Check my spec

[Lucio]

Woot! After nearly 11 months of waiting to get my cash back, I can finally order a new PC at the weekend from Scan. Just want to check over the items I want to order to make sure I've not missed anything important

All of this is going into a Lian Li PC-A05 case, which has additional cooling fans on the side above the GPU and CPU sections (probably both gonna be set to intakes as it's a back to front airflow)

LN20684 Abit iX38 Quad-GT£147.33
LN19488 Intel Core 2 Quad-Core Q6600 G0 SLACR £159.79
LN20748 512MB PowerColor HD3870 £150.40
LN20647 500GB Seagate ST3500320NS BarracudaES.2 £86.59
LN13344 Silverstone SST-FP53B Black Hard Disk Cooler for all 3.5" Hard Disk Drives £16.57
LN15215 620W Corsair HX Series Modular £85.65
LN17166 Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 64Bit 1Pk OEM (DVD) £64.93
LN16381 Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition SP2b (Release 2) OEM - Single Pack £51.50
LN19302 4GB (2x2GB) Corsair TwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC2-6400 (800) £114.73
LN14016 Zalman Super Thermal Grease ZM-STG1 £4.22
LN20271 20" Samsung SM206BW Black Widescreen LCD, 1680x1050 £179.18
LN16428 Creative Inspire Black T3100 2.1 Speaker System £26.43

All told £1,102.19, excluding whatever I can get on Today Only at the weekend


Getting two Operating systems because I'm not 100% sure on Vista, but I do need to get some experience in for when my computers at work start coming with it (it'll happen sooner or later).

I could swap out the motherboard for a 680i + 8800GT but I do really like the X38 Quad GT layout, especially in an inverted case setup.

Another option is to spend another £100 and get a cheap P35 board and an 8800GTX but to be honest, I'm not sure whether it's worth it. I mostly play WoW though I do want to run Oblivion, STALKER and FEAR at reasonable frame rates with most of the details on.


Any input then for me?

[spiral out]

You could get away with the cheaper 520 Corsair psu and check out the samsung 500gb drive, there very fast and quiet

Also get artic silver 5 or arctic cooling MX2 thermal paste.

[LegacyOne]

Get 2x “2GB (2x1GB) Corsair TwinX XMS2” for less then “4GB (2x2GB) Corsair TwinX XMS2” and you should be able to get a 8800GT.

[acrobat]

Is it possible to wait until early next year? If so, you could get all the new breed of gear. New quad core CPU's, and new nVidia graphics card. Just a couple of months could get you onto a higher league of gear, for a similar price. Or could get you that same gear for a much cheaper price. I know how hard it is to wait, especially seeing as you have been waiting so long already. But it is quite a big deal. If you get on to the high level of gear, you are just giving yourself more time with that gear before you will want to upgrade. If you bought your PC now, even with an 8800GTX in it... in just a couple of months time, you will be peaved to see the Geforce 9800GTX achieving double the frame rates etc.. And within a year, you will be lowering the settings of games to allow your 8800GTX to cope, when a 9800GTX would still being going strong at maximum settings.

If not, I like your list, but I would swap the Seagate for a Samsung or Western Digi. I use the Seagates but I've lost confidence in them. There is a thread here somewhere, about RMA'ing Seagate hard disks, and there are about a million people talking about all the disks they have sent back. Its just not right having that many people, on one forum, in one thread, all RMA'ing the same disks - and these are disks which have only even been available for about a year or so.

Also, if I was going to be spending over a grand on a new PC, I would want to go that bit extra, and get a better screen. 20" widescreen is a good choice, but that particular screen isn't that great. I'd suggest finding one with an IPS or S-IPS panel. (like one of the Dells etc). The screen is vitally important if you are a gamer. The screen is your window into the games you play, and the screen is the thing you are looking at the whole time. People rarely look at their case, and yet they spend a fortune on flashy lights and crap. The screen is what everyone is staring at, ALL the time they are using their PC. When you have a quad core and a high end graphics card, the games will be running at their full potential. So you should really have a screen that can display them at their full potential, and a TN panel doesn't quite achieve that. Its not doing justice to the rest of the PC.

[Lucio]

Also, if I was going to be spending over a grand on a new PC, I would want to go that bit extra, and get a better screen. 20" widescreen is a good choice, but that particular screen isn't that great. I'd suggest finding one with an IPS or S-IPS panel. (like one of the Dells etc).

