£800 for core bits?!

[5aboy]

hello,

after having gotten rid of my opteron/mobo/ram, i have been running an amazingly inadequate athlonXP and i really am beginning to get really really tired of it right now.

i have around £800 for mobo/ram/chip/gfx card, and perhaps a monitor (not a must, but i am using a dell CRT at the moment that i should like to replace).

so, what do i go for?

e4300? e6600? asus p975? 2gb RAM or 1gb? 8800gtx or GTS?

its just that i dont imagine upgrading again for quite some time, so i do need it to be worth my while.

i currently have:
2x320 gb seagate 7200.10, 2x160gb seagate 7200.7s, corsair hx620W, case, dvdrw (all leftover from before). i have a big tall chenming matrix full tower case, and i know if i remove the bottom cage the 8800 size cards will fit comfortably.

so, what do i do?!

i was really trying to wait for our friends at dell to have an offer of double ram/monitor upgrade so i could get an e6600/2gb/22inch+ monitor for around the same price, but im increasingly thinking its not going to happen.

[Sumanji]

Hey,

I'd get an E6600 (£200), 2Gb of RAM (£100), a nice P965 motherboard like the Gigabyte DS3 (£100), 8800GTS (£200)... that leaves £200 for a nice big 20" widescreen TFT

Are you going to be overclocking? If so, you could hit 3GHz+ with little effort, which would be a huge boost! If you can't be bothered to build, phone up Dell and barter, they can be very flexible on pricing

Suman

[5aboy]

overclocking is very important to me! i always ran my opteron 165 at 2.6ghz as this was as high as i could get with stock volts. i dont like overvolting at all, though.

i had a gigabyte motherboard in the past and wasnt all that impressed, not too sure id go with another gigabyte - their boards have a lot of hype around them but are often very very poorly laid out - hence massive aircoolers are difficult to install, and seeing as im going to be overclocking and i like my bedroom to be as quiet as possible, its a major no-no!

thanks for your input though!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I have hit 3ghz using a E4300 and I was limited by my memory speed(I do not like overclocking my RAM).People with faster RAM have gotten upto 3.6ghz I think.

The E4400 which is coming out in the next couple of months has a 10X multiplier!!

For something currently available this seems a good setup for 800 quid:

QTY Price (ea) Ex VAT Total Inc VAT Remove
LN15069
Gigabyte GA 965P-DS4 iP965, S775, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 533/667/800, SATA II, SATA RAID, ATX £87.55 £102.87
LN14947
20" Viewsonic VA2012-2, Widescreen TFT, 1680x1050, 8 ms, 600:1, 300 cd/m2, Speakers, Silver/Black £148.99 £175.06
LN16801
640MB Gainward 8800GTS Bliss, PCI-E (x16), Mem 1600 MHz, GPU 500 MHz, 96 Streams, Dual DVI HDTV £218.99 £257.31
LN13080
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro - P4 up to 4.4GHz - S775 Dual Core / Core2Duo Ready £13.99 £16.44
LN11596
2 X 2GB (2x1GB) CorsairTwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC2-6400 (800), 240 Pins, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 5-5-5-12 £113.99 £267.88
If you change any quantities, please re-calculate your basket
Scan Finance - Buy Now Pay Dec 2007
Pay £83.34 deposit and then NO payments for 9 months, then settle the balance and pay NO interest.

Scan Finance - More Sense Than Money


Net Total £697.50

Carriage £11.74

V.A.T. £124.12

TOTAL £833.36

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I imagine you are wanting to run games under Vista - 4gb should be plenty - hopefully!!?? If you drop the memory to 2gb you can get this:

our Basket
QTY Price (ea) Ex VAT Total Inc VAT Remove
LN15069
Gigabyte GA 965P-DS4 iP965, S775, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 533/667/800, SATA II, SATA RAID, ATX £87.55 £102.87
LN14947
20" Viewsonic VA2012-2, Widescreen TFT, 1680x1050, 8 ms, 600:1, 300 cd/m2, Speakers, Silver/Black £148.99 £175.06
LN13080
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro - P4 up to 4.4GHz - S775 Dual Core / Core2Duo Ready £13.99 £16.44
LN11596
2GB (2x1GB) CorsairTwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC2-6400 (800), 240 Pins, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 5-5-5-12 £113.99 £133.94
LN16517
768Mb Palit 8800GTX PCI-E (x16), Mem 1800 MHz, GPU 575 MHz, 128 Streams, 2 x Dual Link DVI HDTV £297.86 £349.99

[5aboy]

wow - loads of people are recommending gigabyte boards - how very odd!

the last suggestion sounds quite appealing, actually. i shant be moving to vista until they sort things out with it - i have a perfectly good copy of xp pro that ill be running initially.

thing is, soon ill qualify and not have that much time to play on my PC, but i do want whatever time i DO play to be enjoyable.

thanks very much!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I forgot to add 100 quid for the E4300 - doh!!

