£800 - £850 for some bits..

[RDL]

Hi guys, got a mate who is running a Socket 939 computer atm, specs something like...

Asus AV8 Deluxe
Athlon 3500
Radeon X800
2GBs of quality RAM (assured by his mate from the shop who built it)
Couple of nice big HDDs etc.

He's a bit hazy on the rest, but that should do it. (Custom built by his mate in a shop)

Now he wants to keep this as a video editing rig only, and setup a new gaming one.

He has all the peripherals, monitor etc. So basically, what is the best rig I could spec him up (don't need a HDD either really atm) which will get him 100+ frames (the main thing he wants) on CSS (I know now too hard to do ) for £850.

Much appreciated, cheers.

[alsenior]

you will want a fast processor try and atholon 4000+ on an nforce 590 board with a geforce 7950gx2 with plenty of ram. that should get him what he wants. im sure the guys here will fill you in on the exact parts.

[RDL]

...?

[chuckskull]

For £800 you can pretty much afford a new rig, (presuming you re-use case, HDD, etc)

E6600 for £250.
X1900XT another £250.
2GB of PC6400 £150.
Choice of mobo £150.

Plus he can sell the old stuff, for a bit extra spending money.

[Clunk]

^^ what he said, only E6600 £220 from dabs
2gb ocz platinum 6400 £135 from komplett
gigabyte ds3 motherboard for £98 from scan

£240-250 for the x1900xt as above.

the savings will pay for a hard drive and case, or just a nice one of either

[chuckskull]

^^ what he said, only E6600 £220 from dabs
2gb ocz platinum 6400 £135 from komplett
gigabyte ds3 motherboard for £98 from scan

£240-250 for the x1900xt as above.

the savings will pay for a hard drive and case, or just a nice one of either

Yup shopping around can save you loads, i was just pulling numbers off the top of my head. thinking about he'll probably need a chunkier PSU too so some money will have to go into that.

[RDL]

He wants to keep the other PC for video editing, thanks for those specs, look nice; only thing is I'l need a case and a PSU, but I suppose that could swap for a case / HDD so should be ok.

[Clunk]

well dont scrimp on the psu...of all the things, do not scrimp on the psu

some brands to consider, seasonic, tagan, fsp, enermax. avoid anything cheap and lightweight. 500-600w should be ideal for those specs above.

[RDL]

Yep, cheers. I'd advised on a Tagan / Seasonic...possibly the Tagan as it's slightly cheaper IIRC, but still good quality.

[DanceswithUnix]

My guess is that if he ever tries video editing on a shiny new Conroe machine, the Athlon64 will get dumped. Anyone here actually tried on both?

He could always go for this motherboard which would allow him to re-use his existing DDR RAM on a Conroe. A review of that motherboard is here where they showed no real improvement for DDR2 memory over DDR (which you would expect).

[RDL]

He wants to keep the second machine though, so he'l need new RAM anyways, so might aswell stick with the DDR2. Thanks anyway.

[RDL]

Just a wee bump. Would a Tagan 480W PSU be able to handle that rig, or would something bigger be needed (530W?)

Edit: Obviously ideally the bigger the better, but on budget.

[trojan698]

Might want to consider the 2gb Geil kit available on special offer at ocuk (I know!)

GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC6400 800MHz Ultra Low Latency DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (GX22GB6400UDC) (MY-058-GL)
Price: £109.95 (£129.19 Including VAT at 17.5%)
On this week only (ends thursday)

oc's to 900 mhz easily apparently

And deffo go for the E6600, I get circa 200 fps on 1600x1200 and everything maxed with my overclocked E6300.

The 480w should be cope fine but you might want to consider something over 500w if he's clocking the cpu/gpu.

[chuckskull]

Just a wee bump. Would a Tagan 480W PSU be able to handle that rig, or would something bigger be needed (530W?)

Edit: Obviously ideally the bigger the better, but on budget.

Yeah easily.

[RDL]

One other question:

What's the difference between this and this

Just the bundle?

[RDL]

Thanks for the comments. He will be overclocking. Is the geil RAM as good as the OCZ stuff?