Having survived about a month with a Dell system I finally went batty and have started building up a rig again.
I am going to be using all all the components in my sig, and recently acquired 2gig Ballistix 6400c4 and an Asus P5N32-E Plus sli. I bought the board from a mate, 1 month old, and he has already modded it and removed the crappy heatpipes and replaced with a Thermaltake Spirit 2 on the SB (which runs hot on this board I am told), and a Thermalright HR-05 SLI on the NB, and Zalman vga sinks on the mosfets/pwm area. I understand this hybrid does not have the sata/raid issues seen on the 680i.
So that leaves me with just a case, psu, cpu heatsink and soundcard to get so need some advice. Have a budget of around 700 quid. Already have a bunch of noctua,nexus and scythe fans so should be ok there.
Short list on the case is :
Antec 900 (comes with fans but is this case loud even on low setting ?)
Silverstone TJ09 (pricey, doesn't seem to cool as well as Antec according to recent review on madshrimps who thought the hdd cooling was lacking)
Lian Li A10B (problems mounting large heatsinks over top fan intruding onto mobo area)
Lian Li A16B (seems overpriced. does it use the same panels as the PC7 or is it more the v1000 variety. not sure if the hdd cage would block gtx sli setup)
PSU :
Thinking of either the Corsair HZ 620w, Seasonic M12 700w or Enermax Inifnity 720w. The Enermax is more future proof but I will need to use adaptor cables when I go sli as it only has 3 pci-e cables. The seasonic has 4, the Corsair only 2. All 3 will easily do quad core and sli's gtx's. As everyone knows by now or should know Nvidia seriously overestimated the requirments so much so that Corsair have already been demoing their 620 with sli'd gtx's. I believe HarcOCP or MadShrimps rated it the best psu they tested. Galaxy just seems noisy now in comparison.
Heatsink :
Tuniq, Ninja, Noctua or something else ? I know the Lian Li will have the biggest limitation on what I can mount over the position of the 120mm fan. a lot of this also depends on how high the cpu socket is placed on the board. Doesn't seem too bad on the Asus though.
Soundcard : X-Fi extreme gamer (low profile job, which is missing the audio/mic outputs but comes with an intel hdaudio connector) or the pricier Fatality Pro with the 64meg of useless X-Ram.
Any advice appreciated.
I am going to be using all all the components in my sig, and recently acquired 2gig Ballistix 6400c4 and an Asus P5N32-E Plus sli. I bought the board from a mate, 1 month old, and he has already modded it and removed the crappy heatpipes and replaced with a Thermaltake Spirit 2 on the SB (which runs hot on this board I am told), and a Thermalright HR-05 SLI on the NB, and Zalman vga sinks on the mosfets/pwm area. I understand this hybrid does not have the sata/raid issues seen on the 680i.
So that leaves me with just a case, psu, cpu heatsink and soundcard to get so need some advice. Have a budget of around 700 quid. Already have a bunch of noctua,nexus and scythe fans so should be ok there.
Short list on the case is :
Antec 900 (comes with fans but is this case loud even on low setting ?)
Silverstone TJ09 (pricey, doesn't seem to cool as well as Antec according to recent review on madshrimps who thought the hdd cooling was lacking)
Lian Li A10B (problems mounting large heatsinks over top fan intruding onto mobo area)
Lian Li A16B (seems overpriced. does it use the same panels as the PC7 or is it more the v1000 variety. not sure if the hdd cage would block gtx sli setup)
PSU :
Thinking of either the Corsair HZ 620w, Seasonic M12 700w or Enermax Inifnity 720w. The Enermax is more future proof but I will need to use adaptor cables when I go sli as it only has 3 pci-e cables. The seasonic has 4, the Corsair only 2. All 3 will easily do quad core and sli's gtx's. As everyone knows by now or should know Nvidia seriously overestimated the requirments so much so that Corsair have already been demoing their 620 with sli'd gtx's. I believe HarcOCP or MadShrimps rated it the best psu they tested. Galaxy just seems noisy now in comparison.
Heatsink :
Tuniq, Ninja, Noctua or something else ? I know the Lian Li will have the biggest limitation on what I can mount over the position of the 120mm fan. a lot of this also depends on how high the cpu socket is placed on the board. Doesn't seem too bad on the Asus though.
Soundcard : X-Fi extreme gamer (low profile job, which is missing the audio/mic outputs but comes with an intel hdaudio connector) or the pricier Fatality Pro with the 64meg of useless X-Ram.
Any advice appreciated.
