New PC Spec check/Suggestions please...

[GremlinUK]

Hi all,

Long term lurker here, but time for advice

My old Athlon 2800+ (socket A) system is looking (quite) tired these days, so I think it's time for an update

I'm hoping for some feedback on a new build i've spec'd up.

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0
Graphics card: Asus HD4850 512mb
CPU Cooler: Akasa AK-965 (thoughts?)
Motherboard: Asus P5Q Pro (any alternates?)
Memory: OCZ Memory 4GB (2x2048) Platinum Edition DDR2 PC2-6400 800MHz Dual Channel CL 5-4-4-15 Platinum or Corsair 4096MB TwinX XMS2 6400 C5 DDR2 5-5-5-18 800Mhz Memory Kit(2 x 2048 MB)
HDD: Samsung 750GB Spinpoint F1 SATA II 300 7200rpm
Case: Antec Three Hundred
PSU: Corsair PSU 650W CMPSU-650TX
Sound: i dont think I need a dedicated card - hoping onboard will suffice.
DVD-Rom/Keyboard/Mouse etc coming from old system.

I'm (hopefully) planning to overclock the CPU to 3.6ish (I beleive I should be able to do this with little effort). I did consider a quad core, but i'd rather it be better at gaming etc than multi tasking (i dont mind waiting a little longer for a process to run, but I'd rather urgent tasks like graphics and occasional gameplay to be better) so I've chosen to base around the E8400.

The things i'm not too sure on are the memory, motherboard, cooler and PSU choice. I've tried the "cheap and nasty" route for things like PSU's and motherboards in the past and have regretted it nor am after "cutting edge" or i'd be going down the i7 route

Any thoughts?

[Nobull]

The OCZ memory you mention is on offer on Ebuyer today for £35, for a 4GB set I'd say that's a bargain and go for it while it's still on. Your probably making the right choice CPU wise with regards to your uses. With regards to your mobo I think the P5Q is also an informed choice although I've also heard nothing but good things about the MSI P45 Neo3-FR which is only about £88 so you'd save yourself £20 the only drawback being that it wouldn't support Crossfire if were considering that at a later date. If this was essential, the P45 Neo2-FR has crossfire capability and is £94 so again you'd save a little on the P5Q Pro. As I said though, the Asus is also highly regarded so either would be a good choice. In terms of the cooler by all accounts the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 is the best air cooler in that price range, but it is £16 so a wee bit more than the Akasa you listed. i have one myself tho and I can't fault it. P.S. what resolutions will you be gaming at? Both the 4850 and 4870 are due for price drops, with the 4890 being released soon if you can bear to wait till april. If not I've seen the Powercolor 4870 OC edition listed for £150, might be worth investing the extra £30 in that if your high res gaming? Hope that helps.

[Pob255]

The OCZ memory you mention is on offer on Ebuyer today for £35, for a 4GB set I'd say that's a bargain and go for it while it's still on. Your probably making the right choice CPU wise with regards to your uses. With regards to your mobo I think the P5Q is also an informed choice although I've also heard nothing but good things about the MSI P45 Neo3-FR which is only about £88 so you'd save yourself £20 the only drawback being that it wouldn't support Crossfire if were considering that at a later date. If this was essential, the P45 Neo2-FR has crossfire capability and is £94 so again you'd save a little on the P5Q Pro. As I said though, the Asus is also highly regarded so either would be a good choice. In terms of the cooler by all accounts the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 is the best air cooler in that price range, but it is £16 so a wee bit more than the Akasa you listed. i have one myself tho and I can't fault it. P.S. what resolutions will you be gaming at? Both the 4850 and 4870 are due for price drops, with the 4890 being released soon if you can bear to wait till april. If not I've seen the Powercolor 4870 OC edition listed for £150, might be worth investing the extra £30 in that if your high res gaming? Hope that helps.

And people accuse me of writing blocks of text.

Not sure on the new Neo3-fr, the older P35 neo2-fr was a very nice lower cost mother board.
Should be fine for smallish overclocks as proposed.

The AC f7p was the best low cost cooler, until Akasa brought out the AK-965x3 which is both slighter better for cooling and costs a bit less, around £12
Also it does not suffer from the fan problems of the AC f7p, long term use has shown quite a few people having an issue with the ACf7p where the PWM function fails and the fan gets stuck permanently at full speed and it loud at full speed.

