Will This Work?

RoEy · 9 Mar 2008 at 16:08

Hi all,

Building a PC for my Dad and I want to know if the PSU I've chosen will power it all, especially seeing as it's a new Penyrn CPU? Plus, I used to have a Gigabyte board 3 years ago and it was terrible, have they improved a lot? Is there another board same price thats better? Can't go above £500, is there anything I could make better with the spec? He's got Monitor, keyboard, mouse.

Potential Spec: (He wants it mainly for work i.e. word processing, powerpoints, surfing net, downloading, watching films and listening to music, not playing games)

MOTHERBOARD - Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L Intel P35 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard - £65.79

CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 LGA775 'Wolfdale' 2.66GHz (1333FSB) - Retail - £117.49

RAM - Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2-6400C5 TwinX (2x1GB) - £35.24

GPU - PowerColor ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO SCS3 SILENT 256MB DDR2 HDTV/DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail - £29.36

HDD - Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (WD2500AAKS) (Going to partition it) - £44.64

Drive - Samsung SH-S203D 20x DVD±RW SATA Dual Layer ReWriter (Black) - OEM -

Case - Antec Solo Quiet Mini Tower Case - No PSU - £61.09

PSU - Enermax Liberty 400W ELT400AWT ATX2.2 Modular SLI Compliant PSU -£49.34

OS - Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition inc. SP2 - OEM - 1Pk (N09-01991) - £56.39

Total Price £476.94

Will this work well together or will there be any bottlenecking?

Thanks all,

RoEy

jak731 · 9 Mar 2008 at 16:12

what type of work does he do?
if it is media type work like encoding videos, he will be better off with a quad core, if it is typing word documents or other office type work, he will not need a wolfdale

semi-pro waster · 9 Mar 2008 at 16:13

That looks fine to me, it might be worth considering Vista if the PC is going to be kept for a long time but other than that I can't see any obvious problems. Gigabyte make pretty decent motherboards and have done for quite a while now.

You could save a few quid by going for either OCZ PC6400 Platinum Series or Geil PC6400 C4 instead of the Corsair but not a huge deal if you are a fan of Corsair Ram.

//edit although jak731 is correct, the system does seem somewhat overkill for the uses suggested at present.

RoEy · 9 Mar 2008 at 16:24

Thanks lads.

It's just word pro etc. But he'll want to be doing multi-tasking too. I don't mind it being an overkill as this means it will last him a long time, which is what he wants. Plus he wants it to be really quick so for doing this sort of stuff it will fly. He's never used Vista before and knows XP like the back of his hand. So you think the enermax 400 watt psu will power it all easy enough? No board better at that price range then?

Thanks again,

RoEy

semi-pro waster · 9 Mar 2008 at 16:32

Nothing stands out as significantly better but if you have an aversion to Gigabyte then the Abit IP35-E is a competent performer and I don't think I've heard any bad reports about them.

The Enermax is easily sufficient for what you have there, if you were going for a higher powered graphics card then I might recommend something of higher wattage but adding a couple of extra hard drives (for instance) wouldn't phase that PSU in the least.

RoEy · 9 Mar 2008 at 16:45

Thanks Semi,

I looked at the abit board you suggested but a few people say the chipset cooling on it is naff. Do you think I should lower the cpu and get a better board to balance it out a bit?

RoEy

semi-pro waster · 9 Mar 2008 at 16:53

I don't have the motherboard so can't say for certain but it seems like most of the heat issues occur while overclocking which doesn't seem like a major problem given your dads intended uses.

You could always stick with the Gigabyte motherboard I suppose.

RoEy · 9 Mar 2008 at 16:56

Ok thanks for the advice.

RoEy