Which Bundle To Buy?

I believe, if you have asked these question, which mean you have enough money and ready to pay for any of those two. So in this case, you got money, why not i7 ?

Seriously, it is overkill for now, but you want a system which last 5 years right ? Then i7 bundle is better. And even in the next 5 years, you want to upgrade, and I believe at this time, there are more suitable CPU option with the 1366 socket than 1156.
 
If the main use of the pc is just for photoshopping, web browsing and file transferring you have to think 5 years down the road will these tasks really be any more demanding on pc hardware? probably not much.

Fact is a cheap Core 2 quad is pretty future proof and well above what is needed for general photo editing etc...

A C2Q setup with 8 gig of ram is going to set you back between 300-350 (cpu, mb, ram and cooler) a heck of a lot less than an overkill i7 oc bundle!

IMO 4 cores and that much ram is pretty damn future proof for your needs and will cost you considerably less dosh which you can spend on other things like crazy fast drives etc..
 
mkohman said:
4 - THe kingston HDD if I were to Raid the 2 49gb HDD will itr be faster than a single crucial m225. I like the idea of m225 as supports trimming..
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Raid of the 2 SSD's will give a very small if any real life improvment but double the chance of failing, I would go with the m225.
 
Sligu said:
Raid of the 2 SSD's will give a very small if any real life improvment but double the chance of failing, I would go with the m225.
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I would respectfully disagree. Magnetic drives in RAID 0 are known to give issues, but this is RAM. You're not physically moving a head or anything like that, so you can pick a small cluster size with no reliability concerns. Keep it backed up and be amazed how fast it runs. It will be roughly 50% faster than a single drive overall.

The Kingstons are the older model Intel drive (basically half an 80Gb Intel drive) and the latest firmware does support TRIM, but TRIM is Windows 7 only and doesn't work in RAID either. I'm a great believer in RAIDing SSDs for the OS (I have 4 Kingstons in RAID 0 in my main work machine - £280 for a 160Gb drive that blows away any single drive)

Keep this for a boot disk (and your Pagefile), keep it backed up and you'll have no issues with it at all. And if you routinely format the RAID, restore your backup, you're basically doing the same as TRIM anyway.
 
Sligu said:
Raid of the 2 SSD's will give a very small if any real life improvment but double the chance of failing, I would go with the m225.
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Very small if any improvement?
My dear friend you should do some homework and read more about how drives in raid work, especially raid 0 setup.

And as WJ said already, the failure chance on SSDs is as big as the one on your RAM sticks which is low enough to not even consider it.

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Now on the main topic, I guess I'd go with i5 if you really don't want a cheaper AMD setup (which will be plenty good for your needs anyways), and don't bother with OCed bundle just get your own setup and OC it yourself if you feel the need of extra mhz's.


May I just ask yet another question, what's your current setup ?
 
I noticed no REAL life difference when using Raid, Yes the benchmarks show a 25- 50% increase in results But if you compare the m225(128gb) to the Kingston its already 40% faster and has a quicker access time. Just my view.
 
I think you have a perfectly valid point Sligu. Benchmarks don't give a real life indication of very much, just the ultimate capabilities of what the hardware can do. I think my wife would agree with you that she sees little practical benefit to having a fast PC, as she simply doesn't exploit it's full capabilities in real life. RAID 0 is fantastic for reads. That's pretty much it's whole trick. If you have the available bandwidth (2 or more fast HDD) and a good controller (ICH10R is a very good controller) you should see real life benefits, even if it's just Windows and games starting faster.

It's definitely possible to configure a system so it performs badly - cluster size is a hotly debated topic at the moment for example - and with new technology like SSDs there are huge amounts of things we don't know in terms of optimising systems, but that's why people like us are happy to take a punt and rig up RAID arrays. If it works we keep it, if it doesn't we try something else.

If you compare the 128Gb Crucial to a single Kingston then it will be faster. It certainly used to be the case that much of the speed increase was due to the manufacturers using RAID already on the drives so a 64Gb fast drive was two 32Gb drives in RAID 0 and that's exactly why the 40Gb Kingston isn't as fast as it's 80Gb Intel sibling.

Where I would take issue with you is to compare the 128Gb Crucial drive - if we are spending that much money then I'll have my 4 Kingstons (160Gb) in RAID 0 with a small cluster size every time.

For the same money as the 64Gb Crucial you can have 80Gb of Kingston and it'll be just as fast, if not faster.

And as always in these things, it's just my opinion. It is nice to have a civilised discussion about it though, don't you think?
 
