Hi This is my first post on this forum although I have been visiting daily Bit-Tech for the last 2 years I never had the courage to write anything on the forum. I am a 40 year old gamer from Malta. I started back in 1984 with my Spectrum 48K, went next with an Amiga 500 Amiga 1200 then started on PCs. I play the Battlefield series from Battlefield 1942 to the latest Battlefield 2142. At the moment I have an old MSI 648F Neo motherboard with a Pentium 4 3.02 GHz Northwood socket 478, 2GB RAM and a Gainward 6800GT Graphic card connected to a 19” Benq FP937s’. Yes its about time I upgrade and although I built many computers in my life this is the first time I will build an true gaming computer or so I think. I am looking for a future proof gaming computer with some overclocking but would not like to use any water cooling just air cooling. Here is my list, I just want to know everyone’s opinion on this setup especially on the motherboard. Motherboard: eVGA nForce 680i SLI or Asus P5N32-E SLI NF680i RAM: Corsair 2Gb TwinX DDR2 XMS2 Dominator, PC8500 CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Graphics card: EVGA 768MB 8800GTX KO Superclocked PCI-E 2000MHz GPU 626MHz (1 for now but will get another for SLI in the future) Hard Disks: 3 Seagate Barracuda 250Gb (In Raid 5 giving 500Gb with redundance) PSU: Enermax Galaxy 1000W EG1000EWL V2 (for SLI and the 3 hard disks) For now I am going to keep the monitor but will upgrade to a 21” widescreen and will then upgrade to a 2nd graphics card with SLI. I would like to hear any comments on if my gear is right or not. I do not want to spend so much and have a computer that is too much powerful or a slow one. Thanks beforehand for the help.
hey, and welcome to the forums... your rig is pretty sweet, though the psu may be overkill...bbq will prolly come in shortly to advise better psu options that cost less...here are a few i would recommend, and even the corsair would run ur rig fine......if you dont live in the us, then i found out from a previous post that the dominator memory is slightly overpriced and there is ocz i believe that is just as good and lots cheaper...the video card you are looking at goes for a decent premium, and to be honest, every review shows that they are very oc friendly and you should be able to hit those speeds or darn close....so save the money and go stock, then oc urself...between the psu money savings and the gpu money savings, you could sell your monitor and grab a 22-24 in lcd to really take advantage of that card...
If you're gaming on a 19" monitor (I'm guessing it has a res of around 1280x1024) then you're never likely to stress one 8800gtx, let alone two. SLi is a waste of time IMO anyway, What I would do is forget about raid-5 without using an expensive dedicated raid controller. It'll sap your cpu power doing parity calcs. I'd get 4 disks and use raid 10. or two raptors mirrored maybe. or two raptors striped with two larger drives mirrored for redundant storage. And the 1000W is almost certainly overkill. Not sure how it stands now with BIOS updates etc but I know the mobo you mention was real buggy initially.
on the raid front, with the speed of drives these days, it is becoming a more popular opinion that even the most heaviest personal pc user doesnt benefit from raid vs the cost. you would be better off grabbing a raptor for your os and what not, and one huge drive for storage....
First of all thanks for the response you were all very helpful. Now for my new hardware list:- Motherboard: Asus Striker Exteme NF680i Never wanted to choose this as it has too much gimmicks for my liking. From the reviews I saw of any 680 board this was the most stable not even the Asus P5N32-E SLI NF680i shows any promise. It’s expensive but I cannot find anything better at the moment. I also would have liked the MSI P6N NF680i SLI as I am a great fan of MSI but cannot find any reviews of this board looks similar to the eVGA board. RAM: Corsair 2Gb TwinX DDR2 XMS2 Dominator, PC8500 Price difference wasn’t that big on RAM so for now still going with these. CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Graphics card: MSI 8800GTX 768Mb PCI-E (x16), Mem 1800 MHz, GPU 575 MHz I saw a good review of this MSI board and can be overclocked fairly well and its cheaper then the eVGA Hard Disks: 150 Gb Western Digital WD1500ADFD Raptor Enterprise for OS 320 Gb Seagate ST3320620AS Barracuda for storage PSU: Coolermaster Real Power Pro RS-850-EMBA 850W This is a money saver great reviews good performance and SLI approved. I am still confused on what motherboard to get. I hope I have sorted the rest but please feel free to give me any other advice about the other stuff too. Thank you all again for the help
Don't bother with the Coolermaster Real Power 850. It's just not that good. The Silverstone ST75ZF is more than enough for what you're doing.
I have rechecked this PSU and I think it is good and cheaper. At first I had made the mistake of thinking it was the Strider ST75F which isn't a good PSU from reviews I saw. The ST75ZF is the Zeus which is a very good model and I will add it to my list instead of the Cooler Master. Thanks Bbq.of.Doom
With a low resolution (such as 1280x1024) the GTX is still just a terrible overkill.. I'd simply put the money somewhere else. The other thing I want to point out is that even if you don't go RAID, it would be nice to have two storage disks so you would have atleast some place to backup your pictures and eveyrthing you just don't want to loose. I'd definitely want to know how much the RAID5 takes CPU-time and lowers the overall performance......
