A couple of questions about possible build.

[monkentage]

After reading this forum and looking at the bundles I was thinking of putting these together for playing games at 1650x1000 but I have a couple of questions.

Powercolor ATI Radeon HD 5850 "Dirt2 Edition" 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £234.99
(£199.99) £234.99
(£199.99)
Intel Core i7 920 D0 Stepping (SLBEJ) 2.66Ghz (Nehalem) (Socket LGA1366) - Retail £217.61
(£185.20) £217.61
(£185.20)
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 Intel X58 (Socket 1366) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard £209.43
(£178.24) £209.43
(£178.24)
Corsair XMS3 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 (1600MHz) Tri-Channel (TR3X6G1600C9)

1. Is it worth having an i7 over a i5?
2. Are there any cheaper motherboards that are adequate?
3. What happens if I start it up with my old hard drive with Windows etc already installed?

Thanks.

 

[Biz.Kid09]

1)Well if all you do is play games then no it is not,But if you do encoding and heavy video editing then you will see the benefits of i7
2)Well any x58 motherboard will work so you can choose the cheapest if you wish unless you want extreme OC facilities
3)Well it will load up like normal,However your best off putting a OS disc in your pc and booting from that then installing again on your hdd then you can install all the appropriate drivers otherwise your pc will have problems...

 

[BIGBC]

1. For gaming - not really. Though it does open up some extra options like upgrade paths in the future, triple channel DDR3, x16/x16 dual cards.
2. The ASUS P6T SE + P6T are good boards, Id prefer them too.
3. Running off your old HDD may work, but isnt a good idea. Its likely to get messy with files getting mixed up etc. Best to backup all your important files and reinstall Windows fresh.