Prebuilt Ultima Dreadnought Changes

Capodecina
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Morning guys,

Moved house and new PC desk on the way so ready to order my new mahcine! :D

Looking to buy a prebuilt OcUK system but to makes some changes, i'm looking at the Ultima Dreadnought and have a few queries.

1) Is it worth getting an SSD for the OS and Games etc?
2) Will I be able to use my Nvidia 8800GTX with this? I'm wanting to wait for the new ATI 6990 rather than getting a 5970 now.
3) Will the motherboard support the new 6990 when it arrives?
4) Which version of Win7 would you recommend? I've had a look at Professional looks to be right
5) Can you recommend a good 24" monitor for gaming? (Preferably with a matte casing not glossy)
6) Are there any other changes you would recommend?

Case: Antec 902 Gaming case with Nvidia Green Fans
Power Supply: Corsair TX 750W ATX Modular SLI Compliant Power Supply
CPU: Intel Core i7 950 3.06GHz Overclocked to 4.00GHz
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Intel X58 (Socket 1366) DDR3 Motherboard
Cooler: Prolimatech Megahalems Rev B CPU Cooler with 2000RPM Sharkoon Silent Eagle 120mm
RAM: Corsair XMS3 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C8 (1600MHz) Low Latency Tri-Channel
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache
Graphics Card: OcUK Value GeForce GTX 480 1536MB GDDR5
Sound : 7.1 Channel Sound (On-Board)
Optical Drive: LG DVD+/-RW SATA Drive - Black
 
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1) Worth is subjective, theyre nice yes, I use one, but its very much down to yourself if its "worth" it, depends on how much money you have to spend on overall system etc
2) You mean as a dedicated PhysX card? Should be able to yes
3) Yes
4) Again you havetn given a budget but Id recomend looking at an IPS panel such as the HP ZR24w or even the Dell, if you can afford
5) You could look to build it yourself if youre wanting a new level of customisation, if you want to stick to prebuilt then no not really, pretty solid system

N.B. You are aware the 6990 could be end of year before its out, its only the lower end cards which get released next week and the main stream ones Nov, high end cards are end of year afaik
 
Sorry 95,

I would be removing the existing card from that system and using my 8800GTX as the graphics card for a cuple of months then buying the 6990. I can't see the point in keeping the GTX in the build and then buying a 6990.

There's some flexibility with budget, don't want to go crazy as the gfx card will cost £400 plus. So a monitor around £200 would be ideal.

Overall budget is probably going to be arund £1700 but that will include a 6990, monitor, OS, mouse etc.

I could build myself but to be honest they are not charging much extra to build it and complete the OC'ing etc which comes with a gaurantee.
 
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Well you could go middle ground n get OCd bundle n build rest yourself
afaik they wont build a machine without a gfx card, this seems to be what youre saying?
re the monitor, imo its not worth spending all that money on a system and gfx card then trying to display it on a crappy monitor, there are some decent enough TN panels to be had for around 250, but I went from TN to IPs and would never go back, the image is just so much better

System below, obv you can tweak it, stuck with 902 as its same as used and went for modular psu which should help with keeping case tidy, stuck with Corsair as thats whats in the dreadnought but theres cheaper variants just as good that can be had, eg XFX or even the Sapphire, 625W shouldd still be OK for single card system, personally Id go i5 rather than i7 too, save a bit more money and unless youre doing some heavy encoding or the like its not gonna make any difference to gaming
This is just illustrative of what you could get
Untitled-23.png


or with a few of those tweaks you can include that SSD, changed case too, imo this is much nicer

Untitled-24.png
 
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Hi mate,

I purchased this monitor from Samsung, and its the best monitor I ever bought, it has 2ms, 24 inch, and HDMI.

Good review from folks who bought it too. Oh and pixels, I have no defects to my screen. Oh and its matte :). At £169.00 bargain; I paid ten more.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MO-124-SA&groupid=17&catid=510&subcat=

I am running 64 bit Home Premium and I heartily recommend it...if I might suggest, 64 bit is the modern standard, Microsoft limit RAM access to 32 bit operating systems, so 3 gig of your 6 would be wasted on an I7 machine if you bought a 32 bit os:(.

In regards to the GPU you plan to get then as long as the mobo is PCI-e (which all are these days) then there should be no problem PCI-E version 3 is not relevant as it is not out until 2012...The question you should really be asking there is whether the PSU with the system you are getting will cope with the new GPU, if its below say 550 watts it might struggle especially in an overclocked system.

In regards to the OS, a SSD is a great little add on, but it won t replace the old fashioned hard drive for a few more uses due to the very small storage of units, its an emerging tech. I have noticed on Company of Heroes that some guys are beating me to loading (but not by much), presumably because they are hard core players who now have SSD's :).

In regards to the motherboard, has it got USB3 and Sata 3? Thats the tech that would concern me on motherboards at present.

I hope that ramble helps :)

Cheers

Von
 
Thanks, i'll have to enquire about not building without a gfx card then. I could build myself and use a pre-overclocked bundle that's not too bad an idea. Although to be honest I don't really enjoy tinkering with the hardware myself anymore!

