Advice on a new build

mcmUK

mcmUK

mcmUK

Associate
Joined
29 Jan 2007
Posts
4
Hello Forum!

I’m putting together a new PC, although I’ve built PCs before it’s been three years since the last one and a few things have changed (PCI-E, dual cores, etc.) I would greatly appreciate the forum’s expert insight on this potential build.

The main components are as follows:

Motherboard: ASUS P5N-E SLi (nForece 650)
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4Ghz)
Memory: 2Gb OCZ PC2-6400 DDR2
Graphics Card: Gainward BLISS GeForce 8800 GTS 640Mb
Sound Card: Creative Audigy
Primary Hard Drive: Western Digital Raptor 150Gb
Secondary Hard Drove: Western Digital Caviar 320Gb
PSU: Corsair HX 520W
Case: Antec P180
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

Would anyone suggest swapping any of these for better or more suitable equivalents? Or are there any compatibility issues here that I’m not aware of?

I’m trying to stick to around £1,300 for my budget, without a monitor/keyboard/mouse/speakers. The cheaper the better, but I really don’t want to compromise and sacrifice too much performance. Primarily the system will be used for gaming and content creation (Photoshop).

A few other general questions while I have your attention:

-Is the 520W PSU powerful enough for everything listed above?
How about if I wanted to add another hard drive and/or graphics card (in SLi mode) in the future?
-Is the 64bit edition of Vista appropriate for the Core 2 Duo?

Thanks for your time and consideration! Any/all advice greatly appreciated.
 
520W is more than powerful enough as the Corsairs are arguably the best PSUs around right now :)

Adding another GFX card in the future will be fine, seeing as you have chosen an SLi board, the motherboard will come with the SLi bridge iirc.

The 64-bit edition of Vista is perfect as the core2duo is a 64-bit processor

:)

Kiz

EDIT: The only thing I would say is do you really need the raptor? The performance between that an a 7200.10 is not that noticeable, however, you have said that it will be for gaming so map loading times will be helped by this.
 
Thanks for the sugguestions. I've replaced the two hard drives I listed in my first post with:

2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA-II 16MB

It is the SATA-II version I need and not the ATA-100, correct?

As for the sound card I've had problems in the past using intergrated chipsets - in the worst case my performance took a 10% hit when onboard sound was enabled. I just wanted something cheap and cheerful to take the burden off the main board. If it wasn't for that I wouldn't bother with the stand alone card. I've looked around the obvious review sites for details about the P5N-E but they don't really go into much detail about the on board sound. If anyone knows that it won't be an issue with this motherboard then I'd happily dump the Audigy.

Thanks again for the tips!
 
Another quick question sprang to mind:

Will the motherboard (P5N-E) BIOS support the Core2Duo out-of-the-box? I've read that some BIOS need to be flash updated first before they support the duos.
 
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