Help!? Sub £550 Pre Bulldozer spec. Should I wait for BD?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

If you didn't have an HD4850 already I would have suggested you get an A8-3850 or A8-3800. If the A8-3850 and Asrock A75 mini-ITX motherboard had been out when I got my Core i3 2100 I would have gone the AMD route TBH.

[phurbs]

If you didn't have an HD4850 already I would have suggested you get an A8-3850 or A8-3800. If the A8-3850 and Asrock A75 mini-ITX motherboard had been out when I got my Core i3 2100 I would have gone the AMD route TBH.

For what reason? Is the A8 a better chip for the price? Would you have used the onboard GPU and not bothered with the discrete? I have no particular attachment to the HD4850 so if I can sell it for around £50 I would?!

Obviously the A8 is not on the AM3 path so there is no future upgrade available. At least with the S1155 I can, if I wanted, upgrade to a i5/i7 in the future if I ever wanted to. Or is there some future FM1 chip coming out that I am not aware of?

[shaithis]

Looking at the AMD roadmap, it looks as if there will be a "Trinity" core, which will almost certainly be on FM1. it will be based on BD tech.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

For what reason? Is the A8 a better chip for the price? Would you have used the onboard GPU and not bothered with the discrete? I have no particular attachment to the HD4850 so if I can sell it for around £50 I would?!

Obviously the A8 is not on the AM3 path so there is no future upgrade available. At least with the S1155 I can, if I wanted, upgrade to a i5/i7 in the future if I ever wanted to. Or is there some future FM1 chip coming out that I am not aware of?

The HD4850 1GB is better for gaming. However,the build I did earlier this year was for general purpose use and for light gaming as I already have an HD5850 1GB in another build. My Core i3 2100 and HD5670 GDDR5 will be better for gaming but an A8-3850 would have been better suited for the light games I play on this computer. The HD6550D IGP is around 10% to 20% slower than an HD5570 for gaming which means it is around the same level as an HD4650 GDDR3 graphics card. Remember,the A8-3850 is only around £10 more than the Core i3 2100 and yet you are getting similar performance to a £35 to £45 graphics card.

The case I used is very cramped:

http://forums.hexus.net/2108383-post73.html

An A8-3850 would have meant I could have ditched a separate graphics card and overall system power consumption at idle and load would have been lower. I could also have had used one cooling fan meaning less noise too. On top of this for video encoding using HandBrake the A8-3850 would have been faster than a Core i3 2100.

[phurbs]

@CAT - Ah I see what you mean. Well to be honest I am happy sticking with the i3 build as I feel I have a decent handle on what I need and what I can get. I dont really need the 4 cores of either A8 or i5, so it is not really worth the extra cost, especially considering I already have the HD4850.

That said, I have made some amendments to my spec. I have changed the mobo to an Asus offering. It is £10 more than the Zotac but I have read that the Zotac can be a little flaky, so I think it is worth the £10 for peace of mind of the Asus name. The Asus still has the USB3.0 headers and onboard WiFi which attracted to me to the Zotac in the first place. Obviously I have had to swap the RAM for SO-DIMM but I dont see any issues there.

Some of these items are on today only, so if I was to buy them this weekend (which I was not planning on, but you never know ) I would save about £12 overall, which isnt bad.



So what do you guys think of this? Specifically:

• How is the PSU choice? It has a 135mm fan which I think is a decent option!
• How is the HSF? I went as low profile as possible to prevent the PSU/HSF competing for air.
• Will the HSF interfere with the GPU? The socket is very close!

Thanks again for the help!

ps. I have found an old DVD drive lying around. Hence why I haven't included one

[Sheva]

Why have you bothered with an extra HSF?

The retail CPU will come with one and you can't overclock it anyway.

[Pob255]

Mainly because the psu is straight over the cpu, so the fans will be fighting against each other.

I still think the scythe cooler would be a better option, although it's not as low.

I'd go with the Titan ttc-nc25h http://www.scan.co.uk/products/titan...l-and-amd-cpus over the thermaltake, it's a direct touch heat pipe design, it should be better and looking at the pictures it looks like only the heat pipe end is the only one that sticks out past the mounting brackets http://www.titan-cd.com/product/show...sp?ProID=813#5 bit of an engrish instruction guide http://www.titan-cd.com/pdf/MANUAL/C...ersal/NC25.pdf but it's not that complex.