£330 seems pretty steep but as you sad there's little point in spending ~£400 on a graphics card etc and then displaying it through a poor panel, just seems expensive!
 
Hi mate,

I purchased this monitor from Samsung, and its the best monitor I ever bought, it has 2ms, 24 inch, and HDMI.

Good review from folks who bought it too. Oh and pixels, I have no defects to my screen. Oh and its matte :). At £169.00 bargain; I paid ten more.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MO-124-SA&groupid=17&catid=510&subcat=

I am running 64 bit Home Premium and I heartily recommend it...if I might suggest, 64 bit is the modern standard, Microsoft limit RAM access to 32 bit operating systems, so 3 gig of your 6 would be wasted on an I7 machine if you bought a 32 bit os:(.

In regards to the GPU you plan to get then as long as the mobo is PCI-e (which all are these days) then there should be no problem PCI-E version 3 is not relevant as it is not out until 2012...The question you should really be asking there is whether the PSU with the system you are getting will cope with the new GPU, if its below say 550 watts it might struggle especially in an overclocked system.

In regards to the OS, a SSD is a great little add on, but it won t replace the old fashioned hard drive for a few more uses due to the very small storage of units, its an emerging tech. I have noticed on Company of Heroes that some guys are beating me to loading (but not by much), presumably because they are hard core players who now have SSD's :).

In regards to the motherboard, has it got USB3 and Sata 3? Thats the tech that would concern me on motherboards at present.

I hope that ramble helps :)

Cheers

Von

Thanks for the reply :)

I'll take a look at the monitor and see, no problem with spending a little more if it's worth it. Would be great to actually see them in action side by side.

I thought that was the case with 32bit etc as it was the same with Vista, Professional it is.

I thought the gfx card would be fine as everything would be PCI-E but i've not paid much attention to hardware for a while and wanted to be sure. I probably need to understand the requirements for SLI/CrossFire as my PSU clearly states SLI.

The PSU is the prebuilt system is a 750W which I would assume is fine?

Not made my mind up about the SSD, I may leave it out for now and buy one in the future.
 
750 watts is perfect, but it might overload with perhaps two 480's...I am not certain, but from what I have read 480's suck lots and lots of wattage and might straint that PSU, SLI only works with matching GPU's you can use the 8800 GTX for physics or as a stopgap until end of year, note DX11 is here and more games over 2011 will use that...Crysis 2 from what I hear.

To conclude 750 watts would be perfect for a single 480, just check with a PSU calc for two of them.

Cheers

Von
 
Oh and one more thing, series 9 (don t know about 12 series for certain) Seagates, the majority of the ones I owned had terrible capacitor whine. I could hear the eee of it over the rest of PC...either I have too sensitive ears or Seagate use cheap boards on those HD's. I went Samsung HD's, the F3's are super super cheap at mo and the best conventional drive on the market, £42.99 for 1TB.
 
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Cheers Von, the SLI thing is really just out of interest and is a possibility much further down the line.

I'm waiting for a reply from OCuK regarding shipping a pre-built system without a graphics card.
 
If youre looking at SLi'ing/xfiring a couple of high end cards you want 850 if not 1000W PSU, SLId 480s already exceed 850 and thats without OCing, if youre planning on running a 3rd card (8800) for physX then 1200W may even be needed
 
Just wanted to bump this in case anyone has any thoughts.

Also - Are they any slightly cheaper monitors that offer the same performance/quality?
 
In short, no, theres cheaper monitors but theyre lesser quality, as before the whole TN vs IPS thing
For single card 650W is enough
I stand by the 2nd build I posted above
 
Thanks,

They can't sell without a card so rather than buy the cheapest possible one i'm thinking about just buying the system as is. The total with the peripherals etc is about £1800 anyways.

Could always SLI with another 480GTX when the need arises. The spec should easily cope with anything for a while?
 
Good review from folks who bought it too. Oh and pixels, I have no defects to my screen. Oh and its matte . At £169.00 bargain; I paid ten more.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...id=510&subcat=

Hi mate I still say you should cheack this monitor out its TN, but well its got great features and looks good on desk too. At £169.00 why pay near £400 for a same size screen with barely any noticable advantage? From what I understand TN suffers mostly from reduced viewing angles, which is not relevant, because you sit right in front of the PC monitor, its not a TV...

Cheers

Von
 
Thanks for the advice all :)

I've ordered this prebuilt but with the cheapest video card, will use my 8800GTX for now and then move to a new high end 6 series I expect.

Created a new thread for monitor advice because it's going back and forth a bit, I don't want to waste money on an IPS panel monitor if the colours etc aren't going to be as good as a cheaper TN screen. Viewing angles are not important to me at all like you've said.
 
Doesn't look like this is coming today, was dispatched yesterday but the tracking shows it as arriving at Preston but doesn't say anything about it being put on the van and delivered to my house like my last delivery did.

Gutted :(
 
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