Hi, im planning a new christmas build to replace my ancient computer but im on a low budget so no fancy hardware and stuff. IT will mainly be used for gaming and overclocking and will be running vista 64 bit and before i order it i was intrested in what people think of it. P.S. some of the components are from cheaper sources, i listed them from OCUK for ease of viewing
Drop the Zalman Reserator, they're not worth the plastic they're made from. If you want to spend, what looks to be, over three hundred quid on watercooling you could do it so much better, I can (and I'm sure many others can) give you a hand on watercooling if you drop in a list of what you want cooling. The general consensus is a Laing DDC Pump, a Thermochill or BlackIce Rad and the various blocks out there all perform pretty similarly. The CPU looks fine, could look at the E8400 or even the E5200 to save money, motherboard, I don't know what you will pay for it where you will get it from but if it's around £100 there are better motherboards for that price. RAM and GPU look fine, I would possibly change the hard drive but someone else can elaborate on that.
Welcome! Cheap + Watercooling go together like ice and fire in a tumble dryer - just don't bother. If you want quiet running - Look at Noctua CPU coolers and fans, as well as the HIS ICEQ 4850. The Antec 900 is a HIGH AIRFLOW case too - that's not particularly quiet.
If you're going to do water cooling don't do it from a kit, because they general don't do a good job for the price
If you want a cheap, super quality motherboard, I would go for one of Gigabytes EP45-UD3 series boards. Picked one up last week for a friends build and I liked it so much, it's replacing my Asus Maximus Formula. Only $120 USD for the UD3P. These boards have twice the copper in the pcb and have a ton of features and overclock like mad. Also, if you stick with the Asus motherboard, OCZ doesn't always play nice with them but G.Skill and Corsair work wonders on Asus and will work great on the Gigabyte board. Get an E8400 instead of a quad core. If you are gaming and just overclocking, you'll never see the benefit of a quad core. As others have said, don't skimp on water cooling. I'd rather get some really good air cooling than buy anything cheap when it comes to water cooling....disaster looms. Can't stand Samsung drives.....got one and within a week it starting making a whining noise and then just puked. I stick with Seagate. Bindi is right, I have an Antec 900 and setting the fans to low, it's pretty quiet, but there are quieter cases out there with great cooling. The CoolerMaster HAF 932 is a phenomenal case and about the same price. I wish I had gotten it instead of the Antec. Plus the Antec doesn't incorporate any kind of dust filtering, it's like a vacuum and I find myself cleaning my rig every couple of weeks. It's a royal pain in the ass.
also 2 northbridge coolers went get you far.. Get a larger case (you will NOT fit good cooling in the 900, I tried) Not sure what case to get, but make sure its larger than the 900, that thing is tiny on thee inside. Get yourself some good EK blocks, Laing DDC Ultra pump, some good Feser res's and that will cost less than theh zalman set up, and work better too.
Sorry but i think for your sake i should say the balance of this build is completely wrong. You want no fancy hardware yet you have pointless watercooling, the amount of money you are spending on that would yield MUCH MUCH better rewards being spent on other hardware. In a £1000+ PC, used mainly for gaming, you should have much better than a 4830 in there. Ok two examples forgoing watercooling: Firstly for the same price with about £20 spare for cooling you can get a core i7 system with the same case, tadaaaaa!: Or drop the water cooling and get the same system with a 4870x2 a TRUE on the cpu and say about £100 spare for whatever the you want it for: These will peform greatly in games compared to the system you've specced, hope this helps P.S. These are litterally five minute specs to give you an idea, neither ar eperfected or whatever, Vimesey out
The Corsair HX620 is a good PSU and is regularly recommended however there are other PSUs that are perfectly good for less cash. The PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610 @ £72.84 or the Hiper 630W HPU-4M630 @ £62.26 are a couple of examples. With the money you save on a PSU you can upgrade the Radeon 4830 to a Radeon 4850.
ok, thanks for the extensive and quick advise, very helpfull first post for me. Ive taken on everybodies ideas and copmpiled this list. for some reason my computer wont let me change the zoom for a screenshot so its in simple text this time. comes to £770 so saves me a lot of money which is great cos im paying for it HIS ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB GDDR5 TV-Out/Dual DVI/HDMI (PCI-Express) - Retail Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 LGA775 'Wolfdale' 3.00GHz (1333FSB) - Retail Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P Intel P45 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard Coolermaster HAF 932 ATX Case - Black PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610 EPS12V 610W Power Supply Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 320GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (ST3320613AS) Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme CPU Cooler (Socket AM2/LGA775) Delta 120mm Focussed Flow Fan (EHE) Sony NEC Optiarc DRU-V200S 20x DVD±RW SATA Dual Layer ReWriter (Black/Silver) - Retail Corsair 4GB DDR2 XMS2 PC2-6400C5 TwinX (2x2GB)
