My upcoming build **Need Recomendations**

castroman

n00b
Joined
Nov 20, 2008
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Hello all I will be building myself a new desktop this coming holiday season and could use some advice on parts for my build.


1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming
2) What's your budget? Around $1500
3) Where do you live? USA, NY
4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? A PC, i have some parts below
5) Will you be overclocking? I do plan on it
6) What size monitor do you have or plan to have? 22' Wide screen at 1680 x 1050
7) When do you plan on building/buying the PC? Around Christmas
8) What features do you need in a motherboard? all my stuff fits!



Free from MSDN
OS to be used: Windows Vista Business 64bit

From my current build
Case: Thermaltake Armor Series VA8000BWS Black Aluminum
Monitor: Acer 22' wdescreen

Things to be bought:

CPU: Intel Core i7 920 2.66GHz

RAM: Patriot Viper 6GB (3 x 2GB)

Mother Board: GIGABYTE GA-EX58-UD5 LGA 1366

PSU: CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W ATX12V

GPU: EVGA 896-P3-1267-AR GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked Edition

Hard Drives: 2x WD6400AAKS 640GB

Current Subtotal: $1,373.93

Any other recommendations??? Think I may buy this weekend
 
Standard questions apply.

1) What's your budget
2) What are you going to use it for?
3) If you're gaming, what games do you want to play on it?
4) What monitor are you pairing with it? What's it's resolution?

Answer these and the advice can start rolling in.

Thanks.
 
What the.. can't quote Danny's post.. so many new registers these past days who just jump right in with questions and not bother with the stickies..

If you're gonna ask us to build/list a PC for you or seek advice about a build, please answer all of the following questions:

1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc
2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?
3) Where do you live?
4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, RAM, case, etc. Please be very specific.
5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model.
6) Will you be overclocking?
7) What size monitor do you have or plan to have?
8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?
9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? etc.

By answering these questions you help us help you build a PC that's of better quality, better performing, cheaper or all of the above.

If you have any questions and/or comments about this or any of the other Gen[H]ard-related sticky threads, please post them in the GenHard Sticky Discussion thread.
 
What the.. can't quote Danny's post.. so many new registers these past days who just jump right in with questions and not bother with the stickies..

I have updated my post

And I apologize I am used to Overclockers forums.....
 
"SLI for the future" tends to be a silly idea, as by the time you are ready to buy that second card, a newer single card solution will usually be available and will outperform two of your older cards in tandem. When selling the original card, simply upgrading to the newer card can also be cheaper. Given that, and the fact that keeping to a single card makes for a cooler running, less complex system, SLI is seldom a good idea.

Still, since you can get an SLI-equipped motherboard now with X-58 and not have to worry about the typical drawbacks (mostly being that nForce boards are woefully unreliable.) I'll still warn against getting that second card for the future. Plan to get the best card you can afford now that is best suited to your monitor resolution, and see what the market is like when you want to upgrade.
 
"SLI for the future" tends to be a silly idea, as by the time you are ready to buy that second card, a newer single card solution will usually be available and will outperform two of your older cards in tandem.

I don't think I mentioned SLI for the future.....



Anyway I have a question, will a 64 bit OS run with my processor?
 
WD6400AAKS never fails for hard drive. Oh, you want something fast for booting? RAID0 the two of them! Still half the price of a VR but still faster! And you can still get a third one for storage and it's STILL cheaper than a VR, altogether.
 
I second that recommendation of the WD6400AAKS. Its highly recommended on this forum. I recently updated my drive to WD6400AAKS. Its fast, quiet and at a great price, you can't go wrong.

By the way I like your rig. The Intel x58 platform is the way to go if you want a nice SLI gaming rig.
 
Do you already have that 22'' monitor or are you planning to buy it?

What games do you want to play?