I'd probably this 80mm PWM fan http://www.scan.co.uk/products/80mm-...-speed-control

However it would be well worth it to stick with the stock cooler at first, see what that's like before getting an after market cpu cooler.

Having read through the giant Q11 thread, it seems that the hard drives can get a bit toasty if you've got a hot/long gpu in there, because there not much air flow down there and the graphics card can trap the air.
You've not said anything about your current 4850 so we'll not know how much of a possible issue this could be.
Again it's one of those areas where I'd say wait, try it out and see first.

On the PSU, personally I'd get a modular psu, cable management is going to be an issue in this case, I would strongly advise on a modular psu

The silverstone modular psu http://www.scan.co.uk/products/500w-...2v-quiet-fan-a with a short cable set http://www.scan.co.uk/products/silve...su-100-modular would be the best ATX option short of modding the cables yourself.

Most PSU's now has long cables which is great in most cases but not in SFF builds.

[dbh]

I wouldn't bother with the P8H67 Deluxe. Yes it has all the extra stuff but do you need it? The onboard wifi n is only 150mbps. Save some money and put it towards a better card if you want wifi the price difference is quite a bit.

I was going this similar route like what you've done but decided against it as the money you save between this mobo and the lower tier one you can get a much better wifi card.

If you don't need raid go for non raid board you'll save another £20. If you need RAID you can always do software RAID in windows 7.

The software RAID in windows 7 actually is comparable to the onboard RAID you get on these mobos so you're not losing out. I went with this mobo (it's MATX though) http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=H61M/U3S3.

It's around £64 from amazon. Has 6 sata ports (2 of which are SATA 6Gbps). Japan Caps and has USB3. Also noticed with your case choice you've got USB3 front ports. Most motherboards don't have USB3 headers to do additional ports. So those will go to waste and only be running at usb2 speeds.

The only other motherboard I came across that does have these additonal headers is the H61M_EVO http://uk.asus.com/Motherboards/Inte...55/P8H61M_EVO/. Again this is a MATX mobo. I'm not sure of any other mITX mobos that have these additonal headers.

Have a look at the H61 mobo's there's little to no difference between them and the H67 ones apart from RAID. As for a case I bought the Silverstone GD05B. Very nice case looks like a HTPC case. Has 3x 120mm fans.

If you're after a tower though there's this case.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/silve...ro-atx-w-o-psu

It's not much bigger than your Lian-Li but it supports mATX and has much more space if you plan on upgrading / adding addtional cards in your pc.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I wouldn't bother with the P8H67 Deluxe. Yes it has all the extra stuff but do you need it? The onboard wifi n is only 150mbps. Save some money and put it towards a better card if you want wifi the price difference is quite a bit.

I was going this similar route like what you've done but decided against it as the money you save between this mobo and the lower tier one you can get a much better wifi card.

If you don't need raid go for non raid board you'll save another £20. If you need RAID you can always do software RAID in windows 7.

The software RAID in windows 7 actually is comparable to the onboard RAID you get on these mobos so you're not losing out. I went with this mobo (it's MATX though) http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=H61M/U3S3.

It's around £64 from amazon. Has 6 sata ports (2 of which are SATA 6Gbps). Japan Caps and has USB3. Also noticed with your case choice you've got USB3 front ports. Most motherboards don't have USB3 headers to do additional ports. So those will go to waste and only be running at usb2 speeds.

The only other motherboard I came across that does have these additonal headers is the H61M_EVO http://uk.asus.com/Motherboards/Inte...55/P8H61M_EVO/. Again this is a MATX mobo. I'm not sure of any other mITX mobos that have these additonal headers.

Have a look at the H61 mobo's there's little to no difference between them and the H67 ones apart from RAID. As for a case I bought the Silverstone GD05B. Very nice case looks like a HTPC case. Has 3x 120mm fans.

If you're after a tower though there's this case.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/silve...ro-atx-w-o-psu

It's not much bigger than your Lian-Li but it supports mATX and has much more space if you plan on upgrading / adding addtional cards in your pc.

That ASRock H61 motherboard is unusual as it has a third party SATA 3.0 controller. The H61 chipset lacks ACHI too which is important for SSDs and every one of them will be limited to two RAM slots. Two RAM slots for a motherboard larger than mini-ITX and over £60 is not acceptable IMHO and should be the preserve of motherboards under £50.

