Hey, I'm looking to build a new rig in early December and I have pretty much all of the components decided on, except for the motherboard. (I got most of my choices from a load of reviews and the 'What To Buy' Article this month ) C2D E8400 Be Quiet! 650W PSU Powercolor HD4870 1GB Akasa AK-966BL Cooler 8GB Corsair XMS2 (4x2GB) DDR2 800MHz 5-5-5-18 2x 640GB Spinpoint F1 ASUS DRW-2014S1T I have not really decided on the motherboard, although i have had the ASUS P5Q-E recommended a few times. It just seems a tad expensive and I doubt I will be using Crossfire. So would the P5Q-Pro or the standard P5Q be enough? I will be overclocking and the nothbridge cooling on the P5Q-E looks a fair bit better.. Help and thoughts appreciated
I just bought a Gigabyte EP45 DS3L, not overclocked or anything with it yet as I have a faulty graphics card, however, the bios looks excellent, easy to use with a lot of options, it's cheap aswell at a touch over £80 The other stuff you have there is great, what will it be used for!?
Mostly games. I mess about with virtual machines to test stuff for work, as well as doing all the general stuff like ripping DVD's for my media box. That mobo looks alright, seems to have good OC headroom too.. My only problem with it is it doesnt have enough USB headers on the board. My case has 4 ports on the front and I have a card reader for my camera. I thought it might be quite useful, I had a bit of money left over in my budget and it seemed like the thing to do as it was cheap I also multitask quite a bit, lots of windows and all sorts of stuff going on. I did read the 'Is more memory better' article, which is why I initially went with the higher-end board for stability, although I dont have too many sources to compare against, or if BIOS updates have solved stability issues. Is 8GB not really worth it then, even with lots of multitasking?
I've only ever seen Tim use 6-7GB and he has about 50 firefox windows open, photoshop full of pictures, word/excel, email (10,000 emails) - basically filling two 1920x1200 monitors worth with multiple layers having not rebooted Vista for weeks. If you're doing obscenely large workstation file or database stuff, then 8GB is worth it, but buy 4GB and see how much you use in realtime. I doubt you'll get that close. P45 doesn't handle 4 sticks that well anyway.
I see no problems in the components. You might wanna swap the HDDs to the 640GB WD ones, as there have been lots of complaints about Samsung HDDs. Also, check out the Samsung SH-S223Q DVD drive, it's 22x and supports LightScribe. And as you said, the NB cooler on the P5Q Pro is kind of small. I have one and the NB runs quite hot. Also I'd not get a P5Q anymore, Asus seems to have gone greedy with it's "over 1.5 million P5Q owners worldwide". The boards are too expensive now. I'd suggest a Gigabyte.
I was interested in the F1's because of the really fast sequential transfer... Load stuff quicker My alternative for the drives was the Seagate 7200.11 500GB, as i've used seagate a lot and not had any problems, so I'll do a bit more research there. To me, Lightscribe is a bit of a gimmick and something ill never use.. For the occasional time i do burn a DVD, speed isnt the deciding factor, even if i had the media to do those speeds. I can never understand the product progression of the Gigabyte motherboards, their model numbers are like black magic to me, got any recommendations?
