New motherboard, RAM, CPU, GFX spec please!

Arakarth

Arakarth

Arakarth

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Joined
15 Nov 2006
Posts
47
Hey guys, after posting separate threads, I decided just to post one thread in here instead!
Basically looking at spending roughly £500 on an fairly large upgrade that'll be used mainly for gaming, so I'll be wanting to overclock everything.
Been thinking of getting the E2180 but now the E2200 has arrived should i get that instead? Cooler wise I've heard very good things about the Tuniq Tower 120, would that be the flavour of the day? :rolleyes:
For the motherboard I've heard good things about the Asus P5K series as well as the Gigabyte DS3/DS4/DQ6. Which one would give me the best stability and overclocking headroom?
For the RAM, would it be benificial to get 4Gb over 2Gb? I've seen the G.Skill 2x2Gb sets are they good value for money?
Been reading reviews for the 8800GT range of GFX cards, seems that they can outperform the much more expensive Ultra and GTX lines so I've been thinking about geting one of these, any recommendations as to which one?
Finally, I've currently got a Seasonic 600W PSU would this power the upgrade? If not I'd like to get a new modular PSU instead as the cables are really annoying!:confused:

Thanks for any help guys, Joe
 
Well this is my personal preferance to what you need, the Abit boards are top notch and highly regarded for the overclocking around here as for ram the 4gb kit fitted in with your budget so i put it in over the 2gb just for bang for buck.
I listed the cheapest 8800 as pre oc ones only stand a minimul chance of a better overclock you should still get a very nice OC on this one.
2 hard drives is a must one for OS and one for storage and the tuniq is there for the e2200 wich should hit some nice speeds aswell.
lastly your power supply is ample for this rig and a moduler psu would push your budget closer to the £600 mark rather than the £500 one for a gaming rig and no sense cutting back the main rig spec when you have a plenty good enough one to start with.

Untitled-8.jpg
 
This should do the trick :)

Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler (Socket LGA775) £14.99
(£17.61) £14.99
(£17.61)

GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400C4 800MHz Ultra Low Latency DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (GX22GB6400UDC) £25.99
(£30.54) £25.99
(£30.54)

Intel Core 2 Duo E2180 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.00GHz (800FSB) - Retail £47.99
(£56.39) £47.99
(£56.39)

Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £64.99
(£76.36) £64.99
(£76.36)

OcUK GeForce 8800 GT 512MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail £139.99
(£164.49) £139.99
(£164.49)


Total : £355.91

edit: And the PSU should be able it powers my rig (see sig, and add 2 hard drives, and a DVD writer).
 
Lol i went crazy its allmost a new build completely though the dvd writer would dismiss ide cables if power supply cable are a pain for you scrap the hard drives and save some cash aswell
 
I've got 2 BenQ DVD rewriters anyway and plenty of HDD space so I wont be needing anything else there lol!
Melbourne, why'd you choose the E2180 over the E2200 any particular reason?
Damian, thanks for that spec minus the bits i dont need that comes in at £400 which is very nice :P
 
Its a good price isnt it, its getting amaizing the machines you can build on budgets these days PC users really are benefiting greatly at the moment.
I dont know why melbourne would choose the E2180 over the E2200 but personally if your looking to overclock the cpu and im not mistaken, the E2200 has a higher multiplyer wich allways helps in attaining a greater stable OC so that would be my choice and the price differance is £3 so really isnt an issue either way.
 
Thats what I was thinking. What about that Corsair RAM? Does it have what it takes in terms of overclocking potential? Haven't OC'd RAM before and I'd like to give it a go!


{EDIT}

Also, just remembered, XP home doesn't recognise 4Gb RAM as it's a 32 bit OS. So the only way to get it to recognise the full 4Gbs would be to either use XP Pro x64 Edition (which i have a legal copy of) or go pay for Vista. That's correct isn't it?
 
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I havnt personally OC'd corsair ram before but i would be highly surprised if it didnt oc well with the company it comes form.
though i wouldnt expect to see a vast improovmant with the ram overclocked as the OC on that chip will be massive. If other core 2 cpus are anything to go buy i would be aiming for 3.2 atleast and should be achivable with that board.
bare in ind though you will have to use a 64bit version of either xp or vista for the 4gb of ram as 32bit operating systems dont recognise 4gb.
 
XP 32 bit recognises upto 3 and a bit Gb doesn't it? I seem to recall reading somewhere about changing/hacking something in XP to get it to recognise if not all of the 4Gb then more than the normal? The rest is turned over to page file or something isn't it? Would it actually be worth getting the 4Gb then as I don't especially want to use Xp x64 edition as I found in the past quite a lot of the games I was trying to play would either BSOD or freeze totally.
 
I would think that xp would be patched well enough to overcome such problems as that, but there again if you are gaming in XP wich compared to vista isnt that resource hungry and prooven to be better in bench's for gaming then 4gb may be a little over kill.
But bare in mind that the price of 4gb is exceptionally low at the moment and not garunteed for the future so its good future proofing in some senses and 64bit will be a standerd eventually so it may be worth investigating on here if there are still issues with 64bit and gaming as 4gb would be my avice in a price, handyness aspect though.
 
damian666 said:
I dont know why melbourne would choose the E2180 over the E2200...
Click to expand...

Only because it is cheaper, and the final overclock (assuming you overclock) is unlikely to be limited by the multiplier. Essentially it doesn't really matter, as the e2180 and e2200 are both the same stepping of chip.

Say you overclock to 3 GHz on both chips:-

e2180 10x300 = 3GHz
e2200 11x275 = 3.025GHz

Not much difference. The faster chip puts the motherboard under slightly less strain. The average P35 motherboard will get a chip up to 400MHz without much problem. Lets see what that would do to the chips in our example:-

e2180 10x400 = 4GHz
e2200 11x400 = 4.4GHz

Both clock speeds would need cooling disproportionately more expensive cooling than the cost of the chip (high end water, LiN2, Phase, etc...).

I just think that the multiplier on these chips is unlikely to be the limiting factor like it was when the e6300 was the lowest end core 2 duo.
 
Thanks for that clarification melbourne. Think I'll go for the E2200. Also going to go for the GEiL RAM instead and possibly get another set at a later date.
Also go for Artic Silver 5 for the thermal compound yes?
 
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