Have I Seen The Light

[Cupra]

ok i was looking at Upgrading and was getting this

BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC 320MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail £199.74 ( i do intend on getting a second one of these in the future)

Gigabyte GA_M59SLi-S5 nForce 590 (Socket AM2) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £117.49

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5000+ 2.60GHz (Socket AM2) - OEM £164.49

Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2 Dominator PC2-6400C4 TwinX (2x1GB) £173.89

OCZ GameXStream 850w Silent SLI Ready ATX2 Power Supply £135.11


but after a post i have changed to this


Intel Core 2 DUO E6600 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail
£204.44

Scythe Shogun CPU Cooler - Retail £39.94

2 x Hitachi Deskstar 7K160 NCQ 160GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (0A32728) £32.99 x2 = £77.52

Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2 Dominator PC2-6400C4 TwinX (2x1GB) £170.36)

BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC 640MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail £264.36

Asus P5N-E SLi nForce 650 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £82.24

OCZ GameXStream 850w Silent SLI Ready ATX2 Power Supply £135.11

Sub Total : £985.67 (over budget but hey if i dont spend it my wife will)

Could my money be better spent?
and the reason there is hard drives there now is one of mine has failed and i would rather buy 2 new sata ones than 1 new sata and chance the old one breaking.

 

[GazD]

A couple of things

Choose HDD that have 16Mb cache. Personally I wouldn't have two separate drives unless I was running RAID. I would just have one big drive of 320Gb instead of 2x160Gb

PSU. You could save a bit of money and get the Corsair HX620W PSU. I have the 520W model and can't fault it, plus it will run the 320Mb 8800GTS in SLi no problem.

CPU Cooler. I don't know much about this cooler but with the price of that cooler you could get a Tuniq Tower which are probably the best out there at the higher end of the CPU Cooling market.

 

[Cupra]

yeah but i intend on running 2x 630 in sli

and i will be running raid 0

 

[GazD]

yeah but i intend on running 2x 630 in sli

and i will be running raid 0

I take it you mean the 640Mb models, I'm not sure but I think that the Corsair 620w would be able to handle that.

 

[Cupra]

Yeah 640 even

 

[Cupra]

Intel Core 2 DUO E6600 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail
£204.44

Scythe Shogun CPU Cooler - Retail £39.94

Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2 Dominator PC2-6400C4 TwinX (2x1GB) £170.36)

BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC 640MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail £264.36 (two of these in sli) 2x = £575.72

BFG nForce 680 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £176.24

Samsung SH-W183 18x18 DVD±RW Serial ATA Dual Layer ReWriter (Black) - OEM £23.49 (got this from all the reviews on here)

Western Digital Caviar RE 160GB 1600YS SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM £42.29 x2 = £71.98

and 1 cd-rw
and 1x floppy (sata drivers are a pain)
and Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS Edition (got this the other week)


WHAT PSU will i need
should i swap the 2nd gpx for another 2gb of ram?

 

[GazD]

What resolution will you be running games at? Two 8800 in SLi would be overkill IMO, you can save a little and just get a single GTX which would more than suffice. If after a while you think you need two then with the money you have saved and with a little more saving get another GTX. I think that the 620W Corsair would be enough for SLi. 2Gb of RAM at the moment is quite adequate for games, applications and vista.

 

[Cupra]

if i swap for the gtx i could still afford an extra 2gb of ram too

 

[GazD]

if i swap for the gtx i could still afford an extra 2gb of ram too

Indeed you could, which would make your computer more future proof, although from what I gather the Dominator RAM isnt worth paying the extra over the Corsair XMS-2 stuff. You could save more money there.

 

[Corasik]

Personally, I would buy a Raptor, and use it as the boot/system drive, for windows+swapfile and mebee 'applications' as well, and then have a Seagate 7200.10 for games, and data.

Windows loves to make a swapfile even if you have tons of spare ram, by having your games on a separate disk to your swap, it can improve performance just as much as having a raid0.

Raid0's ok, but it only improves sequential transfer speeds. There is actually a slighty penalty on random access. I've tried its both ways, raid0, or dual independant disks, and to be honest raid0 wasnt worth the bother. Certainly not on a gaming system anyway.

Wouldnt bother with SLI either, buy an 8800GTS/GTX whatever you fancy now, and instead of making it sli, buy a 8950 or whatever comes on in the next refresh, or even the next generation ATi. SLI's current generation rarely beat a single next generation card. You'll even be able to sell on the 8800 when the next gen comes out, can normally get a fair return on second hand graphics cards.