New 2k System

[sunny304]

Looking for some advice, im planning on building a new system over the next few months, from now till december, this is what im planning on so far, eventually considering water cooling the system, but that wont be until next year. The cpu im hoping will overclock to 4ghz or close to it, most things have been bought to future proof the system

The crossfire gpus may or may not happen, depending on the progress dx11 cards
Just wondering if anyone can offer any further advice on the system specs ive given below

Case - Lian Li x1000 - 300.00 - if this becomes available in the uk

Motherboard - Asus P6T7 WS Revolution - 339.25

Power Supply - 1250w Enermax Revolution - 217.35

CPU - Core i7 920 2.66Ghz - 201.45

GPU - Sapphire 4870x2 x2 Crossfire - 243.46 Each

RAM - 6GB Corsair Dominator GT 2000mhz - 235.98

CPU Cooler - Thermallight Ultra Extreme 120 - 51.62

Hard Drives - 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 - 113.86 - Media
500Gb Western Digital - Currently Own - Backup
300GB VelociRaptor 10000rpm - 165.39 - Games
32GB Corsair Extreme Series - 114.22 - OS


Total - 2226.04

Thanks

[Cornholio]

Not sure were your getting these prices from..but already i can see the thermalright cooler is overpriced, its 34.49 @ scan.

[sunny304]

Not sure were your getting these prices from..but already i can see the thermalright cooler is overpriced, its 34.49 @ scan.

i priced that on scan this morning at that :s
weird, ill check again

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/Therm...nc-1600RPM-fan

there you go
need to stick the w's together, wont let me post urls


Note from admin - I've sorted the link for you. You need a few more posts to be able to post links. It keeps dodgy links out from spammers, but unfortunately, occasionally affects a genuine poster like you.

[Cornholio]

i priced that on scan this morning at that :s
weird, ill check again

w w w. scan. co .uk /Products/Thermalright-Ultra-120-eXtreme-1366RT-120mm-heat-sink-for-Intel1366-CPU-inc-1600RPM-fan

there you go
need to stick the w's together, wont let me post urls

my bad buddy, didnt cross my mind to look at skt 1366 doh !

[Jasp]

If you not planning on building till december wait, simply as, the new i5 processors will be out as will the DX11 cards so you will be able to see how they line up. If you intend to buy i would downgrade the PSU a bit, you seriously won't need 1250w unless you are planning on powering 2 PCs, the rest of the houses appliences and jump starting your car at the same time, i would be looking towards the corsair TX850 or HX1000, also i would look at scrapping the raptor drive and upgrading the OS SSD to either 64 or 80gb and going for a 1TB WD Black as my games drive, but thats personal choice more then anything.

As for coolers you might want to take a look at this one http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Proli...1366-(Fanless) i hear its the new bad boy on the block.

[nightkhaos]

Your inital setup is overkill in the extreme.

The motherboard is way to expensive considering, and the only advantage I can see over it compared to a mid-range board is Serial Attached SCSI. If we consider that none of the drives you are getting are SAS, this negatives that advantage. Save £100 and get something like a Asus P6T Deluxe V2 or a Gigibyte X58-UD5.

You will only need a 750W - 850W powersupply, not a 1.25 kW, even with a future megacomputer. For quad GPU with a good satefy margin I would air on the side of cauntion, althrough I do know from experience that a 750W will be fine, and get a HX850 from Corsair.

4 GPUs? Are you planning to run dual, tri, or quad moniters? Because if you only intend to run one moniter of this system, you will find the performance increase you get will be nomial. Tri and Quad Crossfire is still under development, and they do not scale very well. Either wait for the DX11 GPUs where I think ATi have improved tri and quad crossfire performance, or get a single nV 295 or two 4890s. Unless you plan to run Supreme Commander on 4 moniters, I doubt you will need that much power. But this depends on your circumstances, what was your logic behind two 4870 x2s?

2000MHz RAM? Seriously! All you will end up doing with that is driving up the usage on the memory controler, thus increasing your CPU temperatures by a few degrees, thus negativing the effect of having high-clocked RAM in the first place, and also reducing your chances of obtaining the stable 4GHz you desire. I would recommend you downgrade to 1600MHz RAM CL7 as it will cost you significantly less, and give you comparable performance, not to mention allow you a wider overclocking window.

