Yet another spec me up thread...

[1LANCS]

Yes I know ANOTHER one of these threads but I'd rather pick the brains of someone who knows about computers, I used to be a huge hardware geek but stopped trying to keep up with the Jones' in 2007 when I built my current Core 2 Quad PC. I am also going to apologise for the tl;dr in advance, if I'm going to spend £1500-2000 I'd rather annoy people than buy a lemon, plus I like to talk tech.

At the moment I'm just doing research because it will be another few months before I go out and buy the machine. My 'dilemma' is I will have £2000 to spend, I would rather spec out a nice machine for £1500 and have a bit of dosh left over but if the extra £500 provides a worthwhile speed bump I might consider blowing the lot.

I did consider a Phenom II x6 1090T machine but for the price of a good 890GX with 1090T I could get a nice X58 and Core i7 930 machine that will destroy the 1090T at most things, the thing that put me off was the 62c degrees thermal limit which compared to Intels 100c Degrees seems a little ridiculous, I do a lot of video encoding so the extra cores could come in handy but gaming performance is pretty weak compared to the Core i5/i7.

I did also consider the Core i7 970/980x but are they REALLY worth the extra £480+? (bearing in mind the £1500 soft cap budget).

For the graphics card I was looking at either SLI 1Gb GTX460, SLI GTX470, Single GTX480, Single 5970. Power usage is a big concern for me as there is no point buying a huge honking computer if I can't run it 24/7 like I do with my current machine. I am vaguely aware with the performance comparison across all cards. SLI GTX460 and Single GTX480 are about the same amount of money, will I run into any problems with SLI, say a game doesnt support SLI would I be able to force it to run in SLI or will it default back to a single card, with this in mind would it be worth just getting a single 'near performance' 480 for the times when a game just wont run in SLI?

Now thats out of the way this is the spec I have penned so far:

Intel Core i7 930 2.8Ghz 8Mb Cache
ASUS P6X58D-E
Corsair Hydro H70
3x2Gb Corsair XMS3 1600
1536Mb GTX480
2x 64Gb Crucial RealSSD C300 (will Raid 0 and have also added 500Gb drive and set up backup software so that every few days at night it does a drive image just in case an SSD goes or Raid array dies)
1Tb Samsung Spinpoint SATA2 drive (transplanted from my old PC)
2x 2.5 to 3.5" drive bay converters
24x DVD-RW Dual Layer SATA2
850W Coolermaster SilentProM Modular
Fractal Define R2 Case
6x 120mm quiet fans
3 channel fan controller with splitters
Xbox 360 Wireless controller with Wireless PC adapter

Does this look like a solid spec, apart from the 2x SSDs and the PSU I am up for suggestions as to alternatives, concerning the £1500 budget is there anything I could buy using the last £500 that would give me a significant enough performance increase for the cost?

Again sorry for the tl;dr just want to be 1000% sure I'm not wasting my money.

Thanks.

 

[1LANCS]

I know you said 'apart from the SSDs' but do you really need raided C300s? They're insanely fast anyway, or is it just mainly because you want extra SSD space for installing more games etc?

You've not actually said what resolution you're going to be gaming at. A single HD 5870 is still easily enough for gaming at 1920 x 1080/1200 (unless you're desperate to keep 60FPS on Crysis). Every other game will run smoothly and the power consumption is quite a bit better than the GTX 480:

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2010/03/27/nvidia-geforce-gtx-480-1-5gb-review/10

Apart from that the rest of the spec look decent to me.

I don't really need raided C300s, I kind of really wanted the extra space and at £230 I thought it was an insane amount of speed for the money. Bigger SSDs are slower and cost more.

I have a 24" 1920x1200 monitor I will be gaming on, I'll have a look at 5870, thanks.

Looks good mate...i would suggest just the one Intel X-25m 160gb ssd or wait for Intel's new ssd's which are going to be super quick...do you not have any parts you can use off your old pc? dvd drives etc? also i would suggest the one GTX 460 for now or SLI because i think in SLI the 460's are really good but might want some clarification on that.....i wouldnt go for the 480 as its just a power hungry and hot
With regards to the extra £500 you have left you could go with a nice watercooling setup? i wouldnt recommend anything as i dont know anything about watercooling really but theres plenty of people on here that do know...

Thanks for the advice, so its not worth going for a GTX480, I did look at GTX 460 SLI but I am bothered about games that arent SLI capable which means I will be running a game off one midrange card instead of one or two high end cards?

who really cares about a gtx480 being power hungry and hot???

they run at 90c with furmark while gaming run at 80 with low fan speed. there not that bad at all.

as for the water cooling great idea with the extra cash.

i would go for

d5pump around £60
res ek 250ml £25
rx360 around £70
fans £5 each need 3 or 6
blocks gtx480 £59
cpu heatkiller or apogee xt £50
tubing £10

all prices gestimates cant be bothered to look them up

Hot isn't really an issue but I don't want a PC that makes my electric meter spin up and collapse into a black hole. I was thinking about watercooling but I don't trust myself to not make a hash of it and trash all the hardware.

Read the OP....unless you cant be bothered?
Just a thought but if you dont fancy sli etc i would recommend a Sapphire Vapour-X 5870 which is an extremely capable card and with the Vapour-X it will run super quiet and will use quite a bit less power than the GTX 480 and also you could if need be stick another one for crossfire...

I didn't really consider the ATI equivalents, apart from 5970, purely for the tessellation monsters that the GTX400 series are, I will take a look at that card though as I like the sound of less power and quiet .

 

[1LANCS]

Just looked at them in more detail, I thought NVIDIA 400 Series were the better cards this generation because of tessellation?