New Rig

[TomL]

Short description of why I'm buying new componants:

2 years of using a Sempron 3100+ 754 machine, x2 512MB PC3200 Crucial Dual Channel, 9550SE HIS Radeon and the frames per second on anything are somewhat lacking nowadays.

Stuff I'll be buying:

Intel Core 2 DUO E6400 "LGA775 Allendale" 2.13GHz (1066FSB) - Retail (CP-127-IN)
Gigabyte GA_965P_DS3 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard (MB-061-GI)
Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2-6400C5 TwinX (2x1GB) (MY-092-CS)
Connect3D ATI Radeon X1900 XT 256MB GDDR3 AVIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-053-CO)
Western Digital Raptor 36GB WD360ADFD 10,000RPM SATA 16MB Cache - OEM (HD-095-WD)
Scythe Ninja Plus Rev.B Heatpipe CPU Cooler (478/754/939/940/AM2/LGA755) (HS-003-SY)

Stuff I've bought recently:

Coolermaster Stacker 830
Enermax 620W Liberty PSU
Saitek Illuminated Keyboard
Razer Copperhead 2000DPi mouse
Samsung 930BF 19" TFT

I'll be salvaging the CDROM/DVD combination drive and x2 76GB WD Caviar HDD's from my previous machine, plus the soundcard.

Thoughts and suggestions please?

 

[TomL]

Seems like a good setup to me, only thing I would say is, perhaps you should go for the E6300 instead, as I understand they both have the same amount of cache, and the E6300 clocks very well, so why waste money ?

Everything else looks good

My possibly flawed logic behind deciding on the 6400 was that it had a higher base clock speed than the 6300 for an extra £42, therefore I assumed it'd be able to clock higher if I were to OC it regardless. Not that I am a fan of OC'ing anyway, meaning the higher base clock speed benefits me there if I didn't OC.

But if it isn't worth the £42 then f' it I'll buy the 6300!

edit: included quote

 

[TomL]

Well if you didn't spend so much on the mouse and keyboard and you no doubt would have been cheaper to get a 150-250 GB 7200 RPM hd. Therfore saving you like 100 notes or something, meaning you could have got the E6600. Standard keyboard and mouse = £10.

I'd gotten tired of using the standard keyboard and mouse, the Saitek keyboard is meant to be good anyway (peoples opinions of it on here anyway), and the Copperhead I feel enables me to play Counter-Strike: Source better

I could just wait for next months wages and cash in on the E6600, it is an extra £78 compared to the E6400 just for the extra cache and slightly higher clock speed though...

EDIT: I'm not very good at prioritizing, at all. If I had common sense I wouldn't have gone for the expensive peripherals and saved up for the better hardware first. Unfortunately I didn't seek anyones opinion on that matter before I spent over £400 on the PSU, case, keyboard and mouse... plus I bought Windows XP Professional aswell

 

[TomL]

The copperhead is fine but the diamondback would have done you fine, you wouldn't use 2000dpi in fps games anyway, 1600 is usually the limit for the 'experience'. 2000dpi is usually for RTS games, but either or.

I have it set on 2000dpi all the time, I just turned the sensitivity down to about 1/3 of the highest setting and it seems to work alright like that. My mouse sensitivity on CS is 3.0 so that's quite low aswell.

 

[TomL]

I appreciate the feed back Macabre and kmistry, about cooling Macabre:

I'm using a CM Stacker 830 case, it's very large and houses 7 120mm fans iirc. I'm hoping that will be enough to keep my CPU at a suitabley cool level, if it isn't then it's not worth the noise it's making

 

[TomL]

I'll check back on this later in the evening

 

[TomL]

Does anyone else have any thoughts about what I'm buying before I click purchase?