£2400 Budget

RoEy

RoEy

RoEy

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Hi all,

Come end of Feb 09 I'm going to (roughly) have £2400 to spend on a system. I've been without a PC for 1 year now and it's killing me. The reason why it’s been so long is due to the fact I've been waiting for Nehalem. Now it's here...

I do like the look of it and I've read quite a lot about it so far but it is a massive jump in price. It would be great if any of you could give me some advice as to what you'd individually do in my position.

I'm reserving £400 of my budget for custom water cooling. I'm going to water cool cpu and gpu/s. So I have £2000 left for everything excluding case, which I already have ready (Silverstone TJ07 WB due to be powdercoated).

I've put together countless systems on paper of late but can't quite decide. I do a lot of downloading/web design CS4 and want to get into encoding but my ultimate joy is gaming.

Monitor has to be at least 24". I really hope someone can give me a bit of advice.

Thanks all,

RoEy
 
Come back at the end of feb then. New ATI cards should be out by then and I7 and DDR3 could well be reduced
 
mame said:
Come back at the end of feb then. New ATI cards should be out by then and I7 and DDR3 could well be reduced
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Well this is what I thought and I'm hoping it will be reduced. I heard a new gpu was also coming out but haven’t read anything about it. Could you enlighten me please?

Cheers,

RoEy

Edit - I've read some info now.
 
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Anyone else got anymore advice? Like would a Core 2 system be worth it instead and if so what spec?

RoEy
 
Well i have a 8600 @ 4ghz and it handles everything i throw at it, including gta4 and crysis i going to wait at least a year for core i7, when they will be cheaper and better.

If i was you i would go a e8600 or the 8500 if you want to save money. Water cool it like you plan too and get a nice overclock on it. You could use the ddr3 ram and water cooling in your core i7 system is a year or so time. With so many good high end cpus out now so cheap in price compared to the i7 cores, i'd find it hard to part with my cash for a i7 unless i had money to burn which i dont.

I really cat see how much perfromance increase i would get upgrading to a core i7. At this present time. Condsdering the motherboards and ddr3 prices and the cores them selfs are sky high at the min.

If you can wait, wait for the next gen amds to come out at least then there would be more competion and prices might drop.

But i would recomend a e8600 based on personal experiance. as for graphics u cant really go wrong with any of the ati or geforce high end offerings. I have 260 gtx in sli and would buy them again without dout execpt i'd go for the newer max cores of course.

As for monitor i would recomend the 28inch hanns-g monitor, its awesome :D
 
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Looking at the e8600 the price seems to have gone up to over 200 pounds so it be hard to justify that price when you can get a e8500 at 155 pounds.
 
You can pick a monitor, independent of the rest of the spec, if it's 24 inch then it's 1920x1200, so that eats some of the budget and gives a more realistic figure for what's left for CPU/board/graphics.

You might want to have a think about hard drives, they are a bottleneck, and people sometimes don't give them any consideration. If you wanted to go for decent solid state hard drives, or SAS then that would eat a fair chunk of your budget. If you want the best hard drive then you're looking at 500 for a 32GB Intel SSD, or £260+ for SAS, and you may need a controller card. Some i7 boards have a couple of channels for SAS already built in.
 
Thanks for the advice so far lads. I like the look of the e8600 but surely I would benefit from a q9550 as it will future proof me a bit more. The hard drives don't concern me too much as I'll just get 1 or 2 Samsung SpinPoint 1T and I'll be happy with that. I already have a WD 34gb raptor.

I just want the system to last atleast a good year so I don't have to mess around with my watercooling too much.


RoEy

Edit - Just found the e8600 £40 cheaper elsewhere...
 
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tbh, i'd just get a q6600, 4gb ram, 4870 / 260 and save yourself £1800


if you do want to spend a crap load tho, my only advice is buy it all at once, not the odd piece of kit here and there
 
The Halk said:
Have you considered the Phenom IIs that are due out soon?
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No I haven't as I prefer Intel but I'll definately keep an eye on them before I do make a decision. Even if I don't go for AMD I hope it does well then Intel prices should fall a little. I really want Core-i7 though but I have to think sensibly this time round. :)

RoEy
 
Are you planning to do some overclocking? Personally unless you are I don't think it's really worth the hassle of watercooling, you could put that towards some other computer bits. A Q9550 would possibly be a good cpu to go for, but it depends what you are planning to use it for. Gaming seems to benefit more from a faster clocked dual, but encoding and multitasking seems to benefit from the extra cores. Samsung F1s are nice and reasonably speedy, but I've heard of a lot of failures both inside and outside this forum. Maybe it was a bad batch?