Do you mean something like Dell E207WFP

I don't want to go much larger TBH due to space on my desktop and I'm not sure another £100+ on a very high res 19" (1600x1200) is worth it.

[acrobat]

Do you mean something like Dell E207WFP

I don't want to go much larger TBH due to space on my desktop and I'm not sure another £100+ on a very high res 19" (1600x1200) is worth it.

Yes, definitely check out that Dell. You don't need to go larger than 20". Infact, 20" widescreen is the perfect size imo. Any higher than that, and it can actually be a problem, because of the strain of a higher resolution. So 20" widescreen is a very good choice.

But there is still the quality of the display, to be taken into account. And that is all down to the panel they use in the screen, and how well they fit the panel. And for all that, you get what you pay for really. So for £150 or less, you get a low end panel which is still "o.k". But its "ok" and not great. (Which maybe isn't ideal considering all the other components are truly great).

It's perfect on a budget. And most people with monitors like that Samsung, are perfectly happy.

But if saw it compared to a more expensive screen, you might find the difference unacceptable. And there are often actual issues too. For example, if you turn all the lights out, and then play a dark game like FEAR or Quake4 or whatever, you can end up with bright patches around the edges of the screen, which some people would find distracting and annoying. Then there are the amount of colours a screen is actually physically capable of displaying. A better monitor (maybe more expensive), using an S-IPS panel can display more colours than a TN panel. Sometimes you can't see a difference. But sometimes, the better panel looks much more realistic and colourful. Especially in games and movies. Its basically similar to setting your desktop colour to 24 bit instead of 32bit. They are both perfectly usable, but the 32bit is much better.

The is also the dots per inch (dpi). That Dell for example, is half a millimetre better in the DPI department, than the Samsung. Better DPI can give a sharper image. Half a millimetre may not be visible (it might though), but either way, its usually an indication of the quality of the rest of the screen. There is the speed aswell. Slow = ghosting. Although that seems to be dying out nowdays, because many of these modern screens are fast enough anyway.

I'm not sure which exact screen to recommend to be honest, because its been a while since I did all my screen research, and there might be new screens now. But generally, the Dell's are a good choice. And that dell you linked above, is a really good price too, so I would suggest looking into that one - for sure. There are usually decent reviews for all these screens, so you should be able to figure it out. And this link has some very good reviews, and also quite a lot of knowledgeable people:
Widescreen Gaming Forum :: Index

Its well worth the hassle of researching it, because like I said, its the thing you spend all your time looking at, once the PC is finally up and running. And unlike a CPU or Graphics card, its not just a case of picking whichever has the highest number and is therefore the fastest. With screens, its more complicated, and a pain in the bum to figure out basically. But its worth it researching. And also, its quite an expensive component, and some people keep them for a long time. I spent around £350 on my monitor, but I will use it almost every day, for probably around 5 years or so. So it works out ok to spend a bit more, in the long run.

[Lucio]

Ok, I realised I was being silly.

By dropping the X38 motherboard for a Abit IP-35 and downgrading the RAM to 2GB, I can get a Scan 8800GTX for my graphics card, for virtually the same price. Sure it's not the latest technology, but it's still one of the most powerful cards out there and I doubt, even with 64bit OS, that I'll make much use of the 4GB RAM.

For an extra £20, could also swap the RAM out for the 2x2GB PC5300 set from OCUK, but knowing my luck, that'll be the part that goes wrong

[Lu-tze]

This article from anandtech suggests little difference in performance between the GT and GTX:

AnandTech: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT: The Only Card That Matters

Certainly not worth the extra cost imho. I believe what acrobat was suggesting would be to wait for the 8800gtx replacement, not to buy the 8800gtx.

To echo other posts, i also suggest 520W corsair psu, 500gb samsung drive, samsung sata dvd drive, 2gb corasir 6400 (4-4-4-12) ram, and i agree that it is beneficial to budget for a good quality screen.

I would look at better cooling components, such as replacement fans (nexus, scythe slip-stream etc), and a decent cpu cooler like the tunic tower or thermalright extreme 120 married with one of the above fans. Not sure you need the silverstone module as the case is supposed to come with a front fan.