Best gaming machine for £500?

[rgreeves]

lol - got to make sure that my wife likes it

uATX is the same as microATX?

the g33 seems to be the same as the DFI board you mentioned earlier, just smaller.

RG

[staffsMike]

Yeah sorry its just a slackers way of doing the micro symbol µATX.

Similar yeah, perfect for a low FSB chip anyway.

[Online]

Well the problem with the SLi board is that is Nvidia only and you have picked an ATi card. If you want to double up on graphics cards you are looking for crossfire with ATi.

While not a perfect solution, this would go a very good job of that
http://www.scan.co.uk/product.aspx?ProductId=25073

Currently a few quid cheaper here www.scan.co.uk/todayonly.

That said, dual graphics setups aren't really that cost effective. It's better to sell your old card and buy a new and improved single card

I'd use the little bit of money saved from the DVD on a nice aftermarket CPU cooler like this
http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=700899

It's usually found on scans today only for about £17 (but not today I'm affraid).

In that case i think i'll leave sli for now, the DFI Lan Party P35 board looks nice, it only seems to pull 800mhz max from the ram though, will that really matter when it comes to playing games like Crysis on higher settings? Also, how long would the Nvidia GTX260 last me? Couple of years?

[staffsMike]

The DFI is a very nice board yeah.

800MHz is the fastest official speed of DDR2 RAM. Most manafacturers don't bother listing support for anything faster but that board can certainly overclock RAM past 800MHz

It won't limit gaming anyway. If you got into that overclocking stuff I was talking about before. When the CPU's FSB is being muliplied by 4, the RAM's is only multiplied by 2.

So 800MHz RAM is really 400MHz, which is far in excess of what the chip is running anyway (200MHz out of the box)

The graphics card life expectancy is dependent on whether you are gaming at high resolutions, ie. 1920 x 1200 or above or 24" monitors and above.

It will work very well for those sort of resolutions now, 2 years down the line perhaps not so much but it will still be very capable.

Anything lower than that resolution wise, such as 1680 x 1050 or 22" screens, and god only knows how long it will last

[rgreeves]

The ati HD4850 seems a little beefy for me - are there any good cheaper alternatives?

RG

[Online]

The DFI is a very nice board yeah.

800MHz is the fastest official speed of DDR2 RAM. Most manafacturers don't bother listing support for anything faster but that board can certainly overclock RAM past 800MHz

It won't limit gaming anyway. If you got into that overclocking stuff I was talking about before. When the CPU's FSB is being muliplied by 4, the RAM's is only multiplied by 2.

So 800MHz RAM is really 400MHz, which is far in excess of what the chip is running anyway (200MHz out of the box)

The graphics card life expectancy is dependent on whether you are gaming at high resolutions, ie. 1920 x 1200 or above or 24" monitors and above.

It will work very well for those sort of resolutions now, 2 years down the line perhaps not so much but it will still be very capable.

Anything lower than that resolution wise, such as 1680 x 1050 or 22" screens, and god only knows how long it will last

lol i think i'll be fine then since i only have a Samsung SM2032BW (20"), i just added all those items that you listed earlier up (only two of them were on the scan website, others were on ebuyer so i just used both the websites), and since i want to go with the Q6600 (I'll be running quite a few apps when i'm not gaming) that's hiked the price up by over £100, the one thing i can see cutting back on is the graphics card, i'm willing to stretch the budget though and still get it if it all turns out to be good once it's been all put together in the end.

[staffsMike]

Well The 9800GT is good at 1680 x 1050. Goes to both of you I guess.

So £500 for a Q6600 build. Lets see then.

Q6600 ~£120
4GB PC6400 ~£50
Asus G33 or P5K ~£55
Western Digital 320GB AAKS ~£35
Antec 300 ~£35
Corsair 450W VX ~£45
sapphire HD4850 Dual slot cooler ~£120

Something like that

[Online]

That will play Crysis on the highest settings? And what is the difference between the sapphire HD4850 Dual slot cooler and the GTX260? If the difference is quite big (as in better and will last me a lot longer than the Sapphire, don't want to get the Sapphire only for it not to be able to handle games in one or two years time so i'd have to upgrade again if you get what i mean), just want to know if the price reflects the quality and whether it's far superior to the Sapphire, in which case i'll go with the GTX260

[Webby]

It all depends on how you look at it, spend £120 now and get a graphics card which exceeds your requirements (4850) and in 2 years maybe it is not managing quite as well as it used to so you then spend another £120 to get the new midrange card and so on. If you buy the 260 the probability is it will last longer but will it last 3 years? Which it will have to to justify the extra cost as the benefits today would be minimal at best. Also will the new midrange card (2 years later) be better than the ageing 260 I would say most likely yes so with this upgrade model you get performance boosts/new technology more regularly and it doesn't really cost you any more.

Personally if on a tight budget I would go with the cheaper card and put the spare cash towards a better processor/motherboard/CPU cooler/PSU whatever (Mike's spec is good I would add a CPU cooler to that as well especially if overclocking ).

[killersuzuki]

nowadays I 'commend single slot GPU (though clocking suffers)

scan do the superior 2x2GB 64bit DHX corsair much cheaper

stick with Seagate the 5yr warranty is a 3.5" block of common sense! *

get the best case and PSU U can afford! * - Antec do best case/psu bundles

only my 2 pence worth ;}

added - if GFX isn't essential-
£55 9500 256/512 DDR3 is very good for the money (it's like a kickass 8600GTS on steroids)

;]

[Phalanx]

Sorry for the thread hijack but this thread is definitely "relevant to my interests".

