New build , opinions wanted.

Armadillo · 28 Apr 2006 at 00:16

Putting together new build to go with the 7800GTX I got the other day.

Asus A8N-SLi SE nForce4 SLi £76.32
AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego 90nm OEM £135.07
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 NCQ 250GB 8MB Cache £63.39
G.Skill 2GB DDR ZX PC3200 (2x1GB) CAS2 Dual Channel Kit £152.69
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 4 7.1 OEM £35.19

£462.66.

Already have everything else needed. Just want some general opinions really , will it go well with the 7800GTX?.

Can't really go anymore , already at a strech to get the 2GB ram , so anything replaced has to be cheaper or same price.

Thanks

.

Monstermunch · 28 Apr 2006 at 00:48

The MSI board is the best around for the price and IMO you'd have a much better system with cheaper ram and a Dual core chip. Also the on-board sound is very good these days so you don't really need a seperate soundcard:

CP-134-AM AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ (Socket 939) - Retail (ADA3800BVBOX) (CP-134-AM)
£183.95 £183.95
MB-046-MS MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum nForce4 Ultra (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-046-MS)
£64.95 £64.95
MY-046-GL GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC3200 Value Dual Channel Kit CAS3 (GE2GB3200BDC) (MY-046-GL)
£94.95 £94.95
HD-018-SA Samsung SpinPoint P SP2504C 250GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-018-SA)
£51.95 £51.95
Subtotal £395.80
Shipping (City Link Parcel Next Day (Delivered Mon-Fri)) £8.25
VAT £70.71
Total £474.76

meths · 28 Apr 2006 at 01:40

^^^ I agree ^^^

SiriusB · 28 Apr 2006 at 01:44

Thumbs up here too

SiriusB

Efour · 28 Apr 2006 at 03:12

i run a 7800gtx and 3700sd @2600mhz (crap ram i have)

and its nice, i cant play above 1600x1200 rez tho on my CRT and rarely go above 1280x960 because its a bit of a lagger.

pretty good for and HL source games (180fps in benchmark) and was great on FEAR

Gun9 · 28 Apr 2006 at 10:00

monstermunch [no1 specster] does it again :cool:

Armadillo · 28 Apr 2006 at 23:11

K thanks for the help

. Board I will change then as I don't really need sli now that I think about it.

As for the cpu I'm not to sure about , I looked at some benchmarks before and it seems in a lot of games the 3700 was quicker as it's clocked faster and the games was not using both cores on the X2. The machine will not be used for anything but games really ,so will the X2 still be better?. Not interested in overclocking it , so out of the box performance

.

Monstermunch · 29 Apr 2006 at 00:14

Armadillo said:
As for the cpu I'm not to sure about , I looked at some benchmarks before and it seems in a lot of games the 3700 was quicker as it's clocked faster and the games was not using both cores on the X2. The machine will not be used for anything but games really ,so will the X2 still be better?. Not interested in overclocking it , so out of the box performance .

Quake 4 benchmarks with the dual core patch are reporting 60% speed increase over single core. Buying now and not buying dual core is a bit silly IMO

SiriusB · 29 Apr 2006 at 01:12

Yeah, dual core is the way to go and it doesn't break the bank either. It's true that in some games and applications you dont see any improvements in performance, but thats because said software is usually single-threaded. However, more and more developers are creating multi-threaded applications and a lot of games developers are creating patches for existing titles.

It shouldnt be too long before multi-core CPUs are the norm. So as Monstermunch says - it would be silly not to go dual core

SiriusB