Last couple of questions

[bigduke6]

Thank you all for you help and i am looking at the new AMD Vision Black 6 core 1090t gaming PC. It has the CROSSHAIR IV FORMULA - Asus Crosshair IV Formula, AMD 890FX, SAM3, PCI-E 2.0, DDR3 1600/1800/1866, SATA 6Gb/s RAID, ATX motherboard, will the sound card with it be good enough for games or do u really neeed a seperate sound card? if so i am thinking of the Asus Xonar D2X Ultra Fidelity 7.1 - PCI-E, your views?

Graphics cards is the ati 5970 really worth £150 more than the 5870? will the 5870 be good for games?

Hard Drives - this is the bit that is confusing me. i was thinking on the 640GB Western Digital Caviar Black, SATA 6Gb/s, 64MB Cache . or also a 300 GB Western Digital VelociRaptor, 10000rpm, 16MB Cache (£134.53) Is the raptor noisey and is there overheating problems with them now and relaiablility? or a 80GB Intel SSD Gen 2, (Read 250MB/s Write 70MB/s) (£143.97) with my operating system etc on it and use the caviar black for everything else? would i put my games on that or the ssd drive,

Case - I am looking at the Antec 193 as quietness is important to me - will i need any more fans for the system?

thank you in advance

[leepen@scan]

Thank you all for you help and i am looking at the new AMD Vision Black 6 core 1090t gaming PC. It has the CROSSHAIR IV FORMULA - Asus Crosshair IV Formula, AMD 890FX, SAM3, PCI-E 2.0, DDR3 1600/1800/1866, SATA 6Gb/s RAID, ATX motherboard, will the sound card with it be good enough for games or do u really neeed a seperate sound card? if so i am thinking of the Asus Xonar D2X Ultra Fidelity 7.1 - PCI-E, your views?

The soundcard which is onboard is one of those "good enough" features, but they do alleviate the load off the CPU and onto the dedicated SoundCard. They can make a huge difference to the volume of the audio as all onboard audio chips have a low signal to noise ratio in comparison, so do try and go for a reasonable card, Asus Xonar cards are relatively cheap and give great performance.

Graphics cards is the ati 5970 really worth £150 more than the 5870? will the 5870 be good for games?

This depends on the resolution you're running in. If you're running in a high resolution (1920x1200 and above) then the 5870's are a little bottlenecked with just 1Gb VRAM, however you can go for a 2Gb model if you wish and should you go for the 5970, you'll have a fantastic cards and the bragging rights that you own the worlds current fastest graphics card!

Hard Drives - this is the bit that is confusing me. i was thinking on the 640GB Western Digital Caviar Black, SATA 6Gb/s, 64MB Cache . or also a 300 GB Western Digital VelociRaptor, 10000rpm, 16MB Cache (£134.53) Is the raptor noisey and is there overheating problems with them now and relaiablility? or a 80GB Intel SSD Gen 2, (Read 250MB/s Write 70MB/s) (£143.97) with my operating system etc on it and use the caviar black for everything else? would i put my games on that or the ssd drive,

Caviar Black drives are fantastic if you wish to keep the cost down, they are much more advanced than any other HDD on the market, having dual I/O chips to reduce bottlenecks and overall better manufacturing. Raptors spinning a little faster will give off a bit more noise but the heat factor doesn't really come into it as the drive itself is housed in a heatsink.

If you were to go for an SSD (highly recommended) then we'd definitely say to use this as the OS drive and any DX11 games, whereas your older DX9 and 10 titles could be stored on a classic hard disk. SSD's are up to 130x faster than a HDD so if you can - go for it.

Case - I am looking at the Antec 193 as quietness is important to me - will i need any more fans for the system?

thank you in advance

The system can house up to 5x 120mm fans - the two provided should be okay but if you wished to swap them out to all Noctua (silence option) or all Akasa Apache (performance option) then you'd be quite welcome to.


Hope this helps

All the best

[bigduke6]

lee

thanks for your help and advice - one last thing(promise) just the fans it come with a 120mm Akasa Apache Black Ultra Silent Fan HDB bearing PWM fan *OEM Fan Only, whats oem fan? and this fan seems a silent yet good performance fan, how many more will i need of these or can you recommend others, quiet wiith good performance over loud and very good performance.

[leepen@scan]

bigduke6,

OEM fans are provided in a brown box, as opposed to bulky retail plastic packaging. It's just a way of keeping the cost down on the overall system without providing more packaging than is necessary - the fans are identical, we just get a better deal from Akasa purchasing them in this way.

The Akasa Apache's are by far our #1 choice for systems at present, our new White Tiger system has these in mass quantity on all the radiators in there

All the very best,