You're recommending the OP to overclock his processor when it arrives. I'm curious to how the RAM will cater this overclock. I was under the impression that as you increase the speed of the processor, the speed of the RAM must increase as well (hence why people buy those PC8500 RAM). Since I too am also on a budget, which bundle of RAM would be best to cater towards light overclockers who will be using air cooling?

Thanks

[Webby]

Phalanx, to answer your question without going into too much detail some motherboards offer the option of changing the divider in which the memory runs to explain that I will cover a few things first.
First CPU front side bus is (in the case of Intel) quad pumped so a CPU with a FSB of 800 actually uses a frequency of 200 and a FSB 1333 is a frequency of 333MHz. The second part of the puzzle is the memory which operates at double data rate (DDR) so the speeds are double the frequency so DDR2 800 is running at a frequency of 400 DDR2 667 runs at 333 and so on.

So if you have a 800 FSB CPU your base frequency is 200 (800 divide by 4) if you use 800MHz DDR Ram (400MHz base) then your motherboard will set a divider to run the memory at 2:1 so that it achieves its rated speed. Now if you increased the FSB to say 300MHz you would overclock the memory to DDR 1200 (300*2*2) obviously unless the memory is exceptional this is not going to work, so you change the divider to say 1:1 so now at a FSB of 300 your memory runs at DDR 600. Depending on your motherboard (and potentially the starting FSB of your processor) different dividers will be available which will allow you to run your memory at speeds it can run at while over clocking your CPU.

Hope that made sense!

[Online]

It all depends on how you look at it, spend £120 now and get a graphics card which exceeds your requirements (4850) and in 2 years maybe it is not managing quite as well as it used to so you then spend another £120 to get the new midrange card and so on. If you buy the 260 the probability is it will last longer but will it last 3 years? Which it will have to to justify the extra cost as the benefits today would be minimal at best. Also will the new midrange card (2 years later) be better than the ageing 260 I would say most likely yes so with this upgrade model you get performance boosts/new technology more regularly and it doesn't really cost you any more.

Personally if on a tight budget I would go with the cheaper card and put the spare cash towards a better processor/motherboard/CPU cooler/PSU whatever (Mike's spec is good I would add a CPU cooler to that as well especially if overclocking ).

In that case i think i'll go with the Sapphire, so, my new setup is:

Q6600 ~£120
4GB PC6400 ~£50 (Thanks for the tip killersuzuki, i'll have to look into that)
DFI LanParty DK P35 ~£75
Antec 300 ~£35
sapphire HD4850 Dual slot cooler ~£120
Corsair 450W VX ~£45
640GB Western Digital AAKS ~£50

Comes out at under £500, of couse it may go just over it if the stuff is a few quid over here and there but it shouldn't be anything drastic so i think i'll be fine, i'd welcome any more suggestions

[Phalanx]

Phalanx, to answer your question without going into too much detail some motherboards offer the option of changing the divider in which the memory runs to explain that I will cover a few things first.
First CPU front side bus is (in the case of Intel) quad pumped so a CPU with a FSB of 800 actually uses a frequency of 200 and a FSB 1333 is a frequency of 333MHz. The second part of the puzzle is the memory which operates at double data rate (DDR) so the speeds are double the frequency so DDR2 800 is running at a frequency of 400 DDR2 667 runs at 333 and so on.

So if you have a 800 FSB CPU your base frequency is 200 (800 divide by 4) if you use 800MHz DDR Ram (400MHz base) then your motherboard will set a divider to run the memory at 2:1 so that it achieves its rated speed. Now if you increased the FSB to say 300MHz you would overclock the memory to DDR 1200 (300*2*2) obviously unless the memory is exceptional this is not going to work, so you change the divider to say 1:1 so now at a FSB of 300 your memory runs at DDR 600. Depending on your motherboard (and potentially the starting FSB of your processor) different dividers will be available which will allow you to run your memory at speeds it can run at while over clocking your CPU.

Hope that made sense!

yeah, that completely makes sense, I haven't been in the computer scene for a few years and I thought it was going to be something like that.

So, if you did change it to 1:1, you could theoretically overclock the processor to 400mhz FSB could you not? You'd just have to pump that processor full of volts.

[staffsMike]

That's right yeah. You might get a little extra out of the RAM but certainly 400FSB is perfectly resaonable to expect from the mobo and RAM it's just whether the CPU can hit it without overheating with the extra volts.

[MantisCSS]

Hi there m8, i just built a PC with spec similar to what you want for gaming last week and this is what i built, runs like a dream and cost £400

1 x PowerColor HD 4850 512MB - £95.25
1 x Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3L iP35 Socket 775 8 channel audio ATX Motherboard - £54.49
1 x Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 2.53GHz (1066MHz) Socket 775 3MB L2 Cache - £65.01
1 x Coolermaster Centurion 5 All Black Mid Tower Case - No PSU - £42.54
1 x Corsair 450W VX 450W PSU - ATX12V v2.2 - £38.78
1 x Extra Value 120mm Blue LED Fan - 4pin Molex Connection - £2.43
1 x Samsung HD502IJ SpinPoint F1 500GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 16MB Cache - OEM - £35.73