs, love the look, used Gigabyte before and no problems. I will also be overclocking both the CPU and GPU so I figured this was the best choice?

Case: Used an Antec p182 before, I'm personally big on aesthetics and cant abide cases with a million bells and whistles on them. Simple and clean for me. Plus I plan to upgrade in the future so I would like a case thats easy to work in and will last me a few years, this seems like the one for me. I know theres the 650D coming out in April but I cant wait that long.

CPU: Its all anyones been talking about for the last 6 months and the reviews make it seem like the next coming of Jesus...

RAM: Good brand, good speed (I think). Not 100% sure on this so may need some advice. I know S/B is dual channel though so thats why I picked it.

PSU: Modular and as above, good brand and I think will be enough to power the machine, could move up a few 100 Watts though if needed.

Cooler: First time I've used water-cooling but I would like to see its benefits personally, and if I'm going to have a case with a side window I don't want a skyscraper of a CPU heatsink obstructing everything.

HDD: Seems ok to me, good reviews and such. I will be adding an SSD for bootup and a few games at a later date but did not consider it essential right now.

So, there it is guys, constructive criticism and any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
 
I would save some money and get the Coolermaster CM690-II Lite Dominator Case & GX 750W Power Supply, would save you a fair bit and you could then add a SSD Hard Drive, that would make a massive difference to the overall performance.

I ordered that case last week and the quality is outstanding.

Also do you really need 8GB Memory for gaming? 4GB will be fine.
 
I'm assuming the chief use of this PC is going to be gaming, from what you've said in your post. With that in mind...

-What's your monitor's resolution? Are you planning on using 3D or multiple monitors? If not, and your resolution is 1920x1200 or below, an AMD 6870 should be more than you need for a lot less money. Of course, if you're going higher than that, a 6950 will flash to a 6970 and then overclock even further, so there's something to consider for a serious power trip.
-Corsair XMS3 2x2GB RAM will be identical in performance to your choice for gaming, and at only £40 you've saved yourself £90.
-The case, I'm not too big on cases but I'm sure you can find a suitable alternative for a lot less than £230. Spend it if you want to, I'm just saying it's a little dear for a part that has little to no effect on performance.
-CPU: Good choice.
-Cooler: again, solid option
-HDD: I'd usually recommend the Spinpoint F3 1TB, it's cheap and very fast. I'd really recommend a good SSD as well, if you can fit it in budget.
-Motherboard: you can afford to drop down to spending as little as £100-£150 on your motherboard with no worry of losing overclocking potential.
-PSU: good choice. Possibly a little over what you need, rather than not being enough.
 
Save yourself a shed load by getting a much cheaper motherboard and put an SSD in there, in my opinion building a brand new PC these days without an SSD is nuts, it's the biggest performance increase you'll ever see from a single component!

No ones having any problems pushing those chips to there limits on cheaper motherboards, i can't help but think you'd be wasting a fair bit of money there. Also would you not prefer a board using the new style UEFI bios?

i agree with having 8GBs of ram, i've had 8GB for the past 15months and it definitely helps in the newest games and will be a good asset to have in the future, windows 7 makes good use of unused memory too.

Personally i wouldn't blow £80 on a cooler but each to their own
 
Last edited:
Ok, I can be swayed on the Motherboard, I did kind of think it was a bit extreme, im thinking the Asus P8P67 PRO? Also I did want to stick with 8G's of RAM, I personally feel 4G's is coming up a little short these days.

Monitors native is 1920x1200 but I did plan on buying a new one during the next year, so I'll stick with the 570. I only bought this one as my old Samsung gave up the ghost.
 
Only just noticed, are you sure you really want to spend £230 on a case? Justify that in your mind for a moment before you order because i can't help but think that's an extreme amount simply for a case

Fair enough if you justify it for yourself, personally though i made the :eek: face when i noticed :p
 
Hahah, I've just been looking over everything and made a few changes, completely forgot I need to buy Speakers and a Keyboard so I added them on and changed the case. Heart ruled my head on the 800D...

Opinions on the change?

deathstar2000.png
 
Last edited:
That's a bit more like it, not sure of the differences between the graphics cards but the zotac 570 appears to have a longer warranty than the others and be slightly cheaper? might be worth going for that one.
 
King Damager said:
I'd probably get the Antec rather than the Corsair

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-117-AN

Purely because of price basically! :)

kd
Click to expand...

+1 for this. The Antec is a top psu, made by Seasonic and I believe it comes with a 7 year warranty.

Also, I would definitely go for a 6950 and flash it to a 6970. The 570 will still perform slightly better, but is 2-5% more fps worth an £85 premium?

If you're sure you want 8gb of memory, go for this GeIL kit. Memory speed shows next to no performance difference with Sandy Bridge, and Geil have always had a good rep.
 
I would not recommend going for the Corsair 600T...for such a high price case, its cooling capability is only average at best according to the review by bit-tech. Also not to mention it doesn't have a good mount location for the Corsair H70's radiator.

I would say go for a Coolermaster 690II (and add a windowed side panel if prefered) and spend the extra money on adding an army of quiet but decent CFM fans.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom