New Gaming Rig

[kutocer]

Hey all first time poster long time reader.

While I've always been in to gaming and loved the hardware side of PC's I have 2 young kids and they use most of my money. This is the first gaming righ i will have built and right now like a big kid at crimbo and its driving me mental. I've got the go ahead from the misses to build my gaming rig i've so longed for. Its going inside a Antec 1200 with a 650W Neopower though i'm gonna be getting a 850W very soon.

Its based on a Core I7 920 D0 chip with a Thermalright Ultra 120 with a push pull config and using Zalman Super Thermal Grease ZM-STG1, running on a Rampage II Extreme with 6GB DDR3 Dominator 1600. Also going on to the board is 2 x XFX GTX 275 all running off 2 x 640GB Cavier Black in Raid1. This is just a system drive and not for storage that is the 1TB drive i'm sticking in. The screen is going to be a 24" 1080p Illyama monitor with the G5 laser mouse the G13 Advanced Gameboard with the G15 Rev2 keyboard and a QPAD EC-R Gaming mouse pad with Carbytek2™ surface

I will be hoping to achive 4Ghz speed on the CPU but that will be just to test the system i will be hopefully running stable at around 3.4-3.7ghz i know to achiv ethe top speed i will need a bigger PSU so untill that arrives it will be running stock speed.

It should all be going through nex week with me taking hte parts hopefully the week after. I will keep a pic log.

Any advice on the system is welcome and i look forward to responses.

Kut...

[staffsMike]

Well it sounds like a bit of an overkill but certainly very nice.

I don't understand the system drive being in RAID 1 though, that is mirror (backup) not stripe (performance). Can't imagine wasting a perfectly good hard drive on an system backup unless the PC has critical uses..

[kutocer]

Well my understanding of it all is that they both perform the same read speed which is what i am going for its just more reliable if one drive fails. I dont want to use the Raid for any storage just to access OS programs etc. The price difference between size's of HD is not alot so i gave myself space for future games i mean Age of Conan takes up 30gb and i can only see games getting bigger over time.

Thanks for you reply.

Kut...

[staffsMike]

That's fair enough and certainly using the same drives is the way to go. RAID can be more trouble than it's worth though. I prefer to have a spare drive with everything I need installed and ready to go.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Regarding DDR3 stick to low latency 1066mhz DDR3:

http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=3589

Any RAM which is faster seems to show little real world improvement. I would also consider getting a GTX295 over a pair of GTX275 graphics cards.

[kutocer]

With regards to the GTX295 i did look at that but the scores i've seen with the GTX275 in SLI beats teh GTX295 quite a bit, turn the SLI speeds to the same as the 295 and they will be the same hence why i've gone for the SLI setup. Wow i did miss that about memory and has made me change my mind on it as for what i want the machine for is gaming and it seems it makes no difference to have the higher speed. Looking at the options for that now.

Kut...

[jim]

Well it sounds like a bit of an overkill but certainly very nice.

I don't understand the system drive being in RAID 1 though, that is mirror (backup) not stripe (performance). Can't imagine wasting a perfectly good hard drive on an system backup unless the PC has critical uses..

I'm probably being pedantic, but backup isn't exactly the best word to describe RAID 1 in my opinion, improved reliability is a bit closer to the mark.

I would say that the OP would be better off with a 640GB system drive and an external 640GB drive if backup is what they're looking for.