I agree with you on the question of What resolution?
eg If 17"-19" 1280x1024 / 1440x900 then a 4830 or 9800gt would be a better card to look at.

That PSU is over the top for what you require.
shouldn't need anything more than a good 450w
Have a look at the Corsair VX450w
However saying that I've just noticed ebuyer have got the nice OCZ Mod Xstream 500w on sale for slightly less than the vx450v
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/152009
A nice buy and modular which will help in a small case like the Antec 300 with so little in it.

RAM pc6400 is a good price point and with the e8400 you should be able to get 3.6ghz with it. any higher and you'd probably want to look at faster memory and better cooling.

The down side here is the cost of the e8400 at around £130 it's a bit pricey.
You may want to look into an AMD system with the new Phenon II x3 as they seem to be pritty good and around £100
I'll leave others to sugest AMD motherboards

[GremlinUK]

Thanks both for your comments...

I agree with you on the question of What resolution?
eg If 17"-19" 1280x1024 / 1440x900 then a 4830 or 9800gt would be a better card to look at.

Initially i'll be carrying on using my 17" 1280x1024 monitor, but plan to upgrade the monitor in a couple of months to something larger/higher resolution.

That PSU is over the top for what you require.
shouldn't need anything more than a good 450w
Have a look at the Corsair VX450w
However saying that I've just noticed ebuyer have got the nice OCZ Mod Xstream 500w on sale for slightly less than the vx450v

A nice buy and modular which will help in a small case like the Antec 300 with so little in it.

The OCZ looks appealing - and at £20-30 cheaper is even better - I wont have power issues with a the OCZ psu?

The down side here is the cost of the e8400 at around £130 it's a bit pricey.
You may want to look into an AMD system with the new Phenon II x3 as they seem to be pritty good and around £100

After using AMD for the last 6 or so years, It never felt is was as solid or reliable as the P4 I had before it and have had on occasions cooling issues from time to time with it - somthing I never had with the previous Intel CPU's so decided to give Intel another go this time. I'm not too concerned about spending a little more on the CPU this time around -I'm hoping it'll last me for a few years until the next gen stuff becomes more mainstream (read - cheaper ).

[Nobull]

And people accuse me of writing blocks of text.

Not sure on the new Neo3-fr, the older P35 neo2-fr was a very nice lower cost mother board.
Should be fine for smallish overclocks as proposed.

The AC f7p was the best low cost cooler, until Akasa brought out the AK-965x3 which is both slighter better for cooling and costs a bit less, around £12
Also it does not suffer from the fan problems of the AC f7p, long term use has shown quite a few people having an issue with the ACf7p where the PWM function fails and the fan gets stuck permanently at full speed and it loud at full speed.

I agree with you on the question of What resolution?
eg If 17"-19" 1280x1024 / 1440x900 then a 4830 or 9800gt would be a better card to look at.

That PSU is over the top for what you require.
shouldn't need anything more than a good 450w
Have a look at the Corsair VX450w
However saying that I've just noticed ebuyer have got the nice OCZ Mod Xstream 500w on sale for slightly less than the vx450v
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/152009
A nice buy and modular which will help in a small case like the Antec 300 with so little in it.

RAM pc6400 is a good price point and with the e8400 you should be able to get 3.6ghz with it. any higher and you'd probably want to look at faster memory and better cooling.

The down side here is the cost of the e8400 at around £130 it's a bit pricey.
You may want to look into an AMD system with the new Phenon II x3 as they seem to be pritty good and around £100
I'll leave others to sugest AMD motherboards

Sorry about the blocks of text, I'll try to change that.

I was also going to say that the PSU was overkill but I thought if he wanted to Crossfire in future that extra power might come in handy and save him money replacing the PSU further down the line.

Didn't realsie the Akasa was so highly rated, although my ACFP 7 has served me well it has to be said.

Like you say you can get Phenom IIs at a good price at the minute, if I was the OP I'd personally pay the £20 extra and get a P2 920 because it has faired really well in gaming benchmarks and I think the E8400 is currently overpriced as you mentioned...£142 on scan! But If you want to go for an intel thats fair enough.

[mat-ster]

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/200...buy-feb-2009/1

This may help....

[Pob255]

I never had stability issues with my old athlon xp2400+, ok I did but that was down to a embarrassingly bad choice of psu, once I replaced that I was fine, until it just couldn't cope with what I was throwing at it, however I did make a careful choice of motherboard, it was an Epox cannot remember the model but it was rated as one of the best socket A motherboards.