Jipa You are right the gtx is an overkill for now but I intend to upgrade to a 22" in the near future its that there isn't such a good choice of 22" monitors at the time. My AGP Gt6800 isn't keeping up so it would be waste if I am going to upgrade not to go for a GTX and buy a GTS until I buy the 22". The 2nd reason is that a GTX would have a longer life then a GTS for compatibility in the future. About the Raid 5 I have checked somewhere don't tell me where as I have seen so many websites these last few days that I cannot remember. There are some 4 tasks involved when writing to Raid 5 including the parity checks which unfortunately take CPU time and so for the speeds disks have today its slow. I general backup much of my work on DVD anyway but if I want I could go Raid 0+1 without the need of an extra card which is fast and safe. The problem is that you need 4 drives and you get the size of only 2 of them ( 4 250GB drives =500GB). One other thing I was asking myself was why is the Raptor so fast if it is still SATA150 and not SATA300. The reason is that it is very rare in true life usage of a hard disk that it reaches the transfer rates of SATA300 therefore the speed of the Raptor and the setup of its disks makes the access time lower and therefore faster then a slower SATA300 drive. (in layman terms hoping I got this one right lol) What I am still confused about, is the motherboard. I want an Nvida 680i chipset and it seems the only good motherboard is the Asus Striker Extreme the reason might be the efficient cooling system for the northbridge and southbridge in overclocking. What I don't like is paying for useless things such as the LCD, the leds and the buttons on the motherboard. Thanks again all for the help
This is my final setup. Hoping I don’t see another hardware review Motherboard: Asus Striker Extreme CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 RAM: OCZ 2GB (2 x 1GB) PC2-8500 1066MHz SLI-Ready Edition Graphics card: EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX Hard Disk OS: Western Digital Raptor X 150GB Hard Disk Storage: Hitachi Deskstar 320Gb T7K500 PSU: Silverstone ST75ZF CPU Fan: Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Changed the RAM this costs less and seems to be efficient Re-changed the graphics card as I found a source for a cheaper EVGA not the factory over clocked KO model. I found some good reviews on the Deskstar. PSU is good and not too expensive. Added a CPU fan which was already on the list in my mind. Any comments would be appreciated. Thank You
looks awesome... thing about the mobo is, you have to remember who is writing the reviews, and on many of the order sites, its a bunch of new computer builders who write a bad review because the board doesnt plug itself into the power supply ...when bit-tech got their evga 680 board, they had all kinds of problems with it...yet many people on here have had no issues whatsoever...probably just a bad board...even lexus makes a lemon once in awhile...as long as the place you are buying from has good service, it would be worth it to me to try a cheaper board and if you have issues with it, send it back and get the stryker...
I'd get a 8800GTS instead (barely slower, and a buttload cheaper). Since you don't need SLI, ditch the Striker for a board based on the Intel 965P chipset
looks amazing still think you should go for corsair hx620 for you power raptor x hard drive unnecessary rip off but apart from that think its brill
First of all WOW thanks again for everyone’s interest. Now to start answering the posts:- Triq Reviews are reviews and they always cannot be taken as 100% good. As I said I hate buying a La Cost T-Shirt just because of the crocodile and the Extreme has too much bling for me. I could live without the buttons the leds and the lcd. But if you consider That the Nvida form motherboards (eVGA, ECS, BFG) all have problems that they might or might not work The problems of the Asus P5N32-E SLI Then there isn’t much left if I want a 680i. I think I read 7 reviews (even Italian ones) and seems that the only cons they had was the position of the IDE connector and the price. One other thing is that I am buying from the UK and I live in Malta, I do not wish to exchange goods as this would cost me shipping fees so I must go right on the first try. There is the MSI diamond 680i which I do not remember the name but I couldn’t find it available I cannot even find it on MSI’s website lol. This will be a killer motherboard as well and should cost less then the Extreme plus having XFi sound onboard. I appreciate you info as the motherboard was my biggest headache. Hope it will live up to its name. TMM MajorGM I will be getting a bigger monitor 22” as stated would like also to include some sort of 7” vga monitor modded into the case and cards will go cheaper with 2 8800GTX compatibility with future games is more then with the GTS. I do not want to buy a new rig for at least 2 more years after this(maybe even 3). Main reason I do not want to have a divorce lol. rswami92 I am a Corsair fan but I do also think that they overprice there products just by adding some cool (LOL) heatsink. OCZ aren’t that bad either and I saw a review of this memory that although it won’t overclock much as they are already quite fast they are efficient and for a price much lower then the Corsair Dominator. The Raptor X hard drive doesn’t cost to much more then the normal Raptor and from the 2 sources I was ordering it was the only 150GB Raptor available. One last thing I ordered my rig today just after reading the comments here. I will report back when I get the stuff and start building. Thanks again to all.
Looks great mate. Have you thought about the Abit In9-Max for the mobo? It, along with the Striker, is one of the few motherboards that isn't an exact clone of the nvidie reference board. Should be cheaper and has less bells & whistles involved too I think. I have one and like it a lot. rswami was referring to your PSU, not the RAM when he nentioned the Corsair HX620. Its the PSU I have and I'm very happy with it but I don't think its much better/worse than the one you've listed. I'd probably want a much bigger storage drive and maybe even consider getting two identical drives and mirroring (raid-1) them. Gives way more peace of mind for not much extra. I'd also consider a Samsung HDD over the Hitachi but if you've read a good review of the Hitachi then I'm sure it'll be good. I assume you have a case already?