With that budget, if you already have a monitor, you can easily afford to go e8400 or Q6600 and grab a GTX280 or a 4870X2 and enjoy the luxury of playing everything on max settings with high fps

I don't think by Christmas time that an i7 build will be a good idea for a gamer who wants to keep it at $1500. You will just blow way too much on ram, mobo and CPU. And remember, the GFX card is the most important component if you are a gamer

Edit: Now that I think about it, you can probably actually do it, especially if you don't have to buy a new monitor, and since you are reusing your case and OS, that will save you some money too. And prices will come down a bit in a month, which will help you too. But I still think it will be hard to do. If you are spending $1500 for a gaming comp you should be getting a GTX 280, 4870X2 or an SLI/Xfire configuration.
 
Ditch the ABS PSU. It's not that good of a quality PSU. You're about to spend ~$900 on a CPU, mobo and RAM and you want to cheap out (quality wise) on the PSU? Some other options:
Corsair 750TX 750W PSU - $115
PC Power & Cooling S75QB 750W PSU - $130
BFG Tech BFGR800WESPSU ES-800 800W PSU - $140

As for the hard drive, there really isn't room in your budget for a two drive setup. In any case, many small sized drives below 320GB are significantly slower than their 640GB and 1TB counter parts. Right now, this is one of the fastest consumer 7200RPM drive out now:
Western Digital WD6400AAKS 640GB 7200RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - $70
 
... By final advice do you mean we should all quote ourselves and copy and paste? Final.. FINAL FINAL! Finaaaaaal..... If you looked around you'll see that all those recommendations are pretty much copy and pasted from every other "help me build" thread aka. proven.
 
You could look at the reviews and benchmarks that basically say that budget SSDs are gimped even compared to spinners instead of shifting the burden of proof on the poster if you're so interested.

(So basically they fail. You are looking at $$$$ SSDs for performance.)
 
Those are the crappy budget SSDs.

Could you please give me a couple of links where I can read about it?

I thought OCZ is pretty good:
- Capacity: 30GB
- Read: Up to 170MB/sec
- Write: Up to 98MB/sec
- NAND Flash: Multi-Level Cell (MLC)
- Interface: SATA-II
- Low Power Consumption
- Lightweight (77g)
- Shock Resistant
- Warranty: 2 Years


Thanks you in advance!
 
Well, I got SSD idea from another forum, where people suggested SSD for system drive instead of latest raptors. I was told that expensive SSDs are very good. Expensive, means 32G no less than £80 or $120. 64G £150 or $300 (but 64G is a bot slower than 32G). I have not looked at the link you have provided yet, but I wonder if they are very bad as you are implying, then why well known brands such as Crucial or OCZ would give SSD drive:
2 to 5 years warranty and the rest of very good specs such as:

Crucial Internal 2.5" Solid State Drive

Product specifications
  • Form factor: 2.5-inch industry-standard metal housing
  • Dimensions: 100.2mm (l) x 69.85mm (w) x 9.5mm(h)
  • Weight: 82g
  • Available capacities: 32GB and 64GB
  • Host interface: Serial ATA (SATA)
  • Host data transfer rate: 3Gb/s (backwards compatible with 1.5Gb/s)
  • Read/write speeds: 32GB: up to 100MB/s (read), 60MB/s (write); 64GB: up to 100MB/s (read), 35MB/s (write)
  • IOPS (inputs/outputs per second): 80K sequential read IOPS for a 512-byte transfer
  • Shock: 1,500G/0.5msec
  • Vibration: 20G (20-2000HZ)
  • Temperature: Operating (0°C to 70°C); Non-operating (-40° to 85°C)
  • Acoustics: 0dB
  • MTBF (mean time between failures): > 1 million hours
  • Endurance: Static & Dynamic wear-leveling with 6-bit ECC error correction
  • Crucial Warranty: 5 years
Masybe I am bit naiive?
 
Many of us here feel like the SSDs aren't worth their current prices, especially when you compare them to their (comparatively) meager storage capacity.

