£1500-ish spec

PinkPig

PinkPig

PinkPig

Soldato
Joined
7 Jun 2004
Posts
3,535
Hello all!

I've just put together some ideas for a new £1500-ish gaming system - haven't done this in a while, and am looking for friendly criticism, have I chosen anything entirely useless or incompatible or just any suggestions for improvements?

CP-148-AM AMD Opteron UP 170 Dual Core San Diego 2.0GHz 2MB Cache (Socket 939) - Retail (CP-148-AM) 1
£299.95 £299.95
GX-047-CO Connect3D ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB GDDR3 AVIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (3056) (GX-047-CO) 1
£304.95 £304.95
MB-129-AS Asus A8R-MVP Crossfire (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-129-AS) 1
£69.95 £69.95
CD-027-NE NEC ND4551 16x16 DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter (Beige) - OEM (CD-027-NE) 1
£29.95 £29.95
HD-018-SA Samsung SpinPoint P SP2504C 250GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-018-SA) 1
£68.95 £68.95
CA-009-TG Tagan TG580-U15 580W ATX2.01 Easycon SLi Compliant Modular Silent PSU (CA-009-TG) 1
£77.95 £77.95
CA-027-AN Antec SLK3000B Midi Tower Case - No PSU (CA-027-AN) 1
£27.50 £27.50
SP-022-LG Logitech Z-2300 THX® Certified 2.1 200 Watts Speakers - Retail (SP-022-LG) 1
£77.95 £77.95
MY-008-GS G.Skill 2GB DDR HZ PC4000 (2x1GB) CAS3 Dual Channel Kit (F1-4000USU2-2GBHZ) (MY-008-GS) 1
£124.95 £124.95
MO-029-SA Samsung SM-930BF 19" LCD Monitor - Silver/Black (MO-029-SA) 1
£209.95 £209.95
Subtotal £1,292.05
VAT £226.11
Total £1,518.16

Thanks in advance!


(Ooops! Sorted now I hope ;-))
 
Last edited:
all looks good to me now. If you want to go crossfire in the future you need to make sure you buy the master card. Dont really know how good the mobo is but asus tend to be good. Then this is my personal opinion... Id go for the seasonic psu over tagan. Case is a matter of choice.
 
Don't know that much at the mo about the crossfire boards but the DFI boards would be great for overclocking the OPTI 170!

I would go for a better choice of case, something like the silverstone or the thermaltake's are quite good.

Also i'd double check the Samsung TFT you've chosen. It's a good one but you might be able to get better. Will you be watching movies etc as well as gaming on the pc?
 
Looks like a great spec there, nothing wrong with it at all. I'd go for the following however:

speccy4js.jpg


Much of it is just personal preferance, although I'd go for the GSkill ZX, as I prefer tight timings to high speed. I'd also only bother with a 17" TFT as 19" is the same res but bigger pixels, but as I said, just my preferance. I've also included a Zalman VF700 to cool the GPU nicely.
 
PinkPig said:
Would I be better with the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ rather than the opteron? I know they're essentially the same.....
Click to expand...

Chances are the Opty will overclock a bit better as AMD use the best wafers for the Optys because they're aimed at the server market and need to be 100% for days on end. But The above spec is purely what I'd go for, I prefer a well-balanced moderately overclocked system that well optimised, hence the low latency ram over ultra high FSB models. If you're into overclocking, then by all means spend the extra on the Opteron. It's gonna be a sweet system either way. :)
 
I'm probably sharing your sentiment there, I don't mind a bit of overclocking but I tend to prefer stability over anything else. Think I might be going for something very much like that spec. with an adjustment or two.

Thanks all!
 
I do actually have a Samsung 27" HDTV that I will be using for much of the time, this monitor is intended mostly as a small screen to use while I'm at Uni and so on. I had pondered getting something expensive and very high resolution (e.g. the Dell widescreens), but have decided that the cost of keeping a system that can do them justice is too high, and the picture on a "normal" resolution monitor is just as good in the scheme of things. That's my opinion at the moment, at least.
 
A few doubts about the motherboard after reports of it breaking quickly or being generally not as good as the reviews suggest.

Since I'm not going to be using crossfire anytime soon I'm tempted by something like the DFI Lanparty Ultra-D. Requirements are that it's stable and reliable and as good an overclocker as possible. Will either of these boards (or others) be compatible (I know not officially supported) with the Opteron 170 if I go for that, and will some ugly BIOS flash be necessary? If a BIOS flash is necessary, how can I do that when I don't have a (nother) supported CPU? Sudden big confusion about the whole issue.

Any comments?
 
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