BORING SPEC ME THREAD - AGAIN!

Greebo

Greebo

Greebo

Caporegime
Joined
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Co Durham
Okay, I've decided to sell my cpu, mobo, ram and get an Intel system (rest all as per my sig).

Reckon I can get £150 from that sale and now I have some money to put to it so my budget is around £500 for new cpu,mobo,ram.

It seems not worth me swapping to Intel unless I was prepared to put money to it as the performance gain would be too small.

So what should I spend my £500 on and I don't necessarily have to spend the whole of my £500 as I always beleived in getting "bang for bucks" ;)

Have never gone SLI and unlikely I ever will so that doesn't bother me.

I always overclock (see sig) so bear that in mind when speccing me.

Have watercooling already :)
 
Asus Maximus Formula Intel X38 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £129.99
(£152.74)

G.Skill 4GB DDR2 PQ PC2-8000C5 (2x2GB) CAS5 Dual Channel Kit (F2-8000CL5D-4GBPQ)
74.99
(£88.11)

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 LGA775 'Wolfdale' 3.00GHz (1333FSB) - Retail £159.99
(£187.99)

Total : £438.53


If you want to spend that extra 60 quid maybe get better GPU on the way also or grab a quad if you're doing heavy graphic/video editing.
 
What would the main uses for the system be? Also what PSU do you have currently? I'm sure it will be ok since your system is running fine but it doesn't hurt to check.

If just for gaming then PhoenixUK's system looks pretty decent although I'd be more tempted by a P35 motherboard unless you may go Crossfire (unlikely) or need PCI-E 2.0 compatability (also a bit unlikely at the moment).
 
Thanks for the answers and here's my replies:

Phoenix: What's wrong with my gpu? :p I only just bought it for £117 (told you i'm frugal;))

I only have a 20" screen so the GTS ought to be fine until next gen come out or I fancy a chnage of screen.

Would I see any benefit from the 4gb of memory since i'm running xp 32-bit? I have vista ultimate sitting on a shelf and I have no intent of putting that back on my system again (tried it for a month then went back to xp)

Semi pro waster: psu is a tagan 430W. Will that be enough?

System is mainly games and video encoding.

Why are the dual core E8 series more money than the quad E6 series? For £33 less I can have a Q6600 guaranteed to 3gz, same speed as the E8400?

Sorry for the lame question, but been out of touch in the overclocking world especially Intel related.


Not too bothered about speed of encoding as I tend to leave it overnight so not concerned whether it takes 10 minutes or two hours although it is tempting.....hmmm. How much faster would a quad core encode compared to a highly overclocked 8 series?
 
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The 8800GTS is fine, you won't get much better without spending close on £100 extra.

Your PSU should do for the system as the Core2Duo/Quads are not hugely demanding considering the performance they provide. I just wanted to check it was a decent brand really.

The E8X00s are newer technology with a 1333mhz FSB and are faster clock for clock at a given speed plus because of their newness and the fact that demand is outstripping supply to an extent command a slight premium still. However the Q6600 is hardly slow and most will reach 3ghz+ easily on air so with watercooling and decent PC6400 Ram you should get further. I wouldn't bother with the guaranteed overclockers, they aren't specially selected, it simply means that OcUK will swap it if it doesn't reach 3ghz and probably 99% will reach that speed regardless.

I'd personally go with quad core, particularly if your encoding software can accomodate multiple cores but if you want pure speed for individual tasks then an E8X00 chip would probably be better. The E8400s can reach 4ghz or above depending on the usual factors.

Finally with 4gb Ram you will see somewhere slightly less than 3.5gb usable system Ram under 32bit XP so it is still worth it, the issue is that a 32bit OS can only address a total of 4gb Ram (normally) and that will include the graphics card Ram as well.
 
Thanks for that.

Wasn't going to pay the premium for the guaranteed 3Ghz processor, was just comparing like for like since the 8400 processor ran at 3Ghz - hence I was amazed that the quad core was still substantially cheaper.

Reading around a lot of people including yourself recommend just PC6400 ram and not PC8500+. I thought getting the fastest (subject to not too much extra money) was best?

And I have been reading the oc threads and there seems to be huge debate over motherboard chips. Assuming I go quad core, is the p35 board best for overclocking? If I go down the E8X00 route, is there a better board for dual core?
 
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Taking the last question first, the P35s are pretty good all rounders but I don't know if there is one specific better option for the E8X00s.

