Building a Desktop - Need Comments

[Kenpachi]

Alright guys, i've worked my arse off all summer so i could build myself a good desktop. Seems like things have come a long way since i first chose the stuff i would use, so i've updated my list, but i would like some input from you guys. Let me know if what i've chosen is good or not, if there is anything i could improve, criticism is welcome. If you think i'm buying something wrong, try to offer an alternative too

So here it is:

Mobo:
Option 1: ASUS Maximus Formula Republic of Gamers iX38 Socket 775
Option 2: ASUS P5E AiLifestyle Series iX38 Socket 775

Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 G0 Stepping (2.4GHz 1066MHz) Socket 775 L2 8MB Cache

Gfx card: ASUS HD 4870X2 2GB GDDR5 Dual DVI HDCP HDTV out PCI-E Graphics Card

RAM: Corsair 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 1066MHz/PC2-8500

HD: Seagate 500GB Hard Drive SATA II 7200rpm 32MB Cache

Screen [Already Bought]: Samsung 24" 10000:1 1920x1200 5ms VGA/DVI/HDMI

Case [Already Bought]: Cooler Master Cosmos S

Power: Corsair HX620W

Thanks for the help Voogru

[NeoStyle]

I've got the same CPU at home, I love it.
Can't comment on the vid card really, never been a fan of ATI. But with 2 gig's of mem, it should display your porn sites quite nicely.
I'm going to assume you're going with vista 64, and not sure what else you do with the computer besides TF2, but I put 8 gigs of ram in mine, and I love it more then my first born.


Ok, I'm joking about the first born thing, it would be a tough contest.

[Kenpachi]

Originally Posted by NeoStyle

I've got the same CPU at home, I love it.
Can't comment on the vid card really, never been a fan of ATI. But with 2 gig's of mem, it should display your porn sites quite nicely.
I'm going to assume you're going with vista 64, and not sure what else you do with the computer besides TF2, but I put 8 gigs of ram in mine, and I love it more then my first born.


Ok, I'm joking about the first born thing, it would be a tough contest.

To be totally honest i'm an nvidia fan too, but i've been reading the benchmarks recently, and 2x4780 is topping Nvidia's 280 by 40%. Seems like Radeon is beating Nvidia at the moment, and it's cheaper for the performance. But yeah 2Gigs, 2GPUs, im drooling. I think i'll stick with Vista 32 I think, 64 has to many problems with compatibility for it to be worth it.

[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

[Captain Justice]

I believe that 3GB or RAM+ => Vista 64.

Or something like that, but I could be wrong.

[TheGuy]

You could always get XP-64 to take advantage of all of that ram.

[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.

[n00b3h]

only vista 64 issue ive had is the poor support by creative on their audio cards infact the buggy drivers/firmware have led me to use my onboard over it ¬¬ - that said i havent looked into unofficial drivers or even the latest ones

[-Thief-]

Have you found a price for that mobo? Something tells me it will be way overpriced

[XTopherVersion2]

Originally Posted by Onlyasandwich

. I'd just spend half the money on the card and pocket the difference, personally. A regular 4870 would be a pretty fair bet.

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!

[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.

[Kenpachi]

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!

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.

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.

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!

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?

[Kenpachi]

For the graphics card, there is a choice between Asus and Sapphire, they're both about the same price, which company would you side with?

[XTopherVersion2]

I personally think Sapphire is the best card-maker on the market. I've been using their products for 10+ years and I've never seen one go bad. I don't know much about Asus, but I'm pretty sure they can't hold a candle to Sapphire. Check the Newegg reviews about Sapphire products, you'll see why I feel as I do.

[.Orrizante]

saw this little guy on the futureshop website, Future Shop: Computer Add-Ons: Sound & Video: BFG GeForce 8800 GT 512MB PCIe Video Card
seems like a decent deal, a 8800 for under a hundred bucks, i've been looking to upgrade too, a question though about the 8000 series, i hear that anything under the 8800 is not worth getting and it would be more worth getting a 7900 or somthing like that, i've tried looking for a reason but cant find any what makes the low end 8000's so bad?