For around the same price as one of the "expensive" 32GB SSDs, you could buy two (or more) of the WD6400AAKS HDDs and place them in a RAID 0 configuration, and they would perform much faster/better than whatever you were using before. That, and you get nearly 40 times the storage capacity of the SSD, all for around the same price.

Many of the reviews of the WD6400AAKS consider it one of the best HDDs around. It's a more effective "bang for your buck" than an SSD currently is.
 
I was thinking to use SSD as a system drive only, so 32G would more than enough.
Maybe I was wrong...
 
Many of today's programs (particularly, games) require many gigabytes of available space. (Vista, I believe, takes up at least 10GB -- which is a pretty significant amount for a SSD of that capacity.) Even a few programs could fill up 32GB pretty quickly.

That said, I believe that two WD6400AAKS hard drive are a better, money-saving alternative.
 
Even without RAID, one of those WD6400AAKS drives is as fast as a last-gen Raptor X.

I'm not saying that SSDs aren't faster than HDDs... but I don't believe that they're worth the money right now.
 
The Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB does well against the VR as well. And yeah, 32GB is horribly tiny. It's great for... Windows 98. Hahaha.
 
My system partition is 20G and it has 7G free after 2.5 years of heavy use. Although I do not install games on system partition.
 
From Tom's Hardware charts WD black is one of the best among standard HDs.
 
My system partition is 20G and it has 7G free after 2.5 years of heavy use. Although I do not install games on system partition.

What's your system?

And what's the point of a system partition that doesn't hold your games? So your OS is fast by being on a faster drive, but all your programs are going to be slow? Are you just going to stare at your desktop and admire how fast you're doing nothing?
 
What's your system?

And what's the point of a system partition that doesn't hold your games? So your OS is fast by being on a faster drive, but all your programs are going to be slow? Are you just going to stare at your desktop and admire how fast you're doing nothing?

Not ALL my programs. Only games.

I have AMD 3500+ venice, 2x1G memory. 2 HDs. 200G devided into 2 partitions and one 120G for rubbish.
I am going to buy i7 system some time in January/February/March. Depends on prices. So, right now I am doing some researches and prepare for it :)

Right now I would buy 1 raptor and 1 WD black, either 750 or 1T.
I would devide raptor into 2 partitions. 1 for system another for games and photoshop.
 
You still didn't mention your SYSTEM for your SYSTEM drive. Which would be referring to your OS. Isn't that what a system drive is for?

As for i7 components, I'm going to stay away for at least another two years. I already have a good rig going and the i7 are going to stay expensive for a while, imo. Also, if the WD Black is using the same platter format as the WD6400AAKS, then yeah, it would be fast.

Personally, I like my VR as my system drive and the WD6400AAKS for my storage. But if I had to choose again, I would have gotten two 6400AAKS and be happy.
 
Windows XP 32bit and I am planning to stay this way for now. Maybe later I would consider moving to Windows 7 if it is any good.
 
Even without RAID, one of those WD6400AAKS drives is as fast as a last-gen Raptor X.
Could you give a link to any benchmarks about it please?
I didn't know that any 7200 HD stands even close to the last generation velocity raptors.
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/144531

Check out this thread of various HD Tune scores. There are various posts there showing that the WD6400AAKS performs on par with (or, in some cases, better than) the last-gen Raptors.

Since you've asked for benchmarks, here are some from 3dGameMan, AnandTech, the Tech Report, and ExtremeTech. Someone else asked that very same question over at XtremeSystems.

Now why would you believe that I would pull something like that out of my ass? :rolleyes:
 
Windows XP 32bit and I am planning to stay this way for now. Maybe later I would consider moving to Windows 7 if it is any good.

Yeah. That's why you don't need a large system drive. I bet Windows 7 is going to need a bit more than 32GB. Windows Vista 64 already does.
 
Yeah. That's why you don't need a large system drive. I bet Windows 7 is going to need a bit more than 32GB. Windows Vista 64 already does.
Quite possible. Then in 1-2 years SSD drives might evolve a bit further :)
 
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