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oli collett

oli collett

oli collett

Soldato
Joined
19 Apr 2004
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4,790
Location
London
Hi,

I'm looking at upgrading my current PC in a couple of weeks time and i'm after some advice on some components. Processor wise I'm probably going to go for the E6600 (it seems the chip to buy at the moment!) but i'm unsure on motherboards. I've currently got an Athlon XP machine which is a tad old so i'll need to ditch the lot really and start from scratch. I've got around £1000 to spend (willing to go a few 100 over though) and I'd also like to get water cooling (probably the reserator 2) to dampen noise levels and give me better performance. I'm also looking at getting an 8800GTS (probably 640mb of ram on my budget) and I expect I will have to replace my Tagan 480w PSU to power the whole lot! I also want to change my optical drives to SATA ones, mainly to tidy up the insides of my case! I'll also want 2gb of RAM (seems standard today?)

So far i'm loooking at:
Intel Core 2 DUO E6600 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail £197
G.Skill 2GB DDR2 PK PC2-6400 (2x1GB) CAS4 Dual Channel Kit (F2-6400 £123
BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC 640MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail £264
Zalman Reserator2 Fanless Water Cooling System £205
Abit AW9D-MAX Intel 975X (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £123
Tagan TG580-U15 580W ATX2.01 Easycon SLi Compliant Modular Silent PSU £79 (will 580w be enough?)

Just under £1000 there, but I might add a new hard drive or two as well, I've currently got a pair of Samsung spinpoint 160gig drives in RAID 0, i presume it will be ok transferring this array to another motherboard, obviously providing the board has RAID? Hard drive wise I was tihnking of a pair of 250gig WD Caviar SE16. Will I need a seperate waterblock for my 8800GTS and if so are there even any out there yet that will fit?

Does the motherboard support quad cores? if not i might prefer to go with one that does for futureproofing sake. Oh and if someone could recommend a decent SATA dvd writer it would be much appreciated!

Sorry for all the questions!

Cheers
 
Got no experience or knowledge in water-cooling so I can't help you there unfortunately. The motherboard you have suggested doesn't support Quad core, you need something that has an FSB of 1333MHz. The brand new abit offering here supports Quad core and is suppose to be a decent board performance and stability wise. I would swap that ram for GeIL C4 too which is also on special offer this week. Snap those up they are absolute bargains! :)

EDIT: Just noticed another bargain... http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CD-076-SA one of the few SATA optical drives and its on offer this week ALSO, seems its your week ;):)
 
Better to start of with a high end air cooled setup, and move to water IF you need to. I would recommend the mobo Mishima said, or the Asus P5N 650, P5B or DS3/4. You also want a good air cooler on the CPU with a quiet fan, so the Scythe Ninja would be a good idea.

If you get decent fans (scythe, yate loon, nexus, noctua) then the noise isn't that high and although expensive for fans, they are still a lot cheaper (and as effective) as an entry level water setup.

I have that sata DVD writer Mishima recommends, it is very fast, go for it :D 2GB is the standard for RAM also.
 
I still can't make my mind up about motherboards. This is a nightmare.

I think i'm going to end up with 4 SATA hard drives + 1 SATA DVD drive. I'm now looking at the Asus P5N-E SLI, but it seems a pain to overclock (needing some kind of pencil mod?) The Abit IN9 Fatal1ty seems to have a variety of issues too, plus it's lacking a SATA port. Then of course there's the Intel boards, the gigabyte boards seem good but the DS3 + DS4 seem to be only 1066FSB as does the DQ6 (although the Gigabyte site seems to differ). Then there is the 975x boards which seem expensive for the features and they all seem to lack 1333FSB bar the Intel BX, and lastly, the 680i boards all seem to have problems running too hot!

I keep reading more and more and i'm just getting myself puzzled. What happened to the good old days where you would choose from 1-2 boards!
 
It depends how much you're going to overclock, as to whether you'd need the pencil mod.

An example. I overclocked my 680i from 266MHz to 340MHz, giving a 3GHz 36600 CPU.

A friend of mine lapped his CPU (e4300), Northbridge, and CPU HSF, overclocked it with the case off and the fans on max and got it to 3.7GHz (from 1.8!).

If you overclock like me then the pencil mod wouldn't come into it. Like my friend, then it would come into it.
 
melbourne720 said:
It depends how much you're going to overclock, as to whether you'd need the pencil mod.

An example. I overclocked my 680i from 266MHz to 340MHz, giving a 3GHz 36600 CPU.

A friend of mine lapped his CPU (e4300), Northbridge, and CPU HSF, overclocked it with the case off and the fans on max and got it to 3.7GHz (from 1.8!).

If you overclock like me then the pencil mod wouldn't come into it. Like my friend, then it would come into it.
Click to expand...

Well I'm looking at taking the 6600 to about 3.2 but i want it stable. I really want a board that will be stable, give a reasonable overclock, allow me to cool quietly (I've ditched water for air now) and I'm not really worried about SLI.

So right now, the ASUS P5N-E is top of the list. I was going to replace the Northbridge heatsink with a Thermalright one and also add a heatsink to the southbridge, but i can't find one that is appropriate right now, can you just use Northbridge coolers?
 
I think so, most of the heat-generating stuff (FSB, memory speeds etc) is on the northbridge. I wouldn't worry about extra-cooling for the southbridge tbh.

Taking a e6600 to 3.2 should be easy enough on a P5N-E.
 
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