Hi new to the forums be nice. Ive been out of the PC world for a while busy with work and family. Im donating most of my existing PC to my kids and building something new. my budget tops is £500. What I have now. Koolance PC2-600 water cooled case. MSI 865 MB. Intel P4 3.0GHz (overclocked at 3.7Ghz). 2GB Crucial Balistix PC4000 DDR. ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. 160GB and 500Gb SATA drives. DVD + DVD-R drives. 20" TFT Viewsonic. Vantec 500W PSU. collecting dust in a cupboard I have. Thermaltake Lanfire case 40Gb IDE drive IIyama 19" monitor keyboards mice ect thermalright S478 copper cooler. My plan so far is the following, taking the spare parts I have add my existing PSU, motherboard, CPU memory and graphics, reduce the overclock and make a new machine. What OS for the kids machine, my son is 5. Windows 98 ?. What do I get for my new machine, im a online gamer but not at the bleeding edge, (just upgraded from BF1942 to BF2 !!). I have decided on the Gigabyte P35 DS4 board. E6750 seems good performance/price and potential overclocker in my rig. 2GB Corsair Domintar PC6400 New DVD-R drive What is the general consesnus on PSU and graphics bearing my budget ?
Hi, first off, welcome to the forum!! As windows 98 is no longer supported, I would recomend using either windows 2000, or windows XP, as you can still get updates for the systems and they both have a built in firewall, which if your connecting the pc to the internet, I would highly recommend!! For PSU, you will most likely get away with a 450-500W PSU for that system. Graphics, if your running XP on the system, then i would advise getting a higher end geforce 7 series card, or an ATI x1900 series card. As your not going to be using vista, thus wont be using DirectX 10, then there is no need to spend huge amount of cash on a geforce 8 series card, even the lower spec gfocre 8 series cards, as your likely get better performance from a high end gforce 7 series card. It may very well be worth checking out the Q6600 cpu instead of the E6750, its a little more expensive, but from what have seen from various overclocks, it would appear well worth it. If you have not check out this thread allready i would recomend you do so http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=136791 Hope this info will guide you to your finnal build
windows 98 was for my boys machine will use XP instead if 98 is EOl and not supported. Im using vista on my current machine and the new one will also. would you advise going for a 8xxx instead of a 7xxx for vista even though still playing dx9 games?. quad core, very tempting not sure i would see the benefit and in theory the 6750 should overclock considerbly more or not ?.
If you're not planning on playing any DX10 games soon. Stick with a 7 series card, it will run Vista fine. - High end ones are cheap now, I got my XFX 7900GT 256mb off ebay. I've seen them sell for as little as £50. For games dual processors are just as good (at the moment). The E6600 was a popular model but the E6750 looks like a bargain to me. It should generate less heat than a Quad Core too (cause obviously theres half the amount of cores.)
