Ok well I've specced a new build, but Ive not kept up with cpu's at all over the last year or so so I need some advice. I have £1000 to spend and I need a complete buiild excluding mouse and keyboard, headset / speakers so a monitor is a must. Its going to be mostly a gaming pc, but its going to be shared with my other half so theres gonne be just some genreal things like office and browsing and a little bit of photoshop here and there nothing ott like video encoding though. The current specs Ive come up with are ... ( if anyone can think of any changes to make to improve or save money would be good) Is this allg oing to be fine or is there any very ovbious what I could change? I've been hearing lots of good things about the 6600 and ocing them but got told the 8400 are betting for gaming? Mobo - Asus P5Q Deluxe P45 Socket 775 8 Channel Audio ATX Motherboard Cpu - Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Socket 775 (3.0GHz) 1333FSB 6MB L2 Cache Retail Boxed Processor Ram - Corsair 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 XMS2 DHX Memory Non-ECC Unbuffered CL4(4-4-4-12) GPU - Gecube HD 4870 512MB GDDR5 Dual DVI HDTV Out PCI-E Graphics Card PSU - Corsair 650W TX Series PSU - 120mm Fan, 80+% Efficiency, Single +12V Rail HD - Seagate ST3500320AS 500GB Hard Drive SATA II 7200rpm *32MB Cache* DVD - Optiarc AD-7200S 20X DVD±RW/DL/RAM Internal SATA Bare Black Drive Monitor - LG W2252TQ 22" TFT Monitor 1680x1050 10000:1 300cd/m2 2ms VGA/DVI Black Case - Xion Stacker Black Full Tower Case Total - £809.90
are you going to overclock? have you considered quad core CPUs? overclocked q6600 will beat e8400 in newer games. in older games, you already get enough CPU power no matter which one you choose. just remember, quad core => 2x dual core processing power. for the 32MB cache hard drive, it doesn't shine at that sized hard drive, you can save some money (or add some storage) and go for a Western Digital 640GB
I'm considering overclocking it its an option Id rather not bother but well the way things are looking am going to have to. The main game am going to play is counter-strike source ( slap me if you want) but I'm going to be playing alot of new stuff / crysis / assasins creed / left 4 dead / whatever new comes out over the next few years. The way am thinking is the 6600 with the 4870 and the 4gb ram gonna kick css's arse I mean its 4 years old so the E8400 is not really gonna be that much use for me in a few years time whereas the 6600 can be overclocked to 3.6ghz and give me that bit of extra time before and upgrade. Hard drive I thinkis yet to change Id much prefere a 1tb drive... or 2 Ive got almost £200 left over to play around with so the HD can easily change.
Have you had a look at the P5Q-E? It has a good set of features and choosing it over the P5Q Deluxe may save you some cash.
P5Q Pro Q6600 GeIL Black Dragon PC6400 4GB ATI 4850 TX650 WD6400AAKS Decent DVD burner, avoid LiteOn Antec Nine Hundred/CM690
I think 4850 is ok enough if you do a little bit overclock, 4870 only makes itself special with the GDDR5 memory. But you could stay with 4850 and another one to setup crossfire few years later, which i think is quite good.
Good selection of components there, but I'm interested to know.. have you accounted for an OS with the stated price?
Disagree with your choice of CPU. A fast dual will benefit more in most games more than a slightly slower quad since most games aren't quad optimised. Even the ones that boast about it, like Crysis, for example, can't make great use of quads. Apologies for double post.
I'd have to disagree with Mike@TCT on the point about the CPU. The Q6600 will easily overclock to well over 3GHz which would make it perform as well as a gaming dual core like the E8400. TBH most games these days are graphics limited, not cpu bound. Also the support for a quad core can only improve in future so it would be more future proof.
*On a decent cooling setup With the Q6600 you can listen to music while you're playing the games, and you'll still have a core free as well, so an added element to gameplay there
you don't really need a decent cooling setup to get q6600 to 3Ghz. i got mine to 3.4Ghz with Zalman 9500 (not a very good cooler), and to 3.6Ghz within acceptable temperature range with the mighty Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme. Arctic Cooling 7 Pro is a very good cooler, it sits somewhere between Zalman 9500 and TRUE. get that and with Antec 900. i'd be surprised if you can't fit 3.2Ghz.
The E8400 vs Q6600 debate is quite an interesting one. I am looking to upgrade and have done some reading on the topic. I must point out that I have no interest and no experience in overclocking so I am taking statements made by others at face value. In this thread there are several claims that the Q6600 can be overclocked to 3GHz on air. On the E8400 side I have seen claims that overclocks of 4GHz can be achieved. I understand that when overclocking a quad the overclock limited by the weakest of the 4 cores so there is more chance of a lower overclock than with a duo. From this I have concluded that for software that utilises 2 cores the a 8400 at stock frequency will outperform a Q6600 at stock frequency. Likewise for software that utilises 2 cores an overclocked 8400 will outperform a overclocked 6600. The advantage that the 6600 has is when more than 2 cores are utilised. As has been mentioned this can be by a single application that uses 4 cores or by several applications that use 1 or 2 cores. I quite liked bigsharn's example of playing music and gaming at the same time From a gaming perspective most games today utilise 2 cores, although some do utilise 4 cores and in the future it can be reasonably expected that more games will use 4 or more cores. Relating this back to CPUs a 8400 will give you better performance on most of today's games where a 6600 will start to come into its own in the future.
I disagree with that, somewhat. Sure it's not drawing 650w, or even 550w, but you wouldn't drive a car at 80% all the time, would you? Add to that, the VX550 "only" has 41a on the +12v and it's a cwt; solid, but compared to the 52a seasonic design the TX650 is.. I'd go with the TX 650. just ten pounds. That's like, two packages of sausages at tesco, and a big mac. Actually, I don't know anything about pricing in the uk related to food, so I'm probably wrong. Now if it was a tx 750, that's a completely different story.
Six months ago you would have been right. At todays prices you would be lucky to pick up a pack of sausages. More seriously a bit a spare capacity in the PSU doesn't do any harm particularly when it comes to upgrading components in the future.
