Decided on full new system

Dr Who · 30 Sep 2007 at 15:16

Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound (3.5g) £5.99 1 £5.99
Logitech Deluxe Keyboard (Black) - OEM £5.99 1 £5.99
Samsung SM-223BW 22" Widescreen LCD Monitor - Glossy Black £159.99 1 £159.99
Seagate Barracuda ES 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (ST3500630NS) £68.99 2 £137.98
Thermaltake VB5001SNA Tai-Chi SuperMidi Tower - Aluminium £184.99 1 £184.99
Pioneer DVR-112DBK 18x18 DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter - (Black) OEM £16.99 1 £16.99
Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2 PC2-8500C5 1066MHz Dual Channel Kit (BL2KIT12864AA1065) £79.99 2 £159.98
Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 "Energy Efficient 95W Edition" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail £159.99 1 £159.99
Gigabyte GA_P35_DS4 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £94.99 1 £94.99
BFG GeForce 8800 GTX OC 768MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail £284.99 1 £284.99

Keyboard is temporary until my stuff arrives from cyprus at the month end

Dr Who · 30 Sep 2007 at 15:17

But I am a numpty as i forgot PSU

Doh!

semi-pro waster · 30 Sep 2007 at 15:26

Is that what you've bought or are you looking for advice/confirmation that it will all work together?

Dr Who · 30 Sep 2007 at 16:51

bought, comments welcomed the 4 stix of ram worries me

stickroad · 30 Sep 2007 at 16:52

What do you actually want to know?

Dr Who · 30 Sep 2007 at 16:55

Any foreseen problems, things to beware of during build...

Gonna run Vista ultimate, will i need to download drivers first? or are they included with HW?

semi-pro waster · 30 Sep 2007 at 17:08

The only drivers you are likely to need are for the graphics card and motherboard itself, both of which will come with driver disks.

4 sticks of Ram should be fine, socket 775 doesn't have the same problems that socket 939 did. I personally would have bought 4x1gb PC6400 Ram and saved myself over £100 or bought 2x2gb PC6400 and saved ~£30 but that wasn't the question.

Dr Who · 30 Sep 2007 at 17:10

Yeah i debated that one as wanted 2x8500 2gb really, but I thought the 4 sticks would be okay as rated for the higher 1066 which the mobo supports.. will it make much difference?

semi-pro waster · 30 Sep 2007 at 17:24

They'll work fine but you might as well ignore the 1066mhz FSB of the CPU and the 1066mhz of the Ram, they don't have to match.

If you already know this part then feel free to ignore but it might help. Core2Duo CPUs have an FSB that is 'quad-pumped' i.e. to make up 1066mhz you divide by 4 to work out the Ram speed necessary which comes out as 266.5mhz. 266.5mhz is PC4200 speed (Ram is DDR2 which means you half the rated speed of 533mhz), 333.25mhz is PC5300, 400mhz is PC6400 and 533mhz is PC8500, so to get your CPU running anywhere near the limits of your Ram (when at the the full multiplier) you have to be on phase/cascade/extreme cooling.

Now I wouldn't suggest getting PC4200 as you have a chip that is almost begging to be overclocked and spare capacity is better than not but I'm just pointing out how the system works out.

Dr Who · 1 Oct 2007 at 01:04

SPW thanks for the info, I am a little out of touch with these new Intel CPUS, my last being a 3.8p4 that ran hotter than a turkish coffee..

I didnt realise the correlation between the cpus/ram speeds so thanks for clearing that up...

Having read the info on these cpu's i think i would be missing out if I don't do some o'cing with this rig. Done the Phase change thing before, the tai chi's water will be good enuff for me this time...

Dr Who · 3 Oct 2007 at 10:00

Whole system went together smoothly in about 2 hours, installing vista ultimate took almost as long again.. For some reason it had my memory stick as first boot drive...

CPU is idling at 25 degrees, so guess its crying out for some clocking now