Any opinions

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Didn't think of that, interesting

Nice card that would more than satisfactorily munch through most games. Probably would have to upgrade in a year or so, but is that different for any other card out there these days?

I was considering getting two as I would like to get Vista on learn it.

Not really a lan gamer, just a gamer

I had the 850 before but someone said its probably too much.

Thanks for the info

How long do think the QX6600 would last if I got one before I would have to upgrade it?

might do but I am a tidy person I find it hard to loose things.

 

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Quad cores with 6MB cache vs Dual Core 6MB cache maybe slightly slower for games, but probably faster for productivity software. The hope is in 6 months time that the software cathes up and you get the full performance benefit. Alternatively you can stick in Dual core and upgrade later. Water and 3v-5v-12v components are unlikely to do any real damage as long as you catch it. The real danger is if it gets into the PSU, you'd want a top mounted PSU not a bottom mounted one as in your case. Shorts are dangerous but waters a poor conductor at low voltages making shorts unlikely unless water comes into contact with the mains or a large capacitor.

They seem to think dangers are somewhat higher here :-

http://www.frozencpu.com/resource/r11/How_To_Recover_From_a_Coolant_Leak.html

Guess depends if you're feelin lucky ;)

 

I probably will go quad core but stil not gonna go water cooled, I'd be scared it went caput everytime there was a slight vibration.

 

But does everything else in the system require more than 350W? He came down from an 850W PSU...

Depends... always go for best bang for the buck. He shaved a bunch off his price by going from a quad-core to a dual-core. It depends on what you're using it for. As you know, some games aren't designed to take advantage of multiple cores. That'll change over time... but he can simply upgrade when the quad prices come down.

Eh, just a suggestion.

Eh? Never had a problem with that on OEM Soundblaster gear - Creative has made no distinction between OEM and retail drivers for as long as I've bought them - even back to old school SB16 cards. Check for yourself, going back a few versions... there's no distinction.

The only differences between OEM and retail are:

1) sometimes, no driver disc is included with the OEM version
2) sometimes, no accessories or cables are included with the OEM version
3) sometimes, there are differences in the warranty terms between OEM and retail

 

Well, I did say to up the rating for when he upgrades or decides to overclock. The graphics card that he selected has SLi compatability, so there is a reason right there for a more powerful PSU.

With hardware falling in price and revisions rapidly being released, it would be wise to invest in the long term and this involves buying quad-core. The latest games do in fact make use of multiple cores, like Quake 4, Race Driver: GRID, to name but two. Also another good reason to invest in quad core is that the average Windows gamer usually has a game, in addition to security software, and maybe to other daemons running - this all serves to justify a quad-core. I have heard reports that dual-cores are faster for games, but that only matters if 3fps means anything to you, and that the system is only running a game.

Yes, mate I have checked. My old OEM Audigy 2 ZS specifically needed the driver CD that came with it because it was OEM. The downloaded driver from Creative failed to recognise it.

 

This is one of those 'crystal ball' questions. I'd be surprised if you needed to upgrade this chip within the next 1.5 years - even for gaming.

 

The only things I would change, although I really didn't check out the case, is swap out the single very large drive for multiple smaller ones and then go with a raid array.

Raid 5 is slow unless you have a very fast hardware controller, and if you have problems with it you can end up with corrupted data all the way through and not be able to recover. It's less efficient drive-wise but I'd go with RAID 10 over RAID 5 any day, and get good performance and reliability. If you don't care about reliability use RAID 0 and at least 3 drives and you won't believe the performance increase over a single drive if you've never used RAID before.

I use Linux software raid on one of my machines in a RAID 0 array with 3 7200-rpm 250 GB Caviars and it's flat out fast. It's almost as fast as the hardware RAID in a RAID 10 array in the server I built not too long back.

Disk performance is what holds a lot of machines back from really performing the way they are capable of because the cpu has to wait for the drive to get through thrashing. Anything you do to speed up disk access and disk i/o is a major performance gain. I did nothing more than create a RAID 0 array out of 2 40 GB IDE drives and put the system on it in an old machine of mine that runs an AMD64 3000+ Sempron, and it responds like I upgraded the cpu 4 or 5 steps. It's a very noticeable improvement in performance from the single disk that is now part of the array.

 

"EVGA NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT KO 512MB PCI Express Graphics Card - Retail (675MHz Core Clock) (1950MHz Memory Clock) (1500MHz Shader Clock) £116.99"

Since you going to build a powerful gaming rig why buy Geforce 8? There now on Geforce 9 Wouldn't be better to get the G9 and over clock it?

 

I am not overly convinced on Geforce 9 yet and I wont be overclocking anything, I have nevr done it before and wouldn't want to chance anything dying on me.

 

8800 GT still has 9600 GT beat, not sure about the overclocking ability...

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/nvidia-9600gt-review.ars/2

I could be convinced to overclock my CPU maybe but I'm less convinced that overclocking GPU's is safe.

 

Thats what I have seen by reviews and articles.

 

Just a couple of comments to the components.

Motherboard: the motherboard is just fantastic. Lots of features for overclocking if you want to.

Soundcard: check out the motherboard kit. Mine came with a souncard included in the package.

CPU: I have the Q9450. Just fantastic and I can only imagine that the Q9550 is a little better. You will definately need a bios update to support it.

Graphics card: again a fantastic and wise choice. It's just a little better than mine (the same one from ASUS). It will do everything that you want it to.

I think at the moment it's better to stick with the GeForce 8 series as the top 8800 cards are still peeing all over most of the GeForce 9 series.

Power supply: they seem to be good. I think the 750W will do the job. I have a 650W with 4 HDD, 2 CD/ROM, the 8800 512MB graphis card, 4 case fans and the Q9450 CPU hanging off it and it doesn't miss a beat.

HDD: it's always a personal choice.

Case: again a personal choice.

Now to the tricky bit, the RAM. Check out the QVL for the motherboard and make sure that the RAM is listed there. As this board only supports DDR3 there isn't much to choose from. I found out the hard way that my mobo doesn't support all 4 slots with the RAM that I chose but at that time there wasn't much to choose from and very little information about.

One other thing, if you go the dual core 6600 way the mobo has built in features to overclock a lot of dual core CPUs automatically. The programs will let you specify which level of performance you want the CPU to have and will do the settings for you eg if you have a 6400 you can choose to overclock it to 6600 specs at the "push of a button".

 

I read through quite a few reviews before choosing it.

This moboo comes with 7.1 sound built in but I think sound cards are better.

I think I am gonna get the E8400 just from a money perspective or if I do go quad it'll be the Q6600.

I read through quite a few reviews before choosing it.

I read some good reviews on the EVGA one

Me too

cool, I'll investigate wattage etc and see whats best.

I read the QVL the crosshair RAM is available.

ASUS mobo's are good for that type of thing, I think I will go dual core for now and upgrade in year or so. Cheers for the comments mate

 

Is this the one?

If so then there isn't any onboard sound. You get the SupremeFX II sound card with the package.

 

yeah thats it, cool so I don't need the sound card

 

Thats £25 for the beer kitty then.

 

for my beer kitty

 

ha lol

 

Actually, I linked a Qcore priced at £135 inc vat