• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Getting coldfeet about this build..

M

mec

n00b
Joined
Jul 15, 2004
Messages
10
I've never had so much indecision due to the nightmare stories I've been reading about on several forums. There are several things on my mind, but at the top of the list is obviously Vista-64 and its alleged driver/compatability saga. I've searched this forum and others for related threads/posts and it seems to be a very mixed review at this point. I guess what I'm looking for is someone who has a similar rig to shed some light on the current driver situation.

I'm open to critiques on the build. It isn't used for anything professional, strictly movies/tv shows/music and a lot of gaming. I'm not sold on buying a quad yet, but left myself with the option to get one down the road here (mobo says it supports quad and c2d). The only reason I am going with Vista64 is because I want 4GB of ram. I will probably end up overclocking the CPU a bit, but that's as far as my OC'ing usually goes.

CASE -- Thermaltake Armor (reusing it from my previous build)

CPU -- Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 Conroe 3.0GHz LGA 775 Processor Model BX80557E6850

HSF -- ZALMAN 9700 LED 110mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler

MOBO -- ABIT IP35 LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard

RAM -- OCZ 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model OCZ2P8004GK

VIDEO -- EVGA 768-P2-N885-AR GeForce 8800Ultra KO 768MB 384-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card

PSU -- OCZ GameXStream OCZ700GXSSLI ATX12V 700W Power Supply

HD -- Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

HD#2 -- Seagate 250GB 7200 SATA (Old drive, reusing it)

SOUND -- Creative 70SB046A00000 7.1 Channels PCI Interface Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Professional Series

OS -- Microsoft Windows Vista 64-Bit Ultimate for System Builders Single Pack DVD - OEM

MONITOR -- SAMSUNG 226BW Black 22" 2 ms (GTG) DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor - Retail

Thanks in advance.
 
You and I find ourselves in the same quandary. With the myriad of migration and compatibility problems associated with 32 and 64 bit versions of Vista, the prudent choice is to stick with good ol' XP (Pro or Home) until service pack 1 is released for the 32 and 64 bit versions of Vista. Granted you will only 'see' 3GB of your RAM, but that is a small conciliation to make for an OS that is virtually guaranteed to work with everything out there.

I can wait for DX 10 and Vista until SP1 is available. You may want to reflect for yourself if Vista 64 is worth the gamble and possible headaches (can you say X-Fi).

Oh, since you mentioned overclocking, boost your cooler to the Ultra 120 extreme as your case has ample room.
 
Ditch the GXS700, it has ripple at high loads. While you may never put a high load on it, and while the ripple will take forever to kill components, there are still better choices. The Corsair 520W or 620W from buy.com/clubit.com/zipzoomfly.com would be a better choice. Here are more PSU suggestions:
http://www.jonnyguru.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1460
http://www.jonnyguru.com/forums/showthread.php?t=103

I find the Asus P5K-E or the GA-P35-DS3R better values than the IP35 vanilla.

Drop the Zalman... its overpriced. The Tuniq outperforms it and is only $47 at svc.com. The Scythe Ninja is only $36 at jab-tech.com, and is quieter than the Tuniq, if that floats your boat.
 
enginurd said:
Ditch the GXS700, it has ripple at high loads. While you may never put a high load on it, and while the ripple will take forever to kill components, there are still better choices. The Corsair 520W or 620W from buy.com/clubit.com/zipzoomfly.com would be a better choice. Here are more PSU suggestions:
http://www.jonnyguru.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1460
http://www.jonnyguru.com/forums/showthread.php?t=103

I find the Asus P5K-E or the GA-P35-DS3R better values than the IP35 vanilla. Drop the Zalman... its overpriced. The Tuniq outperforms it and is only $47 at svc.com. The Scythe Ninja is only $36 at jab-tech.com, and is quieter than the Tuniq, if that floats your boat.
Click to expand...

The 620W Corsair PSU was what I had originally picked out, but I got a bit nervous about dipping below the 650-700W level for this PC. I never have invested the time to fully understand/learn how much wattage I need, so I usually just guesstimate and hope for the best (been very lucky on my past builds I guess).

Still up in the air about the HSF, might change that to one of the other suggestions in this thread.

I have never strayed from ABIT for a mobo, so I don't really wanna move away from my choice of IP35. I have no real data to back this up, but i take notice to peoples setup when they complain about X-Fi/Vista64 and a pretty large percent seems to be people with ASUS boards.

Gonna order this tonight and it might come down to a blind dart throw whether I'm gonna get Vista64 or 32, if I go with 32bit I'm gonna back down to 2GB of ram.
 
what about the rosewill z3 its 50 bucks and from what i hear puts just as good performance as the 9700 zalman or better.I just bought it and installed it in my new build but haven't actually started it up yet as i need a few more components
 
mec said:
I have no real data to back this up, but i take notice to peoples setup when they complain about X-Fi/Vista64 and a pretty large percent seems to be people with ASUS boards.
Click to expand...

ROFL... it won't matter what board you get if you mix Vista and an X-Fi card. The problem has nothing to do witht he motherboard. Its an OS feature of Vista to disable any hardware EAX support, and Creative hasn't found a way to get it working again. The problem lies with the Creative drivers -- its irrelevant what board you choose.

Diesel-man3000 said:
what about the rosewill z3 its 50 bucks and from what i hear puts just as good performance as the 9700 zalman or better.I just bought it and installed it in my new build but haven't actually started it up yet as i need a few more components
Click to expand...

