heres the specs core i7 920 asus p6t 6gb mushkin ddr3 1066mhz ram 500gb western digital caviar green evga gtx 260 superclocked and case with 500 w powersupply if i want to overclock to 4ghz would i need to get a better power supply if so what wattage should i use
You shouldn't be risking your nice i7 setup with an unbranded 500w PSU that came with your case, thats unless your case is a Coolermaster for example which supply decent PSUs with their cases.
I wouldn't touch that PSU either TBH. Get a 600W+ Corsair, Enermax, Seasonic or PC Power&Cooling unit. Brand really does matter when it comes to PSUs, you don't want a cheap nasty power supply taking out all of your nice expensive hardware. This Enermax unit, or this Corsair unit would be excellent choices.
Why the WD Green hard drive? It saves very little power but it's notably slower? They're only good for always-on storage applications because they are extremely quiet and don't get at all hot.
+1 on the HDD the green series are rubbish dont even save that much power. get the WD blue series 640GB its much faster
its not the same price really £54 for the WD 640GB £70 for the 1TB samsung ( i use this one as alot of 1TB are crap especially the old ones) 22-23% more expensive really
Thats one way of looking at it... my way of looking at it would be it's only £16 more for a much faster, and larger drive. Money well spent. Get the 1Tb Spinpoint F1. I have 2 of them.. great drives. Quiet, fast, cool.
thing is its not much faster. i have a F1 samsung also its a great drive but the WD 640GB blue series is also very quick. The F1 is faster but the WD is not much slower. i suppose £16 isnt alot but if your working to a budget then stick to it. There is always something faster for that little bit more money. Some of the 1.5TB HDD are faster than the F1 now as they have 500GB areal densities compared with the 333-4GB for the 1TB F1. suppose at end of the day if you have an extra £16 to get it no reason not to if you need to stick to a budget then the WD640GB is still a very good drive
£16 for a drive that is faster... regardless of how much, and let's not forget that we're talking about 640Gb vs. 1TB as well, so there's a size issue. Just seems odd that when speccing a high end rig like a i7, £16 becomes an issue.
Your hard drive is a greatest bottleneck to any system. Getting even a bit faster make that much edge of difference. A journo friend of mine who writes for TR has an "old" dual core PC by our standards but blagged an X25-M off Intel. He can load a dozen firefox windows in 2 seconds and multiple office apps in under 5s. The balance between throughput and random read/write speed makes the diff.
