Can someone help me before I buy my new RIG?

dannykilla · 27 Sep 2007 at 09:43

Hi,

I will be purchasing my new rig in the next few days and would like some some help on a few issues please?

1. I was told that if I bought 2x 2GB Corsair 8500+ Dominator, that I wouldn't be able to receive fullspeed?

2. Which would be the best case to suit my RIG (below), the ones I like at the moment are either the Coolermaster Stacker 832 or the Cosmos.
I plan to add the hard drive coolers for all my hard drives can anyone reccomend one, for both my raptors and caviar and would they fit in either case?

My RIG I plan to buy

Intel Quad core 2.4ghz Q6600 w/ Thermalright Ultra-120A CPU Cooler
EVGA nForce 680i SLi (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
4GB Corsair Dominator 8500+ RAM w/ Dominator Fan
EVGA GeForce 8800 Ultra KO SILENT 768MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI w/ Thermalright HR-03-PLUS
2X Western Digital Raptor X 150GB (RAID 0)
Western Digital Caviar 400GB
Creative X-FI Fatal1ty 7.1 Sound Card
Enermax Galaxy 850W

If anyone can offer me any suggestions for alternative hardware that would be great

thanks
Danny

schumi84 · 27 Sep 2007 at 10:04

With the RAM, are you gonna be getting 4x1GB sticks or 2x2GB sticks?

melbourne720 · 27 Sep 2007 at 10:12

Welcome to the Forums!

dannykilla said:
1. I was told that if I bought 2x 2GB Corsair 8500+ Dominator, that I wouldn't be able to receive fullspeed?

'receive fullspeed'? I have no idea what you mean, but the RAM is kind of overkill (unnecessarily fast without a proportional speed return for the additional cost). Any Geil or OCZ PC 6400 won't limit an air overclock on your CPU, will do fine, and save you a ton (literally)

dannykilla said:
2. Which would be the best case to suit my RIG (below), the ones I like at the moment are either the Coolermaster Stacker 832 or the Cosmos.
I plan to add the hard drive coolers for all my hard drives can anyone reccomend one, for both my raptors and caviar and would they fit in either case?

Go for a case you like, Akasa, Antec and Lian Li all make nice cases. You can't go really wrong with one of theirs.

Hard drive coolers? Meh, a decent case with decent airflow and they won't be needed.

dannykilla said:
My RIG I plan to buy

Intel Quad core 2.4ghz Q6600 w/ Thermalright Ultra-120A CPU Cooler
EVGA nForce 680i SLi (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
4GB Corsair Dominator 8500+ RAM w/ Dominator Fan
EVGA GeForce 8800 Ultra KO SILENT 768MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI w/ Thermalright HR-03-PLUS
2X Western Digital Raptor X 150GB (RAID 0)
Western Digital Caviar 400GB
Creative X-FI Fatal1ty 7.1 Sound Card
Enermax Galaxy 850W

If anyone can offer me any suggestions for alternative hardware that would be great

thanks
Danny

Change the motherboard for an Abit IP35 Pro (optional, the evga one is good too)
Change the GFX for an OCuk GTX (5% slower, about 50% less expensive)
The RAID 0 raptor X's maybe overkill, but I'm probably just jealous.

dannykilla · 27 Sep 2007 at 10:52

thanks lads/ladies for the replies

@schumi84
I plan to buy 2x2GB sticks,

@melbourne720
Are the Lian-Li case quiet? I want a case that is Silent but has good cooling/air flow? Can you reccomend on?

Also for a mother board if you had unlimited funds what would you go out and buy, I have been reading up on the EVGA one and quite a few people are having a lot of problems with them

Thanks
Danny

thanks
Danny

melbourne720 · 27 Sep 2007 at 10:58

dannykilla said:
@melbourne720
Are the Lian-Li case quiet? I want a case that is Silent but has good cooling/air flow? Can you reccomend on?

All cases are quiet, until you put some fans in them

They are very well made cases, and when paired with some nexus / yate loon / sharkoon fans will be a cool and quiet case.

I have a Antec P180 - a really well insulated case (good for sound, bad for heat) but it is getting a bit long in the tooth now. I also like the Akasa Eclipse, but that has been around for Donkey's years as well (still a good case mind).

dannykilla said:
Also for a mother board if you had unlimited funds what would you go out and buy, I have been reading up on the EVGA one and quite a few people are having a lot of problems with them

Out of the current line up? Abit IP35 Pro.

Regular Hero · 27 Sep 2007 at 11:14

what OS are u going to run?

is it 64bit so you can use 4GB of ram?

if so then be prepared for problems with your soundcard =/ its a know bug that Vista 64 bit+ 4gb of ram + Creative soundcards (mines a fatal1ty) have issues with static sound and BSOD its all over the creative forums, the issues are so bad that my £100 card is currently back in its box waiting for a new working driver...