Sorry!!

[Sumanji]

I remember you now from here , a fellow medic

Trust me you'll have plenty of time to play games next year, what with there being no banding (in Trent FS anyway), and the possibility of ending up with a dossy F1 GP rotation!

Unfortunately all the C2D motherboards suck (as I'd mentioned before). Gigabyte make the cheapest good overclocker, and since plenty of people use them, you're more likely to get help should anything go tits up. There's plenty of other "ok" boards; Asus P5B-Deluxe, Abit AW9, DFI Infinity 975X are Intel BadAxe 2 are a few of the popular ones.

In the pipeline there's the DFI Infinity P965 and nVidia nF680i boards from DFI, MSI, Gigabyte etc. that might be worth holding out for. But all mobos out at the moment have issues or quirks... pretty rubbish situation really!

Hope that helps,

Suman

[5aboy]

well, if i have my way therell be no dossy GP rotation for me! im at hereford/worcester, and have my eye on the paediatrics, obstetrics, and cardiology jobs. i dont want to be a GP, so ill be doing a lot of research in my F1. (but then ill have enough cash for that 30inch dell TFT ive always wanted!).

yeah, im thinking of settling on e6600/asus p975/2gb ram/8800gtx/current monitor - and ill get the biggie once i have more cash!

[aidanjt]

wow - loads of people are recommending gigabyte boards - how very odd!

Asus FTW!

[Sumanji]

well, if i have my way therell be no dossy GP rotation for me...

Dude, have you used a 30" monitor before? If you're gonna be using it from 2ft, it is WAY too big (imho), some serious eyestrain issues going on! I think 24" is largest comfortable size for most people, and it's a more palatable price too. If you want something to watch films on you'll be better off getting a nice big 32"+ LCD which will work out a lot cheaper.

Suman

P.S. MTAS sucks so much! We apply for 2 years in Trent and there's a sweet job with Geri/Resp/GenSurg then T+O/UpperGI/Gastro which is perfect for what I wanna do... but my ranking isn't too great and I reckon that'll be a popular rotation a lot of the good jobs have at least one crappy rotation (GP, Epidemiology etc.) so they are tough to avoid! Are you on Facebook? Join the MTAS IS **** group (* = another word for poo). There's a lot of trouble with ST applications which we should be aware of....

[DecomposingStar]

E63/400 will overclock wildly. gigabyte mobos are safe, but its all preference...
2gb minumum i would say, stick to named brands and try get a matched pair for dual channel. ddr2 at 667mhz would be enough, but the next step up is going cheap recently aswell...

I wouldn't buy an 8800. They are self defeating, if you buy one, you'll need vista for DX10, and there aren't any vista drivers out for the 8800. If you aren't using Vista, and you aren't bothered about DX10, then get an ATI X1950 or the nVidia equivilant.

I have a HannsG 19" widescreen for £120... Can't go wrong. It's a budget monitor so the build quality of the actual plastic housing isn't BRILLIANT, but the essentials definately make up for it. It's not bad at all.

[d032sh]

I can't say I agree with decomposingStar, the 8800 is where the best performance is now for dx9 and it does give you a degree of future-proofing for dx10 if you choose to go down the vista route at a later date. The real question is the size of the monitor and the resolution at which you're going to want to play... will the card that you choose be able to cope with what you want now and in the near future?

Just my 2 cents :-)

[DecomposingStar]

For the price of most 8800's, i dont think it's worth it.
But of course, it's all opinions.

[aidanjt]

Can't deny they're a bit pricey, but you also can't deny how powerful and flexible they are.

[Sumanji]

I wouldn't buy an 8800. They are self defeating, if you buy one, you'll need vista for DX10, and there aren't any vista drivers out for the 8800. If you aren't using Vista, and you aren't bothered about DX10, then get an ATI X1950 or the nVidia equivilant.

Getting an 8800 for DX10 is not an issue right now... getting it for the fact that it beats the X1900 series in DX9/OGL though is a damn good reason.

8800GTS 320MB are £185+, 640MB are £235+. Not a bad price at all for the performance