Specing My Gaming PC

pjgreg04

pjgreg04

pjgreg04

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9 Aug 2010
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2
Hi All,

Its been a while coming but im finally going to bite the bullet and get myself a gaming PC and move away from my console to do some PC sim racing.

Ill like to think I was quite a techie but its must be at least 10 years since I built my last system. I've spent the last couple of days trying to figure out what I wanted I plan on progressing to a multi screen system to go with my cockpit build but at the min I currently only have the one 22" monitor/TV the system is mainly going to be used for gaming and my budget is £1000, I have come up with the following shopping list....

- OcUK Motherboard Bundle - Intel Core i5 2500K & Asus P8Z68-V Intel Z68 Mainboard
- OcUK ATI Radeon 6970 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card
- Cooler Master CM690-II Lite Dominator Case with GX650w Power Supply
- Seagate Barracuda 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (ST1000DL002)
- Corsair Vengeance 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual/Quad Channel Kit (CMZ16GX3M4A1600C9)
- OCZ Agility 3 60GB 2.5" SATA-3 Solid State Hard Drive (AGT3-25SAT3-60G)
- LG BH10LS38 10x BluRay-RW / 16 x DVD±RW Lightscribe Drive - Black (OEM)
- AeroCool Touch 2000 4-Channel LCD Touch Panel Fan Controller
- Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 CPU Cooler (Socket 939/AM2/AM3/775/1155/1156/1366)

Total comes to just over £1000.

So I was just after some feedback really what do people think? Anything I should have in the list anything that I should....
 
The OCZ Agility drives have issues if my memory serves me right so I would swap to the M4 instead. You might also struggle with the RAM due to its height and the big cooler you have choosen so I would go with some low profile RAM like the Corsair XMS3 :) having 16GB RAM is rather overkill so you could save money by just have 8GB.

I am not sure on the PSU that comes with case I have heard that as a general rule they are not wonderful.

Anyway I have done a spec for you and changed a few things so see what you think;

YOUR BASKET
1 x MSI GeForce GTX 570 OC Twin FrozR III Power Edition 1280MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £269.99
1 x Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail £179.99
1 x Crucial RealSSD M4 128GB 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Hard Drive (CT128M4SSD2) £151.99
1 x Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3 Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard £99.98
1 x Seagate Barracuda 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (ST1000DL002) £97.99
1 x LG BH10LS38 10x BluRay-RW / 16 x DVD±RW Lightscribe Drive - Black (OEM) £69.98
1 x Antec TruePower New Modular 650W '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply £69.98
1 x Cooler Master HAF 912 Plus Case - Black £69.98
1 x Corsair XMS3 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (CMX8GX3M2A1600C9) £41.99
1 x Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 CPU Cooler (Socket 939/AM2/AM3/775/1155/1156/1366) £17.99
Total : £1,084.87 (includes shipping : £12.50).

The motherboard has Xfire and SLI support should you wish to do that at a later date but you would probably have to upgrade the PSU to do so. Used just 8GB of RAM instead of the 16GB and changed the video card to nVidia since I find they seem to work better with Intel boards (whether this is true or not is something else just my personal preference). Also included the Crucial M4 SSD which is regarded as a excellent SSD drive :)

Stoner81.
 
Thanks for the feedback will have to have a proper look when I get home still at work at the min off for the rest of the week hopefully going to pop down to oc to make my purchase this weekend..
I was going with the ati graphics because of the eyefinity support for when I get my triple screens sorted. Will I still be able to operate a decent triple screen setup with the gtx 570?
Nice pointer with the ram aswell not something I think I would have spotted. :)
 
With the blu-ray, you want to buy the retail version so that you get the software you need to be able to playback blu-ray DVD's, people say OEM does NOT come with this software, but I ordered a samsung blu-ray drive from a competitor, and it DID actually come with the software, even though it is an OEM one.

So you could take the risk of saving some money and getting an OEM one, and you 'might' get the software. Or buy the retail version and you will definitely get the software

You could get the OEM, and if it doesn't have the software, you could RMA it and swap it for a retail version.
 
pjgreg04 said:
Thanks for the feedback will have to have a proper look when I get home still at work at the min off for the rest of the week hopefully going to pop down to oc to make my purchase this weekend..
I was going with the ati graphics because of the eyefinity support for when I get my triple screens sorted. Will I still be able to operate a decent triple screen setup with the gtx 570?
Nice pointer with the ram aswell not something I think I would have spotted. :)
Click to expand...

nVidia do have a similar setup for using the 3 monitor (3D) set up but I have absolutely no experience in that regard so I would rather not give you advice about something I don't know ;)

If you are indeed going down to the shop then you could always make a note of this thread to show them and ask the guys in store I am sure they would be able to answer any and all questions you may have :)

Stoner81.
 
I was under the impression that to do nvidia surround (I think thats their 3 monitor setup) that you need to have 2 cards in SLi together as a single card can only handle 2 outputs. (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong)
 
DazQ87 said:
I was under the impression that to do nvidia surround (I think thats their 3 monitor setup) that you need to have 2 cards in SLi together as a single card can only handle 2 outputs. (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong)
Click to expand...

Basically correct.

You need 2 GPU's in SLI for Nvidia Surround so 2 single GPU cards or a dual GPU card like the GTX 590 would do the job.
 
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