Also fitting the Thermalright Ultra-120A CPU Cooler in my Antec p182 was a nightmare

cause its so close to the case side.

n3crius · 27 Sep 2007 at 11:33

Regular Hero said:
what OS are u going to run?

is it 64bit so you can use 4GB of ram?

if so then be prepared for problems with your soundcard =/ its a know bug that Vista 64 bit+ 4gb of ram + Creative soundcards (mines a fatal1ty) have issues with static sound and BSOD its all over the creative forums, the issues are so bad that my £100 card is currently back in its box waiting for a new working driver...

Also fitting the Thermalright Ultra-120A CPU Cooler in my Antec p182 was a nightmare cause its so close to the case side.

Wasn't really aware of this. I'm going for a similar setup (Vista64, 4gb) - are there any other card manufacturers that are delivering the good right now?

dannykilla · 27 Sep 2007 at 12:19

Yes I will be making the jump to Vista!!!!

I have just been speaking to one of the I.T. guys in work and he emailed me this, this is in regards to not being able to run the 4GB of RAM at full speed?????

Ask then to explain why it won't run at full speed.... you're not even going up to the maximum supported for the board....

Systemboard supports max 8GB, so best option for 4GB would be 2 x 2GB (what you're proposing is 4 x 1GB) - although, I can't see why you'd need more than 4GB but who knows with M$ "bloatware" OS systems. - Make sure your HDD has about 3 or 4 partitions as with 4GB RAM you'll need a swap file (virtual memory / page file) of AT LEAST 6GB and the max you can have on 1 partition (up to XP Pro) is 4GB (I'm not sure whether Vista - I take it you are going for Vista -changes this maximum, I doubt it as the max file size was set by HDD manufacturers) at any rate, I'd recommend the minimum to be 8GB and the max to be as much as you can make it (i.e. if you have 4 partitions put a 4GB swap file on each!).

Is he correct in what he says?

All I want is a fast as F@#k RIG, that will easily play all the latest games, that is pretty quiet and is cool.

Can anyone point me in the right direction, I have rougthly £2500 to spend

Thanks
Danny

Teaf · 27 Sep 2007 at 12:34

dannykilla said:
All I want is a fast as F@#k RIG, that will easily play all the latest games, that is pretty quiet and is cool.

Can anyone point me in the right direction, I have rougthly £2500 to spend

£2,500 is a major overkill. Spend the remainder on a holiday or something :-)

I've left out an OS, keyboard and mouse from the spec. You'll not go above £1,950 adding these so you're still way under budget. For those parts if you did need them, I would pick a Deathadder / Logitech G15 and Vista 64bit.

melbourne720 · 27 Sep 2007 at 12:38

The motherboard supports RAM that fast, but as the FSB won't go that fast so it is unlikely that the system will use that extra memory bandwidth to a positive effect (which I suppose is what your IT mate is on about).

4 partitions with 4GB swap files sounds a bit crazy, but it's not my area of expertise tbh. As long as you have a swap file on a separate physical disk to your OS, you won't get any particular slow down in that area.

dannykilla · 27 Sep 2007 at 14:19

Hey thanks for the reply Melbourne720

Firstly I noticed that you only have 1 Raptor in the image above?

Secondly would going to DDR3 be a good option?

Danny

schumi84 · 27 Sep 2007 at 14:22

Looking at that spec, you would have the OS installed on the Raptor and then everything else on the other drives.

DDR3 is far too overpriced atm so not worth it, will probably become mainstream in a year or so.

Teaf · 27 Sep 2007 at 14:47

dannykilla said:
Firstly I noticed that you only have 1 Raptor in the image above?

Other than transfer rates, I cannot justify spending £300 on 2 hard drives that would be low in size and run fast. Yeah stuff will load a bit quicker but not enough to justify an extra £150, so I'd only go with the one drive. Normally I wouldn't even recommend a Raptor, as other than the access times, other drives such as AAKS's can match it's performance pretty much. I have added 2 other 500GB drives, these would be storage drives and you run everything else from the Raptor so your OS / games are quicker.

dannykilla said:
Secondly would going to DDR3 be a good option?

As schumi84 states, DDR3 is far too expensive at the moment to make it a viable option. The RAM isn't that much better than DDR2 either due to it's extremely loose timings. When DDR3 starts to get to Cas5/6 @ 1800 Mhz and cost under £170 for 2GB then it's worth it.

Squink · 27 Sep 2007 at 15:16

Don't bother with RAID-0 it sounds great but isn't. I'll quote the Anandtech article again:

"If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop."

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=11

The single Raptor plus a couple of other large storage drives is the best solution imo.