Specification check...

opet616 · 26 Mar 2008 at 19:44

About to hit the magic button so just wanted some final reassurance; I think this is probably the best rig I'm going to be able to build for around £450 (I can't afford a new graphics card yet so will be using ye olde 7900gs)... however I am open to suggestions, naturally...

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8200
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R
Heatsink: Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler
Ram: Geil 2GB PC2-6400C4 Black Dragon
Hard Drive: Samsung SpinPoint T 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache
Optical Drive: Samsung SH-S203D 20x DVD±RW SATA Dual Layer ReWriter
Case: Antec 900
PSU: Corsair HX 520W

thanks

chrispystix · 26 Mar 2008 at 22:06

Looks good to me. I like ASUS motherboards (P35k) but the Gigabyte is very popular. The heatsink is good for the money, in fact mine is sitting on a quad and I get an overclock to 3.3 easy. Ram is the right speed. I have that HDD and it is great. Corsair HX620 here but to be fair the 520 will be fine.

Re Graphics, have a look at the 9600 series for price.

opet616 · 26 Mar 2008 at 23:31

Yeah. I did a hell of a lot of research so I think I've pretty much nailed that rig spec almost to perfection

. Re gfx card, I may go with something like a 9600... but I'm just hoping having new processor, ram etc will bump up my gaming performance a fair bit ( bare in mind I'm going from P4 Northwood, 1gb pc3200 etc) until I can afford a relatively high end card; so I may just wait it out until Nvidia and Ati bring their 'true' next-gen cards out.

chrispystix · 26 Mar 2008 at 23:35

It shows....

Most games are very GPU dependant now though and with the 9800 so expensive and with little benefit IMHO, if you have 22'' screen or below you will be fine with 9600 (budget) or 8800 gt (bit more). I think we may be waiting some time for anything more.

Devil_Spawn · 27 Mar 2008 at 09:36

chrispystix said:
It shows....

Most games are very GPU dependant now though and with the 9800 so expensive and with little benefit IMHO, if you have 22'' screen or below you will be fine with 9600 (budget) or 8800 gt (bit more). I think we may be waiting some time for anything more.

better cpu performance will certainly help, going from single to dual core though