Need advice for new pc.

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bmorton18

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 1, 2008
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I am having trouble deciding on some parts for my new PC I am going to build. I was going to go with the Asus Striker II Formula but after reading a lot of bad things about them I am starting to think that might be a bad decision. In addition to that I was going to buy 2 8800 GTS 512mb for SLI. I will be using a 24" monitor so I wanted to make sure I had enough power to game in a pretty high resolution. After reading some reviews on the vid card I am pretty confident I would be ok with just 1 8800 GTS for now and possibly upgrading to a newer vid card later down the road. Right now the motherboard I am looking at is the Asus Maximus Formula. The proc I will be using is the E8400 core 2 duo. This is my first build in 5 years so I want to make sure I don't screw it up lol.
 
- Budget? And does that budget include tax and shipping?
- What parts do you need for that budget?
- Will you be overclocking?
- What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? # of SATA ports? etc.
 
why not get a hd3870x2?? its pretty much a sli 3870 in one card for $450 with 1gb of memory. right now it's considered the best video card on the market.

answer all of danny bui's questions and add in w/e you feel we should know to help you out.
 
My budget right now is about $2200. Including tax and shipping. That amount is just for the box itself. The parts I am thinking of getting right now are;

E8400 Core 2 Proc
8800 GTS 512mb
2 500gb SATA Seagate 7200.11 hdds
1 dvd drive and 1 dvd-rw both SATA.
4 gb DDR-2 800 memory or DDR-2 1066
Antec 900 Case
Coolermaster 850w PSU

I will probably overclock but it would be a modest one at best. I have an Eznotech Ultra-X heatsink already so I'm just going to put that on there. I am not going to raid my hdd's and I don't really care about e-sata (at the moment at least) so my requirements are pretty basic.
 
DFI LanParty P35 Dark P35-TR2S. End of story.

If for whatever reason you don't like DFI, Gigabyte P35-DS3R or P35-DS4/DQ6. The Abit IP35-Pro is a nice board, but it can act screwy with the 45nm chips with the current available BIOSes.
 
Thanks for the suggestion. I'm also considering going with the Quad Q6600 since the E8400's are hard to find right now. Would I want to consider a different board for that or would the above ones work well also?
 
They'd work just fine with the Q6600, yes. Should work with the 45nm quads when they're widely available as well. If you don't intend to upgrade in the next year or so I'd actually recommend the Q6600 over the E8400 anyway, as I am a strong believer in the continuing tendency toward multithreaded software, and feel that in six to eight months time, and certainly in twelve, four 3.6Ghz cores is going to do you a great deal more good than two 4Ghz cores.

If you want SLI support you'll have to go with a 750 or 780i board, of course. The MSI 780i board seems to actually be the most reliable of the bunch thus far, and has better power regulation than the XFX and EVGA boards as it does not conform to the Nvidia reference design. It also has all solid capacitors, which the other 780is do not. I would stay away from the ASUS boards, as they seem to be having the same sorts of BIOS related issues they had the last time around with the 680i.
 
DFI Lanparty boards are good too, their series in terms of quality goes: DK -> LT -> UT. The X38 DK is $212 or something on motherboardpro.com. You could also go for the p35 DK which is a really good board at like.. $140.

CPU looks good. Either a Q6600 or an E8400 (or Xeon 3110) would do you well. If you are new to overclocking, the E8400 should be easier for you to squeeze out performance with very few tweaks or voltage increases. It also runs cooler, so keep that in mind. If you have trouble finding it, you can also look for the Xeon 3110, it is exactly the same chip in every way possible except the box it comes in.

Video card looks good, but you could also consider ATI. The motherboards on intel chipsets will do crossfire, but not SLI.



Edit: Saw Lanparty suggestion above, I agree with it completely. The X38 if you want the new chipset, otherwise the P35 (I think the only place you can get this board right now is ncixus.com, but it is coming in and out of stock frequently from what I hear.) If you are interested in Crossfire check out the LT or UT series, they have 2-3 PCIE slots.
 
astyler said:
If you are new to overclocking, the E8400 should be easier for you to squeeze out performance with very few tweaks or voltage increases. It also runs cooler, so keep that in mind. If you have trouble finding it, you can also look for the Xeon 3110, it is exactly the same chip in every way possible except the box it comes in.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, not true. The Xeons use different microcode to identify themselves, which may lead to compatibility issues with on some boards, as they are almost never officially supported on anything but server boards.
 
silent-circuit said:
Unfortunately, not true. The Xeons use different microcode to identify themselves, which may lead to compatibility issues with on some boards, as they are almost never officially supported on anything but server boards.
Click to expand...

You are right on the money, but fortunately they do work in many higher end and high quality boards. Though you are going to see comments shortly from people saying it will work in virtually anything. Which is bullshit.
 
Dan_D said:
You are right on the money, but fortunately they do work in many higher end and high quality boards. Though you are going to see comments shortly from people saying it will work in virtually anything. Which is bullshit.
Click to expand...

I think that's the third time tonight I've seen you post that info. Must be tiresome, eh?
 
Danny Bui said:
I think that's the third time tonight I've seen you post that info. Must be tiresome, eh?
Click to expand...

No one likes to hear reason when it runs counter to their wallet. The "Xeon E8400 equivalent" is running $200 flat, shipped if I remember correctly, and most can't find a "real" E8400 in stock for under $230. Granted, I'm a hypocrite in that I found a deal on an X3220 and jumped on it. Now I could get a Q6600 through someone living near a Microcenter for $20 or so less than I paid. I'm going to be feeling awfully foolish if this chip doesn't cooperate when I get my 680i LT back from RMA (the top PCIe 16x slot gave up the ghost on me upon installing my second 8800GTX -- figures). In short, here's hoping I'm wrong.

I understand Dan's frustrations, too. My cries of "Go E2180, go Q6600, or go home" are no more popular.
 
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