Hi So I am wanting to build a fairly powerful gaming PC and heres what I have so far but need your advice. My budget is roughly £1000 give or take a bit. Processor: Intel i7 920 D0 Stepping version Motherboard: Asus P6TD Deluxe GPU: ATI 5850 Case: Antec 902 ?? Optical Drive: ?? Fan: Titan Fenrir Hard Drive: ?? Memory: ?? PSU: ?? Ok so thats a rough outline. Few questions: 1. Does it matter what type of SATA drive I get? 2. Is the Antec 902 sufficient or is the Twelve Hundred worth the extra money? If so, why? 3. Can I get any old DVD/CD drive? 4. What memory is good? There is so many different ones! 5. What PSU? How many watts to future proof me? Any suggestions and help would be much appreciated thank you!
Well maybe you should go for Intel i7 930 which should be the same price as the 920 but most places have it 20 or so more. The chassis should be fine, its a great case. The 1200 is a little bigger, so I personally am going for the 1200 but 902 is just as good. For RAM I recommend the Corsair XM3 PC3-12800 (2*3GB) set, its pretty solid and cheap(ish) for DDR3 ram. In terms of the PSU there was an article not long ago about the power usage of a similar system to yours, and the power usage was really low. I would go for a 650W PSU which allows you some room for growth. There are so many different PSU's out there its really hard to say but the Antec TruePower New TP-650 is currently what CustomPC recommends in that power range, so cant go wrong with that.
Ok thats cool, thanks. I have seen it but how is the 930 better out of curiosity? Haha, makes me sound really tight, but I probably will get it seen as its such little more.
for the 930 http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2010/03/01/intel-core-i7-930-cpu-review/1 Optical Drive: ?? - cheapest you can get .... blue ray if you want movies. Hard Drive: ?? - samsung spinpoint f3 1tb
Basically its better for overclocking, and better if your not (due to the higher base clock speed). To be honest it doesnt matter if you go for the 920 over the 930 as the 920 is a fantastic chip but for tuppence more the upgrade is definitely the better option
When are you going to be getting this lot? If it were me I'd stick around a bit and wait for Fermi to be released to see if NVIDIA have got anything worth buying.
Well it may not be for another month or two, I just wanted to start looking at the options so I know whats best when the time comes. Sounds like the i7 930 is best I'll go with that. As for graphics card; Over the ATI 5850 surely a brand new NVIDIA card would cost quite a lot more? I don't want to spend huge amounts on a GPU.
Yes 930 is probably your best bet. In a month or two the prices should drop down to 920 levels and you'll be golden. Also, Fermi's launch may drop prices of ATI cards. They certainly won't go up with more competition so if you can wait on that as well it'll probably be worth it. As far as hard drives, Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB or Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB would be your best bets for performance and cost/storage efficiency. Also, "For RAM I recommend the Corsair XM3 PC3-12800 (2*3GB)" this must be a typo. Should read 3*2GB. Not a big issue and one would quickly realize that it's wrong, but I thought it would be good to point out.
March 26th. Whether or not there will be stock is a whole different question, and how long it will take for ATI prices to drop is also up for debate, but if you're waiting a month or two anyway then this situation is win-win for you.
It will be interesting to see if they have anything that can compete price/performance with ATIs latest series, NVIDIA seem pretty confident that they're very fast.
For kahanejosh's purposes we can safely assume that even if they turn out to be equally matched in terms of price/performance and furthermore priced competitively that the available stock so soon after release will be quite prohibitive and may even cause retailers to increase the price past Nvidia's ideas to gain a little extra profit from fanboys/die hard performance seekers. Though it will certainly still be interesting to see.
Processor: Intel i7 920 D0 Stepping version Good Motherboard: Asus P6TD Deluxe Good could go with regular P6T or even P6T SE... GPU: ATI 5850 Good Case: Antec 902 ?? Good Optical Drive: ?? Try for a nice SATA one... Fan: Titan Fenrir Good Hard Drive: ?? what ever you can get... Memory: ?? Go with about 6GB 1600MHz... PSU: ?? about 650Watt to 850Watt... Ok so thats a rough outline. Few questions: 1. Does it matter what type of SATA drive I get? it has SATA2 only so SATA1 and SATA2 but no SATA3... 2. Is the Antec 902 sufficient or is the Twelve Hundred worth the extra money? If so, why? I don't know the depth of the ATI 5850 card so I cant say for sure but I would think the 902 would work fine... 3. Can I get any old DVD/CD drive? Ya, but try for a SATA one... 4. What memory is good? There is so many different ones! Find I good company that you can aford (OCZ, Corsair, Gskill) then Go with about 6GB 1600MHz... 5. What PSU? How many watts to future proof me? there are PSU calculators online but I don't trust them, try about 650Watt to 850Watt... * I don't trust PSU calculators because they told me I would only need a 650Watt PSU when I have hit 890Watts wile playing Crysis...
650w for 2 Gtx 295's? Thats crazy. Basically, get the i7 930 D0, 6Gb dominator kit, Antec 902 chassis, £17 Samsung syncmaster optical drive, and the 650w Antec PSU and your sorted.
You've hit 890W draw from just two 295s? That's way more than BiT recorded - if you don't mind me asking, what were you using to measure draw?
make sure you get the P6T Deluxe V2...quickly released after the first gen because it was flawed...although I can't remember why/how...giyf!
...? The V2 is the same, except it's had one of the more expensive bits chopped out of the chipset to make it cheaper to make (the support for SAS drives, IIRC) to increase profitability. Not that you can buy the V1 anymore, anyway, but there's nothing wrong at all with any of the four examples I've worked with thus far...
The Watt meter with the Zalman ZM-MFC2, I don't know how accurate it is but 890Watts is what it said when I was playing Crysis, but usualy it sits at 280-300Watts...
295 draws more power than the 5870 at base so 890 watts isnt that bad but its still a shocking waste of money in the first place. Considering 2 5870s destroys quad sli for half the price. if you were wanting to save money 5850 and what you mensioned would run perfectly fine on a 500watt psu.
