Check Spec - i5 / 460

Associate
Joined
4 Jul 2009
Posts
35
Well 3rd time lucky. Due to housing issues (being homeless for a month) my last build thread led to nothing but now I'm moving into a new place on tuesday I will be able to order a machine for the following weekend! Woo!

Thinking of the following:
MSI P55-GD65 or Gigabyte GA-P55A-USB3 - £95-100
i5 760 - £140
CoolerMaster 430 w/ 500W PSU - £63
Corsair 2x4GB XMS3 - £58
nVidia 460 1GB - £150
Samsung F3 500GB - £32
Samsung 22x DVD-RW Lightscribe - £15
OCuk 300mbs Wifi n card - £17

~£575

Obivously not perfect prices but its what I have written down on my notepad while looking at stuff... down to questions:

.::. Is there anything you would change?
.::. MSI or Gigabyte mobo? Why?
.::. I don't have any cables or anything spare lying about anymore... am I missing anything? (do the drives come with sata cables?)
.::. I'm still umming and arrring over waiting for sandybridge and I will wait IF for some reason I can't order next weekend (because of Christmas & New Years the weekends after) but to be honest apart from a mobo & cpu swap nothing will really change - esp as they said they should be pretty similar in pricing.

Cheers
Leon
 
i'd go for gigabyte over msi, only reason being i've had gigabyte mobo's before and never had an issue with them.

psu wise make sure its 500w+ for the 460.

overall looks fine, but if you can i'd wait for the sandy release.
 
Looks good.

The GD65 is a great board and about the cheapest decent board that supports proper sli/x-fire. Disappeared from OCUK unfortunately but can still be found elsewhere. You don't get USB3/SATA3 but could always add a controller card later if required. If you were going for the GD65 it would make sense to prepare for SLI and therefore get this PSU...

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-117-AN&groupid=701&catid=123&subcat=1088

Great value and ready to add another 460 later for a GPU upgrade.

If SLI/x-fire isn't important to you the Gigabyte board is fine. But dont get the USB3, which only has USB3, get the UD3 for only £5 more which has USB3 and SATA3. Or there's the Asus P7P55D-E to consider at this level too. These boards dont do proper SLI/x-fire so your GPU upgrades are limited to sell+replace (which is no real problem at all). In that case you could consider a cheaper PSU such as...

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-034-CS&groupid=701&catid=123&subcat=1084

The Coolermaster GX range have gotten some poor reviews (noise/ripple).
 
Hmmmm choices choices. The thing I've always wondered about SLI is the following:

I get a 460 now, it plays all games at high and I'm happy... 'x' amount of time down the lie the card is showing a bit of age and games are having to be knocked down a couple of notches - Its obivously time to upgrade.

Now to get to that point the 460 is obviously an older generation card and so adding a 2nd one is it really going to make a difference? Wouldn't you already be at the point of just replacing the card with a new generation?

Make any sense?
 
Right decided I'm not going to wait for Sandy and I don't care about SLI so the following it is:

Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3
i5 760
CoolerMaster 430 with 500W PSU
4GB Corsair XMS3 (2x 2GB)
nVidia 1GB GTX 460
Samsung F3 500GB
Samsung F3/4 2TB
Samsung 22x DVD-RW
300MBs Wifi N card

Around £600 in total.
 
Was thinking about it but already at budget so will wait and buy a decent PSU and cooler when I want to get into the OCing a few months down the line :)

Quick question: there seems to be a few version of the samsung 2TB harddrives and I was wondering which one to get? Its purely for storage / playing of high def video.
 
Right went for this in the end:

i5 760
Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3
Corsair Dominator 4GB (2x 2GB)
Samsung F3 500GB
Samsung F4 2TB
EVGA GXT 460 1GB SC
CoolerMaster 430 w/ 500W PSU
Samsung 12x BD-Rom/DVD-RW

Ah crap while typing this just realised that I didn't add a wifi card... sigh.
 
Back
Top Bottom