Things seem to be going backwards nowadays as having 4 RAM slots in motherboards over £45 was the common practice.

These H67 motherboards are cheaper:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/msi-h...vga-out-sata6g

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/msi-h...ata6gplususb30

The first has SATA3.0 and the second has SATA3.0 and USB3.0 ports.

This H67 motherboard is cheaper too and has 4 RAM slots but lacks USB3.0:

http://www.ebuyer.com/259261-biostar...dio-matx-th67b

[Pob255]

I wouldn't bother with the P8H67 Deluxe. Yes it has all the extra stuff but do you need it? The onboard wifi n is only 150mbps. Save some money and put it towards a better card if you want wifi the price difference is quite a bit.

I was going this similar route like what you've done but decided against it as the money you save between this mobo and the lower tier one you can get a much better wifi card.

If you don't need raid go for non raid board you'll save another £20. If you need RAID you can always do software RAID in windows 7.

The software RAID in windows 7 actually is comparable to the onboard RAID you get on these mobos so you're not losing out. I went with this mobo (it's MATX though) http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=H61M/U3S3.

It's around £64 from amazon. Has 6 sata ports (2 of which are SATA 6Gbps). Japan Caps and has USB3. Also noticed with your case choice you've got USB3 front ports. Most motherboards don't have USB3 headers to do additional ports. So those will go to waste and only be running at usb2 speeds.

The only other motherboard I came across that does have these additonal headers is the H61M_EVO http://uk.asus.com/Motherboards/Inte...55/P8H61M_EVO/. Again this is a MATX mobo. I'm not sure of any other mITX mobos that have these additonal headers.

Have a look at the H61 mobo's there's little to no difference between them and the H67 ones apart from RAID. As for a case I bought the Silverstone GD05B. Very nice case looks like a HTPC case. Has 3x 120mm fans.

If you're after a tower though there's this case.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/silve...ro-atx-w-o-psu

It's not much bigger than your Lian-Li but it supports mATX and has much more space if you plan on upgrading / adding addtional cards in your pc.

The sugo sg03 is about 25% bigger, but yes it's still small.
mATX does open up a lot more options a Z68 like the MSI Z68MA-ED55-B http://www.scan.co.uk/products/msi-z...board-micro-at and an i5 2500k would lead to a really solid gaming system.
But it does add size to the case.

You could also go up a step in size to the Silverstone TJ08B-E http://www.scan.co.uk/products/silve...usb-30-w-o-psu but this is getting even further form a SFF build.

If you wanted to go smaller ITX you could look at the APlus CS-102 http://www.scan.co.uk/products/aplus...-micro-atx-psu data sheet http://www.nanopoint.co.uk/de/gfx/pr...tasheet_En.pdf it can only take a single slot graphics card But the use of an SFX psu does mean it can be smaller.
The psu supplied is from Tagan a 300w 80plus model (Tagan TG300-U33II) but I cannot find out any more details than that however if it's one of the newer Tagan units, which is suspect it is, then is probably ether from Enhance Electronics or Impervio (They where responsible for the very good silverstone Olympia & Decathlon ranges) so I doubt it'll be a hunk of junk.

An ATX PSU and full 5.25" is a bit of a size limiter, the lian-li Q07 and Q11 are about as small as it's possible to make a case while still using an ATX psu and 5.25" bay

[dbh]

That ASRock H61 motherboard is unusual as it has a third party SATA 3.0 controller. The H61 chipset lacks ACHI too which is important for SSDs and every one of them will be limited to two RAM slots. Two RAM slots for a motherboard larger than mini-ITX and over £60 is not acceptable IMHO and should be the preserve of motherboards under £50.
...

I must have some hybrid monster motherboard because I've definitely got ACHI enabled on my H61 mobo. The TJ08 looks like a good option if phurbs wants to retain the USB3 functionality via the front of his case.

If it's worth anything the AS Rock mobo is £59.99 from Novatech and you can get free delivery (orders over £50).

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/p.../H61MU3S3.html

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I must have some hybrid monster motherboard because I've definitely got ACHI enabled on my H61 mobo. The TJ08 looks like a good option if phurbs wants to retain the USB3 functionality via the front of his case.

That is because you have a third party SATA 3.0 controller which is not typical of H61 motherboards. Anyway,as I mentioned H67 motherboards can be had for around the £60 mark which have native SATA3.0 ports.