SFF Gaming/Bit of everything spec

Newflesh2000 · 18 May 2009 at 21:40

Evening all,

Recently been playing around with the specification for a SFF system for general use but with the ability to play games reasonably well when required for my brother.

Wanted to try and stay as close to £500 as possible for the budget and I don't think i've strayed over it too badly.

This is what I'm thinking of building

After doing a bit of research i'm pretty happy with the combination of components. I know I can OC it a decent amount, but as i've never built a SFF before i'm not 100% sure that it'll all comfortably fit in that case, or if there could potentially be a better combination of components. From what i've read i'm pretty sure it would but thought I would put it up for the general opinion of the OC crowd.

Memory and hard drive are already sorted as i've suitable bits spare.

Criticise/Praise away.

Newflesh2000 · 18 May 2009 at 22:21

Geckovich said:
If you plan to overclock it would be worth getting an aftermarket cpu cooler too.

Forgot to put that I'll probably get a scythe mini ninja for it.

Newflesh2000 · 19 May 2009 at 21:20

MrMoses said:
Upgrade that processor!

Would like to, and if i did i'd probably go for a E7400 wolfdale based chip but that would push me a bit too far over budget. It would also have to do without the scythe mini ninja to help save pennies.

As far as i'm away the E5200 is a pretty overclockable chip, and evenknow i'm saving even more money on my chosed gpu at the moment, i don't think I can strech to the E7400. Besides, it can always be upgraded later on to a different chip and the E5200 could be reused in a different system.

Newflesh2000 · 19 May 2009 at 22:46

Right. I've taken a bit of a step back to try and put a bit of perspective on this. As the systems is not going to be used for heavy gaming as my own is it's probably worth the saving to drop down to a 4850 for the gpu. This will then allow me to go with an E7400 C2D wolfdale chip and only just sneak over the budget.

So this is the gpu i'm thinking of going with now. A XFX HD 4850 XXX. Looks quite good for the money.
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-127-XF&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=938

This means that for the moment the system will stay on the stock cooler as I wont bother overclocking it straight away as it's a quicker cpu. However, I may be able to get my grubby hands on a cheap Zalman CNPS9700 cooler from a mate who no longers needs it for virtually nothing. Got one of these in my main rig so I know what they're like but the question is could it be squeezed into a V315B?