Core 2 Vs Core i7

RoEy

RoEy

RoEy

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Hi all,

I'll be spending my hard earned cash a week on Friday on a new system.

I have £2450 to spend and I want to know what other people would do with regards to either building a core 2 system of core i7.

I only have a case so I'll need everything else. I think if I decide to go core 2 then I'll roughly save £300, which I don't really think is that much of a saving to be honest.

I plan to cool my system with high end water cooling so I have reserved £450 of my budget for cooling, which leaves me with £2000 to spend.

I won't require massive amounts of HDD space as I thought a 320 GB for boot drive and 1T for data will be enough for now. I've more or less made my mind up on the monitor I want - NEC 24" Professional Gaming Monitor.

It would be great if anyone could give me some advice on this matter.

Thanks all,

RoEy
 
core i7 is roughly 40% faster than core 2 quad equivelants which equates to a lot more power than core 2 duo
 
for that kind of wonga you could get a decent i7 that would blitz any core 2.

Thats another vote for i7
 
You're shelling out £2,500 on a PC and you're wondering if you should go top of the line or not?

For people on budgets of £1k I think the £300 might be better spent elsewhere in the build... but you can get top whack of everything and likely have change for a couple of pizzas.

i7++
 
Audigex said:
You're shelling out £2,500 on a PC and you're wondering if you should go top of the line or not?

For people on budgets of £1k I think the £300 might be better spent elsewhere in the build... but you can get top whack of everything and likely have change for a couple of pizzas.

i7++
Click to expand...

Hmmmmm Ham & Pineapple!

Ranger07 said:
I'd probably go

i7 920
EVGA X58
GTX 285 SLI
6 GIG Dominator Ram
320 Boot HD and 1TB storage
Click to expand...

I wouldn’t be able to afford SLI.

Here's a rough draft of what I may get:

potential_pc.jpg


I've left the PSU out as Overclockers doesn’t sell it. It's the Silverstone Decathlon 1200. I've read very good reviews about it and I like the fact it's 100% modular so that would take me roughly just over £2000. I want to then spend around £450 on water cooling the CPU and GPU. The reason I have chosen the XFX version of the 4870x2 is because it's a reference board so the koolance VID-487X2 block I'm after will fit it.

I'm saying all this and it will probably completely change again next week.

What do you guys think?

RoEy
 
yeah, ssd for the system drive would prob make things crisper in vista, although they are still quite expensive in comparison i think.
 
For that kind of money I would definatly say go for a high end HDD, or atleast RAID them. A budget like that needs fast speeds, so a VelociRaptor would do well, or better yet a RAID array, or even better an SSD, depending on whether noise is an issue or not.
 
Redgie said:
For that kind of money I would definatly say go for a high end HDD, or atleast RAID them. A budget like that needs fast speeds, so a VelociRaptor would do well, or better yet a RAID array, or even better an SSD, depending on whether noise is an issue or not.
Click to expand...

EgonSpengler said:
First thing I thought looking at that spec was that the hard drives let it down. Go SSD or RAID.

You can't stretch to a GTX 295? http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-114-XF&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1324 on offer this week :)
Click to expand...

I want the system to be as quiet as possible so I won't be touching a VelociRaptor. SSD are too expensive as there’s not much point in have 30gb for boot. I'd have to have at least 60gb and I can't really see them being that much faster to be fair.

I just wanted a smallish boot drive and 1 bigger drive for storage.

I used to have 2 WD Raptors in RAID 0 but to be fair I didn’t see any difference in speed whatsoever.

What would be the best HDD setup for my potential system then, enlighten me?

Reason I was going for 4870x2 was it's around £70 cheaper than the GTX295, which will buy me a water block for it.

RoEy
 
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RoEy said:
I want the system to be as quiet as possible so I won't be touching a VelociRaptor. SSD are too expensive as there’s not much point in have 30gb for boot. I'd have to have at least 60gb and I can't really see them being that much faster to be fair.

I just wanted a smallish boot drive and 1 bigger drive for storage.

I used to have 2 WD Raptors in RAID 0 but to be fair I didn’t see any difference in speed whatsoever.

What would be the best HDD setup for my potential system then, enlighten me?

Reason I was going for 4870x2 was it's around £70 cheaper than the GTX295, which will buy me a water block for it.

RoEy
Click to expand...

??
 
Christ man, have some patience :)

Good reasoning with going for 4870x2 instead of GTX295, most games you wouldn't see a difference in them anyway despite the difference in fps.
 
Fledge said:
Christ man, have some patience :)

Good reasoning with going for 4870x2 instead of GTX295, most games you wouldn't see a difference in them anyway despite the difference in fps.
Click to expand...

thats at the moment but with the extra power of the 295 it should be more future proof, and ssd's do make a difference i went from a western digital 320gb boot drive to an ocz core series ssd and my boot time was reduced by 7 seconds, photoshop loads in 3 rather than 8 seconds and plus windows is a lot more responsive
 
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