New pc..suggestions

martinb

martinb

martinb

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Joined
6 Mar 2006
Posts
4
Hi,

Decided it’s finally time to buy a new pc as my current PC really is a bit out dated (barton 2500, ati 9700pro, 1gb pc3200 ram e.t.c).

Anyway my budget is around £1000 though I would spend a little more if needed.

I use my pc mainly for online games and am often using the internet and doing other things whilst running these games (very slow on my current pc), I also own a 19” LCD so all my games have to be run at 1280x1024, you can probably tell from my current pc I don’t upgrade that often, so would like something that is fairly future proof.

Haven’t been looking long so I have just pulled a quick spec off overclockers as a starting point.


MSI ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB GDDR3 £340.69
AMD Opteron UP 165 £264.32
Antec P150 Quiet PC Case - 430w HE Modular PSU £103.34
Corsair 2GB DDR XMS4000PT TwinX (2x1GB) £152.69
Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 80GB 800JD SATA 8MB £37.54
Abit AT8 ATI RD480 Crossfire (Socket 939) £88.07

Total £986.65

Would appreciate comments/changes in the above spec, any bottlenecks that would be worth while paying a bit more for? Anything I can get away with down grading and paying a little less for?

Is that case ok to fit everything in and is the power supply going be enough? I will probably over clock the chip but run gfx card at stock. Also the plan is eventually to get a second graphics card would I need to get a higher watt power supply for that?

Another thing which is worrying me is I have a Samsung 913 N which doesn’t have a dvi port I noticed all the new gfx cards only have dvi output can you buy a converter and do you loose any quality?

Also could anyone recommend a good heat sink and fan for the chip.

I’m currently using win xp, any point in getting windows xp x64?

Sorry for the million questions, buying a new pc always gives me a headache when there’s so much to choose from!
 
For the heatsink have a look at the Ninja, Typhoon and Freezer 64. Most people seem to be using one of those.

I wouldn't bother with XP64 yet unless your a software developer - that's still moving quite slowly, and it can still be tricky to get drivers for the system.

Graphics cards normally come with a little convertor in the box to change the DVI outputs to VGA ones. You do loose quality by doing this as it's no longer a purely digital path to your monitor, but it's still perfectly usable at a resolution of 1280x1024.
 
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MSI ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB GDDR3 £340.69 - fantastic card

AMD Opteron UP 165 £264.32 - fantastic CPU (especially if overclocking)

Antec P150 Quiet PC Case - 430w HE Modular PSU £103.34 - PSU is good for single card, but if want to keep PSU & want crossfire later probalby best to upgrade to a quality 550w+ PSU

Corsair 2GB DDR XMS4000PT TwinX (2x1GB) £152.69 - good stuff

Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 80GB 800JD SATA 8MB £37.54 - fine

Abit AT8 ATI RD480 Crossfire (Socket 939) £88.07 - good solid mobo
 
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