I think the reason no-one is commenting is that you bought about the most vanilla combination possible, so what's to comment on? PLUS! You bought it elsewhere and are making a big fuss about the fact that it's cheaper which could be construed as encouraging discussion of competitive pricing.

Anyone with half a brain, and preferring not be banhammered, is staying well clear, I'd say.
 
WJA96 said:
I think the reason no-one is commenting is that you bought about the most vanilla combination possible, so what's to comment on? PLUS! You bought it elsewhere and are making a big fuss about the fact that it's cheaper which could be construed as encouraging discussion of competitive pricing.

Anyone with half a brain, and preferring not be banhammered, is staying well clear, I'd say.
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when you say vanilla I am guessing that means good right? lol . I will delete my previous post as I don't want to get the ban hammer either :P
 
WJA96 said:
Yes, it means you bought some of the most frequently recommended components.
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Thanks mate.. I really hope I do not encounter any problems this time.. If I do have same problems with this motherboard.. then which one would you reccomend I go for if I need to send the EX58 UD5 back? I will be keeping the rest of the gear.. thanks.
 
mkohman said:
Thanks mate.. I really hope I do not encounter any problems this time.. If I do have same problems with this motherboard.. then which one would you reccomend I go for if I need to send the EX58 UD5 back? I will be keeping the rest of the gear.. thanks.
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Don't worry about it, there's no need to figure out a replacement for a board you have not yet received.
It does seem like you are expecting it to fail though, it begs the question: why buy the same board if you have so little confidence in its reliability?
I maybe missing something here though.
 
Hesky82 said:
Don't worry about it, there's no need to figure out a replacement for a board you have not yet received.
It does seem like you are expecting it to fail though, it begs the question: why buy the same board if you have so little confidence in its reliability?
I maybe missing something here though.
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well thank you for the reassurance.. I will not worry about it but I hope it doesn't fail me.. I am worried as the overclocked bundle I purchsed earlier in the month with this board was not stable.. The main reason for purchasing this board with all the other items is because I have the bios profile of the overclocked settings and was hoping to use it on this set up.. and also it has 10 sata ports which I need really :)
 
I don't think its a good idea transferring the 4ghz oc bios profile from you old rig to your new set-up.
Although you have purchased an identical system, it is highly doubtful it will overclock identically. Don't be surprised if your system becomes unstable or even fails to post when you load the old bios profile.

I have to be brutally honest, if you want an overclocked machine that is reliable/stable your simply going to have to read up and learn how to overclock i7 systems. Blindly messing around with different oc profiles is only going to cause you problems.
If you haven't the time nor interest to overclock, I suggest you build the pc and leave it stock.
 
Hesky82 said:
I don't think its a good idea transferring the 4ghz oc bios profile from you old rig to your new set-up.
Although you have purchased an identical system, it is highly doubtful it will overclock identically. Don't be surprised if your system becomes unstable or even fails to post when you load the old bios profile.

I have to be brutally honest, if you want an overclocked machine that is reliable/stable your simply going to have to read up and learn how to overclock i7 systems. Blindly messing around with different oc profiles is only going to cause you problems.
If you haven't the time nor interest to overclock, I suggest you build the pc and leave it stock.
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I thought the profile would have been good for this setup as it is the exact same as the overclocked bundle sold here.. If this is not good then I may have to cancel my order and go with a different setup of motherboard and RAM but I will keep the rest the same.. Do you reccomend a better mother board than this? Asus Deluxe v2 or anything else you have in mind.. Also which ram do you recommend..? what is C9 or C8 showing at the end of RAM and whats the difference.. Thanks..
 
To be honest with you since your last message I have been thinking of calling and cancelling the UD5 motherboard all together and changing it for Asus P6T Deluxe V2..and keeping stock i7 920 on my pc with maybe better ram or more ram ie 12GB of RAM.. what would you reccomend .. Would you reccomend this board and setup over the UD5? or would you reccomend I wait for delivery to come set it up and see if stable with the oc profile and if not rma the motherboard for the P6T Deluxe V2.. what do you reccomend? thanks for help..
 
Either of those boards will be fine, the p6t dlx v2 is basically the direct competitor board to the ud5. As Hesky has said, no matter what board you do decide to go for, its best to read up on i7 overclocking and start from scratch yourself. Ive never worked with the ud5 myself but i do own a p6t dlx v2 and ive found it to be very easy to overclock on. One thing you should take into account is aftermarket support should something go wrong with the board, gigabyte have a uk based returns service which by all accounts is pretty good, asus on the other hand have a pretty bad track record concerning rma, though theyre reputedly in the process of addressing this issue.
 
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