Finally, what is WITH that HDD setup? Seriously, I understand you already own an unnamed WD 500GB... but a Raptor, and a 32GiB SSD? Get an 80GiB SSD, with four HDDs in RAID 01/10 3 TB of storage with redundancy. Please note the HDDs are on pre-order at the moment. You will have 3TB of storage for media and games, and 80GiBs for your system to boot off. Of course, the HDD RAID array will be limited to about 80MB/s real world read speed, which means your game load times will be higher than you could achieve with a VelioRaptor, but I doubt you will notice, considering that the real world read speed of the Raptor is only about 90MB/s. The only way to get really good load times would be to go completely SSD, but that is outside even your budget. For one thing you need a RAID controler than can handle a lot of drives.

Now I apologise if I seem overly harsh, but I don't want you to waste your money on needless items. There is certein kudos for getting expensive components, but don't let kudos get in the way of giving you a really good system. In my experience it is not possible to spend to much on a system, but it is possible to spend money improving the wrong areas. And at the moment, it seems to me you are doing the latter.

Take your time and weigh your options very carefully. You are going to spend a signficant part of your life in front of this machine after all.

[blackbirds]

To be honest, I think you're insane. £300 on a case? £330 on a motherboard? £235 for just 6GB of RAM? Etc, etc, all based around the cheapest i7 CPU you could find? 1.25Kw PSU? The term "future proof" making a showing? It's the sort of thing that should get people comitted. I don't want to seem patronizing with this question because I genuinely ask it with good intentions, but am I right in guessing that you're quite young, still living with your parents, and new to PC building?

[nightkhaos]

To be honest, I think you're insane. £300 on a case? £330 on a motherboard? £235 for just 6GB of RAM? Etc, etc, all based around the cheapest i7 CPU you could find? 1.25Kw PSU? The term "future proof" making a showing? It's the sort of thing that should get people comitted. I don't want to seem patronizing with this question because I genuinely ask it with good intentions, but am I right in guessing that you're quite young, still living with your parents, and new to PC building?

I think given it is likely the OP is new to PC building that making mistakes like this, which we consider basics, would be perfectly resonable.

The 920 D0 is afterall very easy to overclock, and thus worth considerable more to the consumer than the other LGA1366 Bloomfield i7 revisions currently in production.

Why would he not go for the most expensive motherboard, he wants quality afterall, how is he to know he can get quality with a cheaper mid-range board?

And the case, well, I don't think £300 on a case is unreasonable. I would speed £500 on a case if I knew I would be happy with it, and be able to use it for the next few builds without worrying about it breaking. I'm lucky however that my style and sense of quality was able to be achieved at less than £100.

And 2000MHz CL8 RAM is that expensive, but as I suggested above, he is better of with some slower clocked RAM so that he can make the most of the overclockable nature of the 920 D0.

Instead of telling the poor kid off, why don't you try and give him some advice? What would you suggest he buy? I am sure he is welcome to any suggetions, particularly if said suggestions save him money, money that he could spend on buying more games.

[Terbinator]

Wait for the new i5/i7s and get yourself an uber machine!!!

[nightkhaos]

Wait for the new i5/i7s and get yourself an uber machine!!!

Okay... I always hate going over this, but the i7 Bloomfield because it's upgrade path will include the i9 Hex and Oct cores. The i7 Lynnfield series look better ONLY if you consider their clock, which is sad to say, higher than the entry level i7s. You will still get better performance from a Bloomfield i7, albeit marginal.

The Lynnfield chips niche market is mid-range gamer. The Bloomfields is high performance sub-server workstation/enthusist gamer.

The reason the Bloomfield chips seem like overkill is because in many respects they are. Usually, to get this kind of performace you would need to go for server grade equipment.

I'm not saying the Lynnfields are bad, I'm saying consider the person whom you are directing this advice too. He is willing to pay over £2000 for a system.

This isn't to say the the top range Lynnfields will be better than the low-end Bloomfields, in fact I think they will be, but the problem comes in the next upgrade path. Intel will not be putting an Oct Core CPU on anything but a QPI bus. In fact, the prototype Gulftown that HEXUS recently reported on was on a LGA1366.