advice needed

have you looked at the 3d systems nvidia offer? the cards and 120hz monitors?

I have a benq monitor from ocuk, wish i'd saved up a bit more and bought a 3d capable one...
 
To be honest, unless you plan on doing some computationally intensive work other than gaming - moving to an i7 rig will not give you much of a performance boost at all. If you feel you do want a new start with a brand new i7 system - that is fair enough, but so long as you know that for gaming it is not required.

Right now you can pick up a Core 2 Quad Q9550 for around £160 second hand. Add this to your 780i motherboard and 6GB DDR2 RAM and for games you will be absolutely flying - do a bit of overclocking and get your framerate up a bit further in some games. Then the only thing holding you back in games is the 8800GTX graphics card - swap it for a 5850 and at 1920x1080 resolution there will be nothing modern you can't play perfectly. The other bonus of the 5850 is that it overclocks well, isn't a bad price and draws less power than the 8800GTX - so can be used with your current Zalman power supply.

All-in the cost of the upgrade suggested above will be around £400.

An SSD will not improve gaming performance (other than loading times) but it will make windows use feel much snappier as the primary disk has instantaneous response times and can do random reads and writes much faster than before. If you have the budget,then an excellent one like the Vertex 2 is worthwhile if you spend a lot of time in windows and loading things/moving files from the primary drive - also your boot time would be significantly faster.
 
I'd have to agree with Andi here, no point in spending more than you need to, you can make your already decent rig into a great one without having to spend a load.
 
cmndr_andi said:
To be honest, unless you plan on doing some computationally intensive work other than gaming - moving to an i7 rig will not give you much of a performance boost at all. If you feel you do want a new start with a brand new i7 system - that is fair enough, but so long as you know that for gaming it is not required.

Right now you can pick up a Core 2 Quad Q9550 for around £160 second hand. Add this to your 780i motherboard and 6GB DDR2 RAM and for games you will be absolutely flying - do a bit of overclocking and get your framerate up a bit further in some games. Then the only thing holding you back in games is the 8800GTX graphics card - swap it for a 5850 and at 1920x1080 resolution there will be nothing modern you can't play perfectly. The other bonus of the 5850 is that it overclocks well, isn't a bad price and draws less power than the 8800GTX - so can be used with your current Zalman power supply.

All-in the cost of the upgrade suggested above will be around £400.

An SSD will not improve gaming performance (other than loading times) but it will make windows use feel much snappier as the primary disk has instantaneous response times and can do random reads and writes much faster than before. If you have the budget,then an excellent one like the Vertex 2 is worthwhile if you spend a lot of time in windows and loading things/moving files from the primary drive - also your boot time would be significantly faster.
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hi i fancy a new start and thought i would choose an i7 for future proofing, i like the sound of an ssd for windows use and speed
 
How does this look?

i71328.png



The case is only a suggestion, I suggest you hunt around and find something you like the look of, perhaps another Lian Li.

I included a 5850 as it will happily run with your existing PSU and is very fast, also it fives you the opportunity to buy a second one in the future and run them in CrossfireX when you feel the performance of one card is not enough. Though adding a second card would require a new PSU (as would buying a 5970 off the bat).

I included a megahalems cooler as it is an excellent air cooler for the i7 and you can use your existing scythe fans with it. The fan controller will allow you to tune the speed of the fans yourself.
 
cmndr_andi said:
How does this look?

i71328.png



The case is only a suggestion, I suggest you hunt around and find something you like the look of, perhaps another Lian Li.

I included a 5850 as it will happily run with your existing PSU and is very fast, also it fives you the opportunity to buy a second one in the future and run them in CrossfireX when you feel the performance of one card is not enough. Though adding a second card would require a new PSU (as would buying a 5970 off the bat).

I included a megahalems cooler as it is an excellent air cooler for the i7 and you can use your existing scythe fans with it. The fan controller will allow you to tune the speed of the fans yourself.
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i dont mind the case, everything looks good, i wont be going crossfire, so should i go 5870, also i would like 2 sata cd drives
 
If you have the budget, go for the 5870. It is faster than the 5850 and overclocks well. I would suggest going for an ASUS one as they come with 3 year warranty (others seem to be 2 or less) and the BIOS is made for overclocking.

For the optical drives, I would suggest a pair of these. If you are interested in Blu-Ray, one of these drives is £47 more and gives you the ability to watch Blu Ray movies.
 
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cmndr_andi said:
If you have the budget, go for the 5870. It is faster than the 5850 and overclocks well. I would suggest going for an ASUS one as they come with 3 year warranty (others seem to be 2 or less) and the BIOS is made for overclocking.

For the optical drives, I would suggest a pair of these. If you are interested in Blu-Ray, one of these drives is £47 more and gives you the ability to watch Blu Ray movies.
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yes i have the budget for 5870, are them drives quiet, i have 2 liteon drives but there noisy when reading/writing
 
I think all drives are noisy when reading and writing - I think the best way to control the noise is reduce the speed of the read/write operations.

Here is a review of the drive (this review the 7420, which is the same drive without the lightscribe functions of the 7421) and it performs very well.
 
cmndr_andi said:
I think all drives are noisy when reading and writing - I think the best way to control the noise is reduce the speed of the read/write operations.

Here is a review of the drive (this review the 7420, which is the same drive without the lightscribe functions of the 7421) and it performs very well.
Click to expand...

how would adjust the speed
 
Just curious...any particular reason for against crossfire? While a 5850 would give you 'smooth' game play for most games...with crossfire 5850 or a single 5970 it would boost frame rate even more as well as allowing your to turn up more AA etc.
 
Marine-RX179 said:
Just curious...any particular reason for against crossfire? While a 5850 would give you 'smooth' game play for most games...with crossfire 5850 or a single 5970 it would boost frame rate even more as well as allowing your to turn up more AA etc.
Click to expand...

no particular reason, i have never had crossfire/sli before
 
PAULRYAN52 said:
does anyone know what the bluetooth is for on the rampage 3, is it to transfer files or can it be used to control the pc from my phone
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According to the ASUS site:

RC Bluetooth
Smashes through all the barriers of conventional overclocking !
Still overclocking in old-fashioned way? Let RC Bluetooth bring you the whole new idea of how to do! Just simply push the button from the Back I/O on the RC Bluetooth card, overclockers can real-time monitor the desktop PC system status & tweak its parameters - such as voltages and frequency on the fly. When users want to use ordinary bluetooth functions, just simply push the button once again & enjoy all the wireless convenience brought from RC Bluetooth.
Click to expand...

Fun and flashy, but not particularly useful. The best overclocking will still be done in the BIOS.

Are you still considering going for the Rampage 3? That board really is only for people that plan to overclock to the extreme with water cooling and/or using 3 graphics cards or more. If neither of these things apply to you then you would be much better off saving £170 and getting an X58 board like the Gigabyte X58A UD3R or ASUS P6X58D-E as you will be losing very little.
 
cmndr_andi said:
According to the ASUS site:



Fun and flashy, but not particularly useful. The best overclocking will still be done in the BIOS.

Are you still considering going for the Rampage 3? That board really is only for people that plan to overclock to the extreme with water cooling and/or using 3 graphics cards or more. If neither of these things apply to you then you would be much better off saving £170 and getting an X58 board like the Gigabyte X58A UD3R or ASUS P6X58D-E as you will be losing very little.
Click to expand...

hi i was considerin the r3 but wont be oc to the extreme or water cooling
 
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