I do tend to recommend PC6400 for the 1066mhz FSB CPUs because with the Q6600 (for instance) which has a 9x multiplier you can get up to 3.6ghz without running the Ram outwith specification (9x400mhz) and you'll find that is a pretty good overclock at 50% - not all chips will reach that high anyway. If you go for faster Ram then you can drop the multiplier but I don't think it is entirely worthwhile since the CPU will often top out before the Ram does.
 
Thanks for that. It explains a lot.

However if getting the E8X00 cpu and acheiving 4Ghz won't that put the the 6400 memory out of spec?
 
Yep, you would do, the multipliers on the E8X00 series are as follows 8x = E8200, 9x = E8400 and 9.5x = E8500 so supposing you choose the E8400 you would need the Ram to run at ~445mhz. That is still possible for a lot of PC6400 but not guaranteed so I'd definitely be suggesting PC8000+ for an E8X00 chip that you wanted to try and reach 4ghz with, a Q6600 is usually fine with PC6400 though.
 
Ofcourse the Q6600 is cheaper since it runs at a lot lower speed ( 2.33 as far as i remember ? in compare to 3.0 ).
And yeah if u got just 20" monitor then its fine, I thought you've got 24' thats why i was advising better GPU.

Unless you do some heavy video/graphics work then I wouldnt advise quad.
And you can get this E8400 to at least 3.8ghz which will be as good as any quad at 3.2 - 3.4 .

And yeah if you're not going for vista then just 2gb ram is the option for you:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-067-GL&tool=3

or

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-092-OC&tool=3

If you wanna push em to the limits.


430watt tagan, i'm not sure but I think I'll be taking somethin more, maybe 520corsair for some really heavy OC.
 
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Thanks for that. I might see how the Tagan handles it. It has really stable voltages and hasn't let me down so far. If it becomes a problem I can always change it later.

I think I'm fancying the 8400 route. Is the Intel X38 best for that processor or did you recommend that board to suit my budget?
 
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^^ Would go for that, although I'd probably just go for the 4Gb PC6400C4 Reaper HPC Enhanced on this week only.

The quad is £50 cheaper than E8400 and has 2 extra cores, plus it will happily run 3Ghz and higher.

You don't need X38 unless you're serious about crossfire. A decent P35 board will be more than enough.
 
steve258 said:
The quad is £50 cheaper than E8400 and has 2 extra cores, plus it will happily run 3Ghz and higher.
Click to expand...

Unused extra cores aren't much good to anybody. More cores isn't always best you have to take a look at the applications you choose and how they are threaded
 
Support for quad will only get better, in the meantime it's not like a Q6600 @ 3Ghz+ won't handle single threaded apps. I mean sure 4Ghz dual core is nice but is it worth the £50 extra for some difference you probably won't notice in day-to-day apps? Although if you game a lot then maybe.
 
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steve258 said:
Support for quad will only get better, in the meantime it's not like a Q6600 @ 3Ghz+ won't handle single threaded apps. I mean sure 4Ghz dual core is nice but is it worth the £50 extra for some difference you probably won't notice in day-to-day apps? Although if you game a lot then maybe.
Click to expand...

Or render a lot... or do anything high end design, whether it's graphic or mechanical

There are lots of uses for high speed single cores. a lot of CAD applications are just being threaded for more than 1 core, by the time they can utilise 4 it'll be time for a new tasty upgrade.
 
steve258 said:
Fair enough but is OP using it for high end CAD rendering?
Click to expand...

Nope!

I still can't make my mind up between a quad core or a E8x00 dual core.

4Ghz sounds tempting but the future all seems to be quad core in the next few years with perhaps more games taking advantage of it so a 4Ghz dual might start and get left behind by a 3Ghz quad core.

The quad cores seem a bargain atm. Just out of interest how much faster than my current rig would a 3Ghz quad or 4Ghz dual core be?
 
i went from a 2.7ghz opteron (dual core), to a q6600 (even at stock 2.4ghz) it was way faster

i'd possibly sell your raptors are get a 640gb western digital drive

the performance will be almost the same, and the noise will be about 1/5 of the raptors, with 9x the space, check the thread for them in Hard Drives section, they're awesome drives
 
bledd. said:
i went from a 2.7ghz opteron (dual core), to a q6600 (even at stock 2.4ghz) it was way faster

i'd possibly sell your raptors are get a 640gb western digital drive

the performance will be almost the same, and the noise will be about 1/5 of the raptors, with 9x the space, check the thread for them in Hard Drives section, they're awesome drives
Click to expand...

Cheers for that tip. I'll look into the drives as I am finding I have run out of space again.

However, I;m not looking forward to reinstalling xp again as that is on my Raid Raptors unless there is a quick and easy way?
 
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