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Originally Posted by TheGuy  You may want to consider an E6850 instead of the Q6600 . It's faster and most games don't even take advantage of quad core anyhow. Unless you needed it for video editing or something. Or the E8500 |
I did think about that, but i think i'd rather be ahead of the times rather then behind. I multitask a lot, including heavy video editing and recording, so i believe i will stick to quad core, but thanks for the advice!
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Originally Posted by Onlyasandwich My advice would be to stay away from the X2 series cards both nvidia and ATI. The 6600 is a great chip, and exactly what I run, but I think a nice card in the $300 range and a better proc with a good cooling solution and a handy overclock would be a fair trade-off. Dual card setups, whether single slot or not, aren't exactly price performers. I'd just spend half the money on the card and pocket the difference, personally. A regular 4870 would be a pretty fair bet.
You can give the 6600 a pretty good push with a nice heatsink. I personally left mine alone.
The e8500 is a good chip, and will probably give an okay performance bump over the q6600 in most games, but the difference is negligible enough that I decided to throw in the quad for when they actually DO start utilizing it properly.
I'm running 64-bit home premium and 4 gigs at the moment. Going to pick up some more memory soon. I really haven't had any vista related issues with my games or anything else for that matter. None of MS's OS's are perfect by any measure, but premium 64 is plenty stable. I do think nvidia's latest batch of drivers BLOW MY COLON INSIDE OUT. I'm recommending ATI here. Obvious exaggeration.
The mobo: I really think that unless you are planning on shoving this thing full of DDR3 any time soon and doing a pretty hefty overclock on FSB and ram that this is not necessary. Maybe you are doing these things! If so, I'd recommend something running the X48 northbridge instead. Maybe they've resolved the issues with wonderful bios updates by now, but I read nothing but instability and problems with the X38 chips.
What I really mean here is that you can get like 95% of the power for a good $500 less than what you're currently spending. Please get a nice after market heatsink if you haven't already. The stock cooler on the q6600 is a little bitch. I enjoy and use the AC Freezer Pro 7. |
Yeah, nvidia havent been doing too well at the moment. Their drivers have been fucking things up, and rather than admit their mistakes, they blame it on us. ATI is blowing nvidia out of the water at the moment, which is why i chose that card. Thanks for the advice about the x2 though, ill have a read around about that. The mobo doesnt actually support DDR3, but its a good solid card, which i need to handle everything else. I will be overclocking. Thanks for the advice on the cooler, i was thinking of zalman personally but ill look around.
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Originally Posted by -Thief- Have you found a price for that mobo? Something tells me it will be way overpriced |
On ebuyer (the place where im getting all my shit) its going for £150. Quite steep.
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Originally Posted by XTopherVersion2 I totally agree with most of what you said, but my experience with dual card solutions has been way different. ATI's crossfire setup is absolutely silly as far as scaling goes. Back during the 3870 days it scaled to as high as 80%, which is nothing to sneeze at considering price/performance ratio. A single 4870 is an amazing card, but if he's getting a 24'' monitor, it'll tax that card to hell and back. ATI is DOMINATING Nvidia right now (anyone see their stock prices fall?) because Nvidia made the same mistake they always do. Underestimate the little guy. I know that AMD/ATI isn't doing as well as Intel or Nvidia, but as far as their performance/price ratio, you can't beat ATI cards at the moment.
Quads are future proof I think. They really aren't necessary, but more and more games ARE taking advantage of 4 cores, even if they are largely GPU limited. Its only a matter of time before its standard. If you want a quad, I see no reason against recommending you get one. Happy hunting! |
My thoughts exactly, ATI is doing much better than NVidia at the moment. And since it is quite a taxing screen, I think x2 is the advisable choice. I'm looking forward to trying out that 2GB card :drool:. Thanks for reassuring me!
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Originally Posted by clowndog I love my Q6600. It's running at 3GHz w/ a cheap aftermarket air cooler. I was too lazy to toss my Thermalright Ultra 120 on it so I went with a cooler that didn't require a backing plate. Along that line of thought, if you do want to overclock, buy the heatsink/fan now. Most of the good ones require a backing plate because of their weight.
As for the video card, I would be tempted to back down to the 4870 (I just with they would up the memory to 1GB) and spend some of the leftover cash on a good heatsink/fan and maybe bump the hard drive up to that 1TB drive that beats the old Raptors (or if that's overkill, seagate or samsung makes a 640GB w/ 2 320gb platters that is supposedly on par with the 1tb drive and is on sale for less than $100).
No matter what, it sounds like you have a great setup. |
I was actually thinking about a samsung 1TB drive, but i thought i'd rather spend more on a kickass GPU, save a bit, then upgrade my drive, get another 500GB possibly. Thanks for the reassurance though! Helps a lot.
General consensus is i'm spending a lot, and its not necessary at the moment, but in the future games and applications will be catering for quadcore. Spending a lot on the 2 GPUs, but theyre good cards, and if i think i really need it, may as well. Have i got it about right?
Thanks for all the input guys, i'm always unsure when it comes to building my PCs, if i've missed some criticism about this and that and end up getting screwed over, haha. Feel free to add more comments if you think of anything! I've added a second option to the Mobo choices, its a very similar board, slightly cheaper. What do you think?