First off this is my first post to bit-tech but Ive been reading for awhile, its a great site. but to get to business....I recently bought a Q6600 (G0), an XFX 680i LT SLI, 4 gigs of PC6400 RAM, and a 8600 GT XXX; then I ran out of money. So Ive been saving up again and I have been looking at a 250GB Seagate drive, a Lite-on dvd drive, and the ZEROtherm Nirvana heatsink. HDD CPU Heatsink DVD Drive First off I was wondering what your opinions on that are and whether you have any better ideas. But I was also wondering how fast I could get my Q6600 with this setup. Ive read the review on bit-tech but will there be a large difference between the normal 680i and the LT version?
Well you have some nice hardware, but if you're going to be gaming then the 8600gt will definitely be the bottle neck; but it really depends on what you need it to do, no need spend money where you're not going to use it. For the hard drive and DVD, those are pretty straight forward, look for the ones with the highest cache and you'll be set - those should be fine. CPU HSF is very, very, nice. I've worked with it before and can recommend it, just be sure to have patience installing it. It's a great performer and it's definitely at the top of the range for air HSFs. I easily got a Q6600 to 3.0-3.1+ on an X38 chipset (with that HSF) and it didn't break a sweat, was perfectly stable with everything I threw at it
thanks seanap. I know the 8600 will be a bottleneck but I could only spend $200 and the 9600's werent out yet sadly. btw Ill be using the computer for gaming, photoshop, and video editing.
Here's an 8800GT for $200 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814145149 It's right at the top of your budget, but the difference would be phenomenal. The 8600GT will be a good start, as you can always upgrade and sell that later on. Other than that, you should have more than enough power for photoshop / video editing. And if you drop the 8800GT in there you'll have a set up for similar to Bit-tech's benchmark set up (iirc). Overall, it looks good.
Definitely shoot for the 8800GT for any gaming, and in video editing it will help with times in loading and rendering effects greatly. The components you chose are great otherwise. Did you remember about the power supply? Power supplies get forgotten a lot, and I don't see it in your list, so just to be sure. A real good power supply brand is PC Power and Cooling. Those power supplies last for ages, they're great. Hope you have a good build Is this your first?
its my first build for myself, but Ive put together some for the rest of my family. I have an Ultra 600 watt modular supply (XVS series). so hopefully I should be good there too.