Core 2s (either dual or quad) will definately last the next year or two and the quads'll probably last longer, but if you have the cash, get an i7, although waiting until the new gpus are out and seeing if the prices go down is probably a good idea.
 
Mattf121 said:
Are you planning to do some overclocking? Personally unless you are I don't think it's really worth the hassle of watercooling, you could put that towards some other computer bits. A Q9550 would possibly be a good cpu to go for, but it depends what you are planning to use it for. Gaming seems to benefit more from a faster clocked dual, but encoding and multitasking seems to benefit from the extra cores. Samsung F1s are nice and reasonably speedy, but I've heard of a lot of failures both inside and outside this forum. Maybe it was a bad batch?

Core 2s (either dual or quad) will definately last the next year or two and the quads'll probably last longer, but if you have the cash, get an i7, although waiting until the new gpus are out and seeing if the prices go down is probably a good idea.
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Hi Matt,

I definately want to get into overclocking hence the reason why I want to Water Cool but I also want to water cool because I like the fact that my cpu/gpus will run a lot cooler, it looks nicer and its quieter plus I wouldnt have bought the Silverstone tj07 if I wasnt going to. Thanks for the info about the Samsung Drives, I'll look into it. Totally agree with what you say about core 2 also. Would you get ddr2 or 3 though if I am to go Core 2.

Thanks,

RoEy
 
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Well if u plan to get a core i7 at some point I'd properly go for ddr 3 and you can reuse the ram, but that bumps the price up of course. I dont have much experiance with ddr3 so i dont know what sort of perforamce increase you get over ddr2

If you do go for the e8600 you will be able to overclock it easy to 4.5 4.6 mhz on water cooling maybe even higher with a good chip and mobo.
 
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moomoomoo said:
If you do go for the e8600 you will be able to overclock it easy to 4.5 4.6 mhz on water cooling maybe even higher with a good chip and mobo.
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Sounds good to me! Although, I still think I may be better off getting a quad, probably a q9550.

RoEy
 
This is what I would buy with your budget, I'd set the Raptors up raid0.

Edit- That should be Vista 64bit

77219789wc5.png
 
Ranger07 said:
This is what I would buy with your budget, I'd set the Raptors up raid0.

Edit- That should be Vista 64bit

77219789wc5.png
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Thanks for the info ranger. I'm still swaying towards core-i7. I love the look of the rampage 2 board. I hope that comes down by Feb. I prefer Corsair ram though, preferably 6gb Dominator 1600MHz and I've find it for £228 elsewhere. The monitor you recommended looks fantastic but has had a few bad reviews, especially for the input lag, 47ms.

Would a 700w be enough for that setup plus water-cooling? I had reserved around £180 for psu. But as people keep saying these 1k psu's are overkill.

Thanks again mate and your system sounds superb.

RoEy
 
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Chimerical said:
700W is fine, I would switch it to a Corsair or Enermax though (better makes).
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Would it be enough if I decided to add 2X 4870X2's?

I'd like it to be 100% modular if possible also, meaning I could unplug the 24pin ATX cable also. That way I could drill through my motherbord tray and slot it through instead of having to remove all the pins.

RoEy
 
RoEy said:
Would it be enough if I decided to add 2X 4870X2's?

I'd like it to be 100% modular if possible also, meaning I could unplug the 24pin ATX cable also. That way I could drill through my motherbord tray and slot it through instead of having to remove all the pins.

RoEy
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The 750W PC Power & Cooling (another good brand) PSU is labelled as being capable of supporting Quad Crossfire (Two 4870X2's) so a decent 700W unit should be fine.

100% Modular PSU's are hard to find. I've only ever seen 1 or 2 in existance (not on OcUK).
 
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