Final Thoughts and Suggestions Please

[Karl|Neo]

Hi, a friend of mine has given me around £1800 (Oh how I wish i could end there ) to build him a pc, of course this gives me the dilemma of what to choose. His only requests were that he has a 7900GTX, an X-Fi fatality edition, and a windowed case.

I have come up with this spec, and I was hoping for some suggestions and\or opinions on it and improvements:

Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Scan £317.19
Asus A8N32-Sli Scan £133.91
Seasonic S12-600 Scan £99.86
2GB Corsair TwinX PC4000 Scan £152.62
250Gb Hitachi Deskstar Scan £66.85
Akasa Eclipse 62 Scan £78.6
XFX 7900GTX Extreme Scan £434.69
Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty Edition Scan £134.88
NEC DVD Burner Scan £29.17
Black Sony Floppy Scan £4.69
Scan 52 in 1 Card Reader Scan £7.04
Window for Akasa Scan £10.56
Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro Scan £15.15
BENQ FP202W Overclock £351

Total: £1836

My main problems are:
A) The monitor, I'm not up on TFT's is this a good model? Are widescreens worth it?
B) Is that a good CPU for the price, he's not too bothered about overclocking, so should I get him the next one up and sacrifice something else slightly, or will that one be fine?

Otherwise I'm just asking for "Don't get... because..." or "Get... because..." replies please .

Thanx in advance, you guys rawk!

Karl

[herulach]

Dont get any extreme edition GPU, all they have is a flashy box and clocks you can put up with no trouble using the tools supplied with any card.

If you can persuade him to, get him a x1900XT/X, they are better cards, especially when you start wanting to game at big res's with AA and AF on.

[Karl|Neo]

Thanks for your reply, you just saved 70 quid that I can try and stick somwhere else
Yeah that's what I thought, but he's a bit of a fanboi, and he's really into the multi graphics thing, and the crossfire motherboards just don't seem 'finished' to me yet. I'll have a chat to him about it anywho.

Karl

[arthurleung]

How bout dual Scan 7800GTX, not much more expensive

[Dark Horse]

Unless he is seriously an Nvidia fanboi I would look at the X1900XTX, it will cope much better at the kind of resolutions that he will be using that monitor at. You can also find them for cheaper than a 7900gtx, as much as a £100 cheaper at ocuk.

I also wouldn't waste the money on 2gb of faster ram. Athlon 64's have shedloads of memory bandwith so you're really just throwing money away as you won't see a 5% increase in framerate from faster memory let alone a 50% increase from £100 for 2gb of corsair value.

I would also question the X-Fi fatality edition, is it really necessary? Its twice the price of a standard X-Fi! If he does go ahead I hope he has speakers good enough to do justice to the card.

Monitor wise that looks fine although I'm not too up on monitors. 20" widescreen is probably the sweetspot at the moment when it comes to price/size/performance.

Rest of the setup looks good, what about keyboard and mouse?

[NightshadowUK]

Instead of getting a floppy drive AND a card reader, why not get them all in one?

As for the CPU, the 4400+ is more than enough - stick with it.

[cptwhite_uk]

I know you say he's not bothered about overclocking but maybe you'd like to consider a Dual Opteron to go with that PC4000 RAM and top quality motherboard you're investing in. You should be able to hit 2.5Ghz with this: (300Mhz faster when overclocked...and £35 cheaper)

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=337800


Would also look at making this PC as quiet as possible when we're talking about this much money.

[TooNice]

I would also question the X-Fi fatality edition, is it really necessary? Its twice the price of a standard X-Fi! If he does go ahead I hope he has speakers good enough to do justice to the card.

Seconded!

But not for the same reason. There is no quality improvement between the Fatal1ty and the base card. All you get is the 62 extra X-RAM (very little benefit), and a front bay (that you get with the Platinum).

So IMHO, the Fatal1ty edition is the worse buy of the bunch (even though it sucessfully catches gamers attention). If you have really good speakers/headphone, then you might as well go Elite Pro (improved DAC/op-amp).

[Karl|Neo]

I'll get onto him tomorrow about the ATi issue, I didn't think it was that one sided.
As you can tell he wants the best of the best, even if it's not exactly the best way to spend his money.

My theory on the PC4000 ram was that, eventually, when the 4400 is getting a bit long in the tooth, he can OC it a bit with the RAM still being able to cope with this. Is that just being overly pedantic on my part?

I think the Fatality X-Fi choice is just him being wooed (woo'd?) by the name of a pro-gamer into thinking it's better than average, I think he just wants the front box, so I'll recommend the platinum for him, but he might not mind the £20 difference (wish I was in that situation), or he might just go whole hog and get the Elite-Pro like TooNice suggested.

I say, that's a great find Nightshadow! However, why is it "call for price"?

I'm not sure about the keyboard just yet, however he has said he wants another Intellimouse (Don't ask )

Good point on the quietness aspect by white, part of the reason I thought the 7900 would be better for the system is that I've heard the X1900XT is quite noisy and whiny, and my friend has said he would like the system quiet. I'm also getting the 2 aftermarket fans mentioned in the Hexus review of the eclipse 62, as these are 120mm they should be quiet, and the seasonic has a 120mm fan on it too. Also, the AC Freezer Pro is supposedly quite quiet. Any other suggestions on how to make it (the whole system) quieter?

Thank you for all the posts, you have been extremely helpful thus far,

Karl

Edit: Also, does anyone have any recommendations on Crossfire motherboards if he ends up going the Ati route?

[Dark Horse]

With regard to the value select vs pc4000 ram read this review:

http://www.techspot.com/reviews/hard...ct/index.shtml

It is fairly conclusive for the Value Select line of thinking. Cpu speed is far far more important these days as the memory controller for Athlon 64s is actually in the processor the latencies are already so low that fast memory makes little difference.

The AC Freezer pro is pretty well recommended, it is quiet and cools well.