New rig

ben_k

ben_k

ben_k

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Joined
30 Dec 2007
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96
Location
England
I'm looking into buying a good pc that will last me some time and I've come up with this.

I would like to know if all the parts I've listed will work with each other and not conflict, that way I'm not wasting my money - any reply would be appreciated greatly.

PSU: Coolermaster Real Power 1000w Modular Power Supply

CASE: Coolermaster RC-1000 Cosmos Silent Full Tower Case £117.49 inc VAT

SOUND CARD: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Professional Series 7.1 Sound Card

OPTICAL DRIVE: Asus DRW-2014L1T 20x DVD±RW SATA Dual Layer Lightscribe ReWriter

HARD DRIVE: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM

GRAPHICS CARD: Asus GeForce 8800 Ultra HTDP 768MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express)

MOTHERBOARD: Asus Striker II Formula nForce 780i (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard

RAM/MEMORY: Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2 Dominator PC2-8500C5 TwinX (2x1GB)

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 "LGA775 Conroe" 3.00GHz (1333FSB)

NETWORK CARD: KillerNIC M1 Network Card with 400Mhz Processing Unit, RJ-45 and USB 2.0

OS: Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 SP2c Single Pack (OEM)

I'm not sure on the OS but apparently Vista is too much of a puzzle and some games don't like it. If you can convince me ill switch.

Thanks
 
It'll all work together, but you're spending way way way too much. The NIC card is completely unnecessary and the Ultra is not much faster than the new G92 GTSes. A 1kW PSU is overkill. I think we can save you a lot of money and deliver equivalent performance.

How much did this cost? Will you be overclocking?
 
was going to say the exact same thing

seems to be just spending money for the hell of it

is this mainly going to be a gaming machine
 
Hello ben_k and welcome to the forums. :)

The specification that you have done is a little over the top in my opinion. You won't be needing a 1000 wattage power supply, a good branded 500-600 wattage power supply will be more then efficient.

The Asus 8800 Ultra is not worth the extra £200 other the OcUK GeForce 8800 GTX.

If you are not looking to run Dual cards in your system then their is honestly no reason to go for an Nvidia chipset board. For a single card setup, you would be far better of purchasing one of the P35 chipset boards.

You do not need 8500 memory, 6400 is more than efficient and quite honestly, i would be extremely surprised if you would notice the difference between the two in real life situations.

In my opinion the Core 2 Duo E6850 is not worth the money, especially as you could get the Q6600 cheaper.

That is one of the most expensive network cards i have seen and is certainly not worth spending £170 on a network card. :p

As regards to the Operating System, if you are looking at purchasing one, i would highly consider Windows Vista. The support for Windows Vista is now excellent. The majority of the manufacturers out their have now released 64-bit drivers for their hardware and as regards to software, once again, the majority of software now work perfectly fine under Windows Vista.

Since there are a number of different versions of Windows Vista, you may not be completely sure on which one to purchase if you are looking to by Vista. Here is a great graph that compares all of the editions of Windows Vista with one another. The two you are most likely looking at are Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate. I have used both Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate and in my opinion, Ultimate is not worth the extra £50 over Home Premium.

As far as gamming performance goes, in my opinion it is now exactly the same as Windows XP in regards to DirectX 9 performance. Have a read through this article. Now DirectX 10 performance is a completely different matter and it is actually slightly better to play games that are capable of DirectX 10 under DirectX 9. Now I believe that this is more due to DirectX 10 itself needing to time to mature and not down to Windows Vista and in certain games as Crysis, the hardware simply needs time to catch up.

Just to open up your options a bit more, I have done an alternate specification for you. :)

Specification-6.jpg
 
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My take:
overclockersukyourbaskedu8.gif

I didn't include an OS since OcUK doesn't sell XP-64, an OS that I think is pretty darned good. This PSU will me more than powerful enough. The processor and graphics card are better choices for cost effectiveness and for future performance. The 'card is better than a GTX in most games, especially Crysis. The 7200.11s are having firmware-related issues that severely hamper performance so I chose a different disk.
 
G92 GTSes all have 512 MB memory. The older ones have 320 or 640 MB. Avoid those unless they're wicked cheap.

The above 620 W Corsair PSU is the one to get.
 
This Q6600, how does that differ in performance to a E6850 because a E6850 is 3.0GHz and the Q6600 is 2.4GHz. I understand one is quad and the other is dual but with major multiple applications open (most of the time my desktop is like this) like recording programs, crysis and photoshop open with IE how do the 2 differ?

Would it be possible for someone to also explain how the dual and quad work becuase I've never had one.
 
In a situation like that the quad would be preferrable. In essence there are two or four processors inside the one package. The OS is tasked with assigning processes to the cores to balance loads. Some applications, such as most video and photo apps, are programmed to use more than one core simultaneously. These are called multithreaded applications.

Single threaded applications behave just as they would on a single core system, using but one processor at a time. The rest would be available for other applications to use.
 
Ah ok, thats got me thinking now.

So these multithreaded applications surely cant use more than 2 CPUs at a time becuase thats just pushing it.

Say I run just Crysis, xfire, msn that can't surely use more than 2 CPUs maybe 3 but only a bit of the 3rd.

So if I have a core 2 I have 2 CPUs running at 3.0GHz but on the Quad I have 4 running on 2.4Ghz I'm only using 2 and they are at 2.4GHz each with 2 idle.

I have less power on the cores and I'm only using 2 anyway.

If im wrong stop me now from looking like a idiot.
 
It depends on the application. For instance, Photoshop and Vegas will each use as many processors as you throw at it. Supreme Commander makes use of at least a few. Crysis (IIRC) makes heavy use of one and lighter use of a few more.

All in all I think the quad is the better bet for you. More and more games and applications are becoming multithreaded and even at stock speeds it's no slouch.

I should also note that with any of the motherboards mentioned overclocking to 3 GHz is just about effortless.
 
Im not sure about your budget.. but it may be a good idea to throw in a Raptor Hard-drive for the OS and Applications (recommend 150gb) Should be a good investment.
 
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