Hardware Advice

[atmax1]

Hello,

It's my birthday next friday and I'm going to build a new pc, I can borrow a 5850, 1000w cooler master psu and 6GB DDR3 duel channel 1600mhz ram... and I have a copy of windows 7 and 2x1TB hard drives.

I'm going to do video editing, web design and gaming on the system so i would like to go i7 and I will grab 2x570s (always wanted a sli rig and try 3D) and 16gb ram for the video editing.

Budget for bday is £600

I was thinking about the following, can you think of any inprovements? cheaper mobo? as ordering tuesday / Wed

- Intel Core i7-2600K
- Gigabyte Z68X-UD3P Intel Z68
- Corsair Obsidian 650D
- Corsair Hydro H70

Then around a month or two later get

- 2x 570s SLI
- sound card dont know what one yet
- 2x Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB

 

[cmndr_andi]

The Z68 UD3P is a nice board, but for your uses you may want to consider spending £40 less and get a P67 board like this msi gd-53. this board (like the gigabyte) supports sli at x8/x8 speeds and overclocks great - here is a review.

also, i wouldn't suggest going for the h70 cooler - it's pretty loud. instead, i would go for the thermalright silver arrow which is cooler, quieter and cheaper - have a look at this review which compares the two.

Also, I would go with this RAM, it's highly regarded, low price and works great at 1.5 V on a sandy bridge system.

Since you are spending this much and considering your uses you should think about getting an SSD.

 

[atmax1]

Thanks cmndr_andi,

I noticed that MSI mobo has not been in stock for a little while, If it isn't by the time I order should I grab this one (a bit cheaper) or stick to first choice? whats the diffrence with the z68 and the p67 mobos? (I haven't been keeping upto date lol)

I will defo get the ram (was thinking about them myself), and the cooler.. I cant find on overclockers, Is there something else thats as good on this website? I want something that looks smart and clean in the case (hopefully black)

I used to have a SSD (currently in my laptop lol) I will most likely put into the new build or look at a 120gb SSD as the 80gb intel I have fill's up quick lol, or maybe raid 0 6gbs drives?

 

[cmndr_andi]

Thanks cmndr_andi,

I noticed that MSI mobo has not been in stock for a little while, If it isn't by the time I order should I grab this one (a bit cheaper) or stick to first choice? whats the diffrence with the z68 and the p67 mobos? (i haven't been keeping upto date lol)

yea, the msi board hasn't been in stock for a few days - but it is a very popular board (since it is one of the cheapest lga 1155 boards to do sli/cf at x8/x8 speeds, plus it overclocks very well) and i would imagine ocuk will have more stock incoming. perhaps it's worth messaging them in a webnote to see what their eta is.

as for the gigabyte p67a-ud3p-b3, this board's second main pcie slot only runs at x4 speed and it doesn't support sli - so not ideal for your uses.

the difference between z68 and p67 is that some of the z68 boards have access to the integrated graphics on the cpu, so you can use this if you don't want to use a discrete graphics card and also allows you to use intel quick sync technology - which is great for transcoding videos. z68 also features ssd caching - which lets you uses a small, cheap ssd to act as a cache when running a mechanical primary hdd. this provides some ssd-like performance imprevements while not needing you to pay for a large primary ssd drive. however, if you plan to us a 80gb ssd or bigger then i would strongly suggest running the ssd as the primary drive (bypassing ssd caching) and getting much better performance.

if you don't need these features, then just go with a p67 - they are cheaper.

i will defo get the ram (was thinking about them myself), and the cooler.. i cant find on overclockers, is there something else thats as good on this website? i want something that looks smart and clean in the case (hopefully black)

the noctua dh-14 is another good cooler - however it is quite a bit more expensive than the silver arrow and quite as cool or quiet (have a look at this comparison) - I would suggest it is worth having a google for the silver arrow.

I used to have a SSD (currently in my laptop lol) I will most likely put into the new build or look at a 120gb SSD as the 80gb intel I have fill's up quick lol, or maybe raid 0 6gbs drives?

Sounds good with the SSD transfer - you should find it nice and quick with this system,

When you say raid0 6Gbps disks, do you mean mechanical hard drives?

If so, please bear in mind that even in RAID0 the speed of mechanical HDDs is literally 100 times slower than an SSD for response time and random read/write speeds - so even if you spent a lot on a pile of disks as single SSD would still be much faster in most tasks. Also, mechanical drives are not nearly fast enough to saturate a SATA 3Gbps connection, so a 6Gbps doesn't mean it's any faster than a standard 3Gbps - just that it's a bit newer and the marketing guys went a bit mad.