Guide to helping you choose your components

95thrifles · 23 Dec 2010 at 17:46

Theres no reason why they wouldn't however you need to be sure they'll physically fit, often some cards (gfx cards in particular) block the slot next to them, so check before ordering, open up pc and look down on mobo, as long as you can see the slots you need to use you should be ok

george langham · 23 Dec 2010 at 17:50

awesome

vesina03 · 5 Jan 2011 at 19:04

nice work.....i would personally stick to AMD+ATI or INTEL+nVidia as you mentioned above....the easiest and sensible way to go,,,still there is the Ivy bridge from Intel coming out this year which means a massive improvement...you may be gettin 10-12 physical cores with GPU built in...
thanks

FoXconn A7DA-S 3.0
Phenom II X4 965 4GHz
8 Gb 1333 MHz
Saphire 5970 2Gb
750 Watts PSU
1 TB Seagate
Black Hawk case

Voices · 2 Feb 2011 at 00:56

Had a look at this guide again. It really is a good starting point

One thing though. Is the RAM missing from the high-end Intel spec or am I just completely blind? Or, alternatively, have I just missed something obvious somewhere?

95thrifles · 2 Feb 2011 at 01:52

It was an intentional error, I was seeing how long it would take anyone to notice, well done, you won the prize,

I shall ammend as soon as upload service stops playing up

Meloco · 6 Feb 2011 at 12:08

Just wanted to say thanks to the OP, great post. Finding it very interesting reading all your points and specs, instead of trawling through 100 'spec me' posts. Very nice job and hope to see further updates!

pauladams · 7 Feb 2011 at 12:46

This is an amazing piece of guide, you have covered almost all the important points and explained them really well. Thanks for the information it is really informative.

remtard · 8 Feb 2011 at 11:16

woah, amazing sticky. I have a friend who's looking to build his own gaming rig, and due to his budget he doesn't know what he wants. This will surely help him, I'll link him to it now

oulton · 10 Feb 2011 at 14:29

Great StickY!

Skarth · 12 Feb 2011 at 19:55

great guide, thanks for spending your time doing this.

~Mike~ · 4 Mar 2011 at 09:00

Agree with the others, this is a great guide, thanks goes to 95thrifles for spending time on this. I haven't built for while now so it has helped me greatly, my biggest decision is which GPU to go for.

95thrifles have to ask about your sig, who are those lovely ladies, I only recognise two!

95thrifles · 4 Mar 2011 at 12:50

Haha, Megan Fox, Olivia Wild, Hilary Duff, Jessica Alba, Elisha Cuthbert

BAppleton · 15 Mar 2011 at 08:14

main importance for me when buying new components is reliabilty and quality. I go for Antec for anything they bring out guaranteed to be fantastic, psus, cases and cpu coolers. Asus for mobos and gpus. Intel for cpus and ssds and Corsair for memory

proxy10 · 8 Apr 2011 at 10:14

good work! thx your info sharing here

iadde · 12 Apr 2011 at 11:29

Thanks for this - very informative.

proxy10 · 15 Apr 2011 at 07:55

Very good but it's a tough guide to write and maintain as technology changes

Moodle · 17 Apr 2011 at 19:31

Thanks for the guide , I'm going to build a variation of the high end Intel

syed2012 · 7 May 2011 at 10:19

Really great information of the components with price list..Thanks!

gwr3850 · 14 May 2011 at 20:45

Hey there,

I have had my system for about 4 years now, and I think time is coming to step upto the next gen of technology i.e. i series CPU and DDR3 memory.
Reading through this article has made it very interesting and now I am not fully sure what to go forward with.

As seen in my specs at the minute I can run most games on maximum or high-ish graphics, though it not always looking smoothly and some game I sacrifice quality to sustain fps.

One in particular is F1 2010 it has recently just started to get "lag spikes". But I also play simulators, which can be rather CPU dependent FSX and Railworks for example. But also really want to be able to "max out" on the likes of ARMA 2 and BFBC2 and the such

I have thought about getting the sandybridge i5 and overlcock it if I can. To be able to really push latest game titles and be able to get upto AA levels of x4, if needed. I was thinking to Put in an SSD also and have windows 7 on there and put my main games on there and add a new 1TB drive along with my old 512GB for storage purposes.

Also my next question would be would it be fine to carry on using my corsair 650W atx PSU or is it time to get a new one? also will it have all the necessary connections to wire up?

As with all the fans my antec case has, I was hoping I could just pull out old mobo slot in new and connect up without having to everything else out i.e. PSU, fans and optical drive.

So, having saying that I had a browse in components and wondered if these would be more than suitable.

Any advice or enlightentment would be most welcome!

Thanks kindly, regards, Kirk

95thrifles · 15 May 2011 at 06:26

yep should be a nice boost, although just get windows and HDD separately, and stick with the Samsung F3, the 6Gb/s transfer rate doesnt really help mechanical drives anyway