The Tuniq is a bit less than $50 and has been proven to be better than the Zalmans.
 
mec said:
I've never had so much indecision due to the nightmare stories I've been reading about on several forums. There are several things on my mind, but at the top of the list is obviously Vista-64 and its alleged driver/compatability saga. I've searched this forum and others for related threads/posts and it seems to be a very mixed review at this point. I guess what I'm looking for is someone who has a similar rig to shed some light on the current driver situation.

I'm open to critiques on the build. It isn't used for anything professional, strictly movies/tv shows/music and a lot of gaming. I'm not sold on buying a quad yet, but left myself with the option to get one down the road here (mobo says it supports quad and c2d). The only reason I am going with Vista64 is because I want 4GB of ram. I will probably end up overclocking the CPU a bit, but that's as far as my OC'ing usually goes.

CASE -- Thermaltake Armor (reusing it from my previous build)

CPU -- Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 Conroe 3.0GHz LGA 775 Processor Model BX80557E6850

HSF -- ZALMAN 9700 LED 110mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler

MOBO -- ABIT IP35 LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard

RAM -- OCZ 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model OCZ2P8004GK

VIDEO -- EVGA 768-P2-N885-AR GeForce 8800Ultra KO 768MB 384-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card

PSU -- OCZ GameXStream OCZ700GXSSLI ATX12V 700W Power Supply

HD -- Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

HD#2 -- Seagate 250GB 7200 SATA (Old drive, reusing it)

SOUND -- Creative 70SB046A00000 7.1 Channels PCI Interface Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Professional Series

OS -- Microsoft Windows Vista 64-Bit Ultimate for System Builders Single Pack DVD - OEM

MONITOR -- SAMSUNG 226BW Black 22" 2 ms (GTG) DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor - Retail

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

Vista 64 ultimate runs great. Just use the newest drivers.
I vote for the corsair 620.
 
Vista x64 has matured greatly over the last nine months. The only drivers that aren't still up-to-snuff are Creative X-fi drivers, but you can still get a fully working X-Fi card w/o too much fuss. I would encourage going with Vista x64 now... Granted, the other option is to stick with XP-32 (don't consider XP-64) until SP1 comes out, but then you've got all that extra work with formatting and upgrading the OS. I'd say install Vista now, and if there are still any issues, have faith that they'll be ironed out in soon-to-be-released driver updates or with SP1.

I current have no issues with Vista x64. System is smooth and stable, and gaming performance is on par with XP.

Mark.
 
in my system i have 4 internal HD's 2 dvd drives a evga 8800GTX and a dualcore AMD opteron all on the corsair 620watt PSU and everything is great. so i doubt u will have any problems
 
First off, the hardware. I would get an E6750 rather than an E6850, as you will get similar results when overclocking. As for the PSU, I would also recommend the Corsair HX620, or you could buy the HX520, they will both easily suit your needs. Change the CPU cooler to the Tuniq Tower 120, it is cheaper and cools better than the Zalman coolers. The motherboard is good, any P35 board will perform well, I would get a IP35-E, the cheapest board, it is virtually identical. I would get 4GB of memory now, but buy 32 bit XP. Then you could upgrade when you go up to 64 bit Vista. I would downgrade the video card to a EVGA 8800GTX, chances are if you plan to buy the 8800 Ultra the GTX will be fast enough. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drives are the best option, they are the fastest drives on the market for the RPM, they are not far off the speed of the Raptors. The monitor and soundcard are good, though if you don't need most of the features offered by that card I would just buy a cheaper model. You could also go for a cheaper monitor, like the HannsG HW223DP, which is said to perform just as good as the Samsung panel. Also, your chances are sometimes varied with getting a good panel, if you believe in it.
 
Ultras and GTXs are available for around the same price nowadays, so there's no reason not to pick up a faster, cooler running card for the same price when available. Keep the Ultra, but don't pay much more for it than you would a GTX.

Mark.
 
Just wondering, any reason for going with vista 64 and 4gb of ram?
Honestly, in my opinion - 4gb isn't needed unless you're into graphic design or content creation. Even I don't use 4gb and I'm a graphic designer. Well...., the mac at my work has 8gb... >_> Anyways...

Also, I wouldn't get the pre-overclocked version of the ultra. If you want to save some money, just go with the gtx, if you have the cash to burn - just go with the standard ultra and overclock. Mine is overclocked higher than the KO version without any issues.

GTX vs Ultra has negligible performance differences. But I heard that the ultra uses a revised core compared to the gtx, which overclock a bit better. (?)

If you're planning on overclocking and need a more customizable board for such, and want to stick with abit - get the ip35 pro instead. You can use the money you save for the standard ultra and add it to this.

Just my 2 cents.

P.s. and I definitely agree with the Tuniq Tower
 
4 gigs will come in handy when multitasking or running a lot of background processes, and especially when running a resource demanding foreground app on top of all that. Four gigs can also be utilized by Vista's intelligent pre-catching mechanisms, such as Superfetch.

On the other hand, almost all apps available today are still compiled as 32-bit binaries, which means that no individual application will use more than 2 gigs in it's own world (3 gigs if a compiler switch is set.) Therefore, for the time being, 4 gigs will only help out the OS or when multitasking / running lots of processes as described above.

The reason four gigs is so popular today is because RAM prices are very low right now, and since RAM is commodity priced, there's no guarantee that they'll be lower or as low tomorrow. My advice would be to choose between two setups: 4 gigs and Vista x64, or 2 gigs and XP-32. XP-64 is a no-go due to bad compatibility issues and horrendous support. It's more of a tech-demo than a full fledged alternative to XP-32, and is only useful in a small number of computing environments. Vista x32 with 2 gigs is also possible, but why not take advantage of Vista's RAM management system to increase overall performance by adding an extra 2 gigs while prices are low?


Mark.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top