thinking of upgrading?...someone wanna spec me?

[Phate]

Hey people,

in the near future im thinking of doing a major overhaul on my rig

current spec

P4 3.4 Northwood
Abit IC7 MAX3
Radeon 9800 Pro
2gb PC3200 Ram DDR


Now in the near future im thinking basically of upgrading but because its quite old kit im gonna need to upgrade everything

now i haven't read into whos better at what as far as intel and amd in dual cores go, but i do a lot of high end gaming, a fair bit of photoshop aswell. so ill go by what you people suggest.

I am an ATI fanboy though, so in the new rig i want to have a crossfire capable graphics card and later on ill more than likely by a second card.

Spec me and see what you come up with,

i'll use my current black widow case.

And i need some reccomendations as far as kooling because atm i run a standard exos watercooler which i like but its awkward if i ever goto a lan so im thinking of either upgrading my w/c to a exos 2 or go for a decent but quiet kooling setup inside the rig. so would like some reccomendations on that.

Also my psu has been sleeved by myself when i was 15 and it looks pretty terrible so would like a new one aswell, modular would be nice


also i currently have 5 internal sata drives so the motherboard will need atleast 5 ports with RAID capabilitys

as far as a budget goes.....just see what you come up with

 

[Phate]

Here you go, You didn't specify what style of RAID, if you want RAID 5 you'll have to use a PCI card for it. This mobo does do Crossfire and have 5 ports, it appears however to have had a bit of a dodgy start although it seems that most probably that was a bad run and any current boards should be ok. Quality mobo, ATI graphics ( which is the best way at the moment regardless of fanboy status ), 2 gig decent ram and a quality PSU with enough in reserve for Crossfire.

MB-131-AS Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe Crossfire (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-131-AS)
£119.95 £119.95
CP-127-AM AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4400+ (Socket 939) - Retail (ADA4400CDBOX) (CP-127-AM)
£279.95 £279.95
MY-046-GL GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC3200 Value Dual Channel Kit CAS3 (GE2GB3200BDC) (MY-046-GL)
£94.95 £94.95
GX-060-PC PowerColor ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB GDDR3 AVIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-060-PC)
£269.95 £269.95
CD-026-NE NEC ND4551 16x16 DVD±RW Dual Layer LabelFlash ReWriter (Black) - OEM (CD-026-NE)
£25.95 £25.95
FG-000-AR Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro CPU Cooler (Socket 754/939/940) (FG-000-AR)
£12.95 £12.95
CA-008-TG Tagan TG530-U15 530W ATX2.01 Easycon SLi Compliant Modular Silent PSU (CA-008-TG)
£59.95 £59.95
Subtotal £863.65
VAT £151.14
Total £1,014.79

oh sorry na i just have 2 x 160gb's in a RAID0 thats all

hmm looks nice, ok can ditch the dvdrw ill take it out of my current rig, is that PSU modular? the is that motherboard DDR2 ram? if its just DDR i can take that from my current rig

 

[Phate]

AMD's are all DDR

As for the PSU :-

Easycon SLi Compliant MODULAR Silent PSU

It's also very quiet .

hehe

i read the majority of your reply im aloud to miss out the modular bit

nice so subtract the ram from that and the dvd drive thats a pretty sweet spec.

 

[Phate]

That's a great spec!



In which case you can add an XT-X to the above spec just for the sake of buying top-of-the-range

I'd also recommend a real beefy PSU as I'm sure you won't want to upgrade it again when you buy the second X1900.

yeh im requoting now ill post in a sec but using whats above as a guideline, im informed that the psu suggested is manly enough to handle it all. if not what do you suggest?