System on a budget?

[simonf7]

Having done my last self-build a fair few years ago I'm bit out of touch with current processors and motherboards.

Anyway, my current case and stuff is still pretty good so only looking for cpu, motherboard. memory and graphics card and have about 400quid (+VAT) to spend.

Currently have this in my Scan basket - does this look ok for the money (and more importantly will it all work together?) or can someone suggest something better?

Asus P5N SLI NFS570 - £62.19
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 775 - £180.98
2Gb (2x1Gb) Corsair Value Select, DDR2 PC5300(667) - £138.54
256Mb Asus 7300GT PCI-Ex16 Silent - £50.39

The machine is really for development and some design stuff so it doesn't need to play the latest games, just as long as it compiles stuff quickly

Si

edit: just noticed the motherboard isn't in stock, any suggestions for something around the same price?

[keef247]

get the 6300 it will spank that and overclock just as fast for way cheaper.

[oralpain]

Current NVIDIA chipsets, for the Intel platform, do not seem to be very good overclockers. It's one of the reasons they tend to be inexpensive.

In this case, simonf7 probably would not be saving all that much money, as he would need to get a better motherboard to do the overclocking.

[simonf7]

get the 6300 it will spank that and overclock just as fast for way cheaper.

Tell me more - last time I overclocked something it was an original Athlon chip.

Si

[simonf7]

get the 6300 it will spank that and overclock just as fast for way cheaper.

Ok, had a quick read around and put this together based on what Scan has in stock -

Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 775 - £106.69
Gigabyte GA 965P-DS3 iP965, S775 - £82.24
256MB Gigabyte 7300GT PCI-E (x16) - £51.25
2Gb (2X1Gb) CorsairTwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC6400 (800) - £182.64

How's this for about the same price as my previous spec?

Si

[oralpain]

Looks pretty good, though you may want to take a look at an ASUS P5B motherboard.

[BlindMelon7]

People are gonna shout at me for saying this but personaly I cant see the point in getting amazing ram. I read a benchmark somewhere that showed the performance difference ram makes and its minimal. I say quantity not quality!

[oralpain]

The new BIOS for the Gigabyte GA 965P-DS3 seems to be shaping up well: http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2854

People are gonna shout at me for saying this but personaly I cant see the point in getting amazing ram. I read a benchmark somewhere that showed the performance difference ram makes and its minimal. I say quantity not quality!

Quality is always important, but speed does not equal quality.

I aim for the best bang for the buck. Top of the line memory is too expensive to be worth it to me, but bottom rung memory is not so much cheaper than the mid range stuff to make up for the performance that can be reliably squeezed out of it.

[spazman]

DS3 is a great performer, all the kinks have been ironed out with the latest BIOS and it clocks like a dream highly recommended

[Robbie G]

The E6300 certainly does not "spank" the E6600. It certainly overclocks well, but no overclocked E6300 will beat an overclocked E6600, ceteris paribus.

Were I compiling, video editing, etc, I would certainly view the CPU as the central piece of my system and go for the faster CPU. Yes, the E6300 will overclock to ~ 3GHz, but the E6600 will go further than that and will last longer. It also has an extra 2Mb of cache.