£1500 build...thoughts?

reddev85

reddev85

reddev85

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Ok, maybe slightly over budget, but here goes. Brother is requesting a new machine built for £1500, Im going for a black and white 'minstrel' look.

20j4o01.jpg


GTX 580 - Love the look of this card, it will fit well into the colour scheme and 1.5GB of video RAM just doesnt cut it anymore at the res he plays at. Also has to be nVidia, as he uses CUDA quite a lot.

M4 256GB - Is there a better SSD around for the money?

2600K - Seems to be the CPU of choice lately, and getting a 2700K doesn't guarantee higher overclocks.

ASRock Extreme7 - Great looking board, and seems to get ace reviews as well, just dont like the colour of the other boards also.

H100 cooler - Already have one in my system and it is a good piece of kit IMO.

Corsair 500R - Lovely looking case, plenty of room, and fits the H100 rad in nicely, also plenty of clearance for high profile RAM.

16GB Corsair Vengeance - Again, mainly for the colour scheme, and the high profile heat spreaders will have plenty of room.

Bitfenix alchemy cables - In white, to finish the build off. Already have the rest of the cables.

He's recycling the PSU, OS and mechanical hard drives.

So how's that looking?
 
Yeah funnily enough I was looking at that one. There were two reasons I skipped past it.

A: No UEFI BIOS.
B: SLI only runs in x16/x8, compared with the ASRock which is capable of x16/x16, though I'm not sure how much difference that makes in real world performance. He will probably go 580 SLI in future, when the 600/700 series is released and prices come down.
 
I'm thinking possibly drop the SSD down to a 120GB, stick a 500GB barracuda@7200rpm in there aswell and use that money freed up to ramp it up to a 16GB ram kit?

It'd probably come in under the £1500 mark aswell.
 
Yeah I was thinking of a smaller SSD, trouble is, he has a habit of letting his C: get outrageously large....download, save, forget about it. Whereas I'm more of a tidy person, anything I don't need or not using gets deleted. My C: is only ~90GB

He's recycling his 1TB 7200rpm drive from his existing system, so another one isn't really required.

RAM is already at 16GB - I'm ordering 2x 8GB kits, which strangely is cheaper if you exclude the weekly offer on 1x16GB, which will have ended by the time I am ordering it.

GPU has to be nVidia, hes a CUDA/PhysX person, even though PhysX is overrated, but thats what he wants, If it was me, i'd have the 7970 any day of the week.
 
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reddev85 said:
A: No UEFI BIOS.
Click to expand...

Its a HybridEFI so still has the same functions, 3TB support etc, how often do you look at the BIOS?


reddev85 said:
B: SLI only runs in x16/x8, compared with the ASRock which is capable of x16/x16, though I'm not sure how much difference that makes in real world performance..
Click to expand...

Effectively the difference is almost zero between 8X/8X and 16X/16X

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/p67-gaming-3-way-sli-three-card-crossfire,2910.html
 
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reddev85 said:
Yeah I was thinking of a smaller SSD, trouble is, he has a habit of letting his C: get outrageously large....download, save, forget about it. Whereas I'm more of a tidy person, anything I don't need or not using gets deleted. My C: is only ~90GB

He's recycling his 1TB 7200rpm drive from his existing system, so another one isn't really required.

RAM is already at 16GB - I'm ordering 2x 8GB kits, which strangely is cheaper if you exclude the weekly offer on 1x16GB, which will have ended by the time I am ordering it.

GPU has to be nVidia, hes a CUDA/PhysX person, even though PhysX is overrated, but thats what he wants, If it was me, i'd have the 7970 any day of the week.
Click to expand...

Get a new brother. :p
 
After hearing my mate trying to SLI 480's the other day on that Asrock board i wouldn't recommend it unless you enjoy boot loops. And now hes sort of got a work around.. Its still not good as it thinks the Intel CPU is the 2nd card, which you cant disable in bios, just pick GFX slot.. And the bios hasn't seen updates since the board came out.

Ok it runs 16x 16x but really 16x gives you like 1fps more, theres nothing in it.. Just pretty numbers for e-peen sake.

But other than that its a good board! ;P
 
Can't really see the drives, they are mounted sideways and hidden in trays behind the cage mounts. Hidden even more if you decide to mount a fan on the inside of the cages. Though that drive would shave some more money off the build, and would probably be fast enough for him.

Nice review on that Gigabyte board btw stulid, just finished reading it and only just noticed it was you that done it :) Are you still using it?
 
Well, I've chucked the asrock out of the basket, replaced it with that. No DVI isn't an issue, no UEFI he can live with, and x8 SLi makes little difference. £70 saved. Thanks for the suggestion!

The only thing left to do now is to try and talk him out of his nVidia fanboyism! (if thats even a word)
 
reddev85 said:
Well, I've chucked the asrock out of the basket, replaced it with that. No DVI isn't an issue, no UEFI he can live with, and x8 SLi makes little difference. £70 saved. Thanks for the suggestion!

The only thing left to do now is to try and talk him out of his nVidia fanboyism! (if thats even a word)
Click to expand...

definitely worth talking him out of the 580, the performance boost to 7970 is definitely worth it.
 
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