Not used any of the newer AM2 boards so cannot really comment there, the main shift back towards them seems to be AMD are now producing better cpu's and there older ones have come down in price.

Unlike intel where the costs have been rising and the cpu's not getting that much better. There's not a great deal of difference performance wise between a old e6600 overclocked to 3ghz and the e8400 at stock, the e8400 has got a higher total overclocking potential but the higher starting fsb would require faster memory to reach it.
Still your money your choice.

If you need to shave some money off the cost I would suggest considering the e7400 older chip but still has just as good if not slightly better overclocking potential with ddr2-pc6400 memory and is only around £100

Not sure on that exact hard drive, others could be of more help here, I will say that even if it's not the best the jump from an IDE to sata2 hd is noticeable. (more so than the older sata drives) and cabling sata is far easier than IDE, although feels less secure. (just remember you cannot fold sata cables like you can with ide ribbon cables as the internal wires can break)

Personally although the Akasa AK-965x3 is a good cooler (my mistake before, scan now got it for even less £10) I'd look at a low cost cooler with a 120mm fan as it will be less noisy than any 92mm fan cooler

For a c2d cpu the new Arctic Cooling Freezer Extreme £26 or Akasa Nero AK-967 £25 or ZEROtherm ZEN FZ120 £26
The main difference between the 3 is going to be the mounting system.

Akasa Nero AK967 uses standard intel pushpins (which some people have problems with) heatpipe touching design and rubber fan mounts

ZEROtherm ZEN FZ120 uses a back plate and both through.

Arctic Cooling Freezer Extreme uses a custom mounting system, you use a push pin type system to fit a bracket to the motherboard, then secure the cooler by screwing an arm into the bracket. Also comes with pre-applied MX2 paste (must admit this cooler has been so long in coming out it seems to have dropped below the radar, but the more I see of it the more I like the look of it. Looks like an improved of the old Scythe Mine, which was an exellent cooler slightly let down by the size combined with intel push pins, the AC mounting system looks far better)

Didn't realsie the Akasa was so highly rated, although my ACFP 7 has served me well it has to be said.

Most of the reviews have sung it's praise and put it on par/slightly better than the old acf7p, it is basically a copy of the acf7p however it's cheaper £10 vs £16-18 (acf7p seems to be £18 most places these days)
My ACf7p served me well, until the PWM and I had to run it through a fan controller. I swaped it out for a thermalright 90 Ultima, Which I still say is the single best 92mm fan based cooler.
My old modded server case was too narrow for a 120mm fan based tower cooler.

EDIT: the Akasa AK965 BL is the other way around, it's the same cooler but with a blue LED fan, which is also a slightly lower speed for less noise, but the cooling suffers slightly putting it below the ACf7p and the price is slightly higher

[Nobull]

Can't believe bit tech ^^^ still recommending the Q6600 over other options, especially as the price has jumped back UP to £150, the benchmarks I've seen put the Phenom II 920 way ahead of it and it's only about £5 more on Scan. It's also old technology in the Q6600 meaning if you buy one new now its longevity is likely to be less and it's also much less energy efficient and costs you more on your leccy bill with it being on the old 65nm die. Admittedly it's a great CPU which would have paid dividends if you'd bought one when they were 1st released but to buy 1 now especially at a premuim price seems silly.

[GremlinUK]

I'd just like to thank you all for the feedback on my build - It's now built and runs amazingly - especially compared to my old Athlon!

Here is what I ended up getting:

Core 2 Duo E8500 (The store was out of stock of E8400 so gave me the E8500 for a fiver more)
Asus P5Q-E
Antec Three Hundred case
Akasa AK-965 Cooler
Samsung Spinpoint (1TB)
Corsair VX550W PSU
Corsair 4GB(2x2GB) TwinX Dominator Ram
Asus EAH4850 PCI-E Graphics card

The above combination worked "out of the box" no bios issues with RAM etc.

I've overclocked the CPU to 3.8 by setting the CPU voltage at 1.225 and the FSB to 400 - it's running at around 27c at idle and 36c under strain - so i think theres a lot of unexplored scope yet

[Nobull]

Congrats mate, sounds like a solid build. Bet it feels like a dream compared to your old athlon!!