Hello - I am new to this forum and would really appreciate any advice you guys would be able to give me on my new build. Seems like forum member are highly knowledgeable chaps Budget: Quite flexible, but aiming for around £1000 considering I already have a monitor and will consider other peripherals separately. Usage: Mostly everyday and media use, but with some light gaming and sometimes video encoding. However I want the system to be really snappy and future proofed to some extent. I often use several applications at once. Also I care alot about quietness as the system will be in my bedroom so please bear this in mind. Resolution: 1920 x 1200 Overclocking: Yes, to get the best performance, but not a competitive overclocker or anything so not looking to push the system to the limits. What I plan to buy: CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K (having trouble finding it in stock at a good price, but probably scan, ebuyer or dabs for circa £185) Motherboard: ASUS P8P67 LGA 1155 (£115 from scan) Memory: Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1600Mhz CL9 1.5V (£95 from ebuyer/scan) Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti (guessing around £200 when its out) Power Supply: Antec TruePower New 650W (£70 from ebuyer/scan) CPU Cooler: considering the Thermaltake Frio for about £40 or maybe the Gelid Tranquillo which is in Bit Tech's latest buyers guide for about £20. As I have pointed out, I care about quietness here. Case: Fractal Design Define R3 Silver Arrow (£85 from ebuyer/scan) Boot Drive: Crucial C300 (£89 from ebuyer) TOTAL PRICE: £880 Already got: Monitor: Dell U2410 (runs at 1980x1200) Mouse/Keyboard: standard wireless keyboard and mouse (will prob upgrade separately) Speakers: Ferguson Hill FH007 and FH008 speakers (these are incredible) HDD storage: will probably continue to use my existing HDDs as well, until a new credit card month, have a couple of 5 year old 500gbs. Sound card: will probably continue to use existing Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi which I have. Optical Drive: Will use one I have lying around, a Pioneer one I think, can't remember model, from a few years ago. Want to upgrade to Blu-ray drive in a couple of months. Questions: OEM vs Retail CPU: What exactly is the difference here (Advantages/disadvantage) and if I got OEM, what more would I need to add to my build? Size of Memory: The Corsair Vengeance seems quite tall - will it get in the way of my CPU cooler? Case cooling: The Fractal Design Define R3 comes with a couple of stock fans, but will I need any more? If so, what should I get? SSD adaptor: I know that the p8p67 has SATA 6 connectors, so I'm assuming there is not much point in getting a highpoint rocket adaptor for what will probably be quite a minor speed boost? I do want a very quick system. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I am still new at this and am still learning. Many thanks!
OEM CPUs come without a cooler, Retail come with Intel's rubbish one. Get the OEM one, save the money and you can pick your own (better) cooler. The R3 comes with two fans, my advice would be to build your system and then check temperatures. If you feel they're too high, add more. I've seen a lot of people adding a third fan in the roof to the R3, but I wouldn't populate every available slot. No point getting an SSD adapter, just hook it straight up. Don't know about the Vengence RAM I'm afraid. However your build looks good to me - my only change would be the ASUS board for the Gigabyte UD4 (£142 currently from Scan).
What exactly has been the problem with the ASUS board? It seems to have gotten good reviews here on bit-tech and pretty much everywhere else I've seen... In relation to the OEM CPU - would I need to buy anything else apart from the CPU fan or would that be enough?
With regards to future proofing you can pretty much forget it these days. Intel have made it so you need one of their chipsets to go along with your new intel CPU each time so you might aswell just focus on getting as much performance as you can get right now. Looks like you have picked the parts well though tbh. Although.. in a recent episode of twitch Ryan Shrout of pcper.com said that even the new i5 2500 (non K) allows you to shift your cpu multiplier up by 4x effectively giving you an extra 400Mhz-410mhz depending what your base clock is set to. If you are not too fussed on ultra overclocks maybe this could be an option for you? This shouldnt need many if any voltage increases and will take you to around 3.7Ghz. I think it was in this episode of the twitch netcast http://twit.tv/twich102 but I can't be sure I just download em and watch to em This way you could also get away with a less expensive motherboard and memory. That said it looks like the budget is plenty to get pretty much whatever you want I'm just saying, I'm an overclocker and I'm tempted by this cheaper easier option myself. So for the P67 option the memory is right on the sweet-spot that bit tech found in it's Which Memory is best for Sandy Bridge article at 1600mhz C9. But as you can see in that guide you wont lose a huge ammount if you drop to 1333Mhz for the H67 motherboard also. The P67 motherboard, yeah I like the look of the ASUS myself with it's EFI bios and all. There may or may not be widespread issues with the cpu socket as seen in recent reports but I think again that will be the the fault of the foxconn sockets used on many different motherboards not just ASUS. And there is always RMA anyway H67 motherboard option, erm £90 gigabyte thing should do it The GPU.. I havn't seen extensive benchmarks of this card yet but it's set to be a cooler 460 1GB basically so for 1920x1080 gaming i'm not sure it will have quite the same grunt as HD6950/6970 once you turn the anti-aliasing and stuff on, who knows right now. Although if you only doing light gaming I presume that could include lowering the in gamer resolution and scaling the image up too. You are more likely to get use out of CUDA for everyday operations like video encoding if you find the right apps though, so that's something to remember also. I'd watch a few of those twitch episodes though before you lay down the cash though definately just to be sure
ebuyer dropped the price from 97 to 89 and it sold out within about a day I think. I managed to get one luckily. by future proofing I meant less that it would be compatible with future spu releases etc., but more that it would work to my needs for a long time (Say about 5 years). My last build has lasted me 5 years, and although its starting to get a bit iffy nowadays, it has been great value for the initial investment. I'll consider a less overclockable rig but I like the idea of tinkering with the system and getting maximum performance for my money, and money isn't too much of an issue, so I'll probably stick with the i5-2500k set-up. I'll check out those twich netcasts though.
Keep checking Scans today only sales. I have purchased two computers this last week, both using i5 2500k and Asus P8P67 Pro boards and saved about £50 or so. There are usually combos for the CPU and Mobo and sometimes RAM and HDD too. Also, the PSU you mentioned has been on offer each day either combined with a case or just on its own (was £59.98 since Friday). Be aware that the price on the Today only page is not replicated when patrolling the site (if you click Power Supplies and go to the Antec PSU it will show 69.99)
