New PC Upgrade: Decisions, Decisions

B

bungee

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 18, 2006
Messages
219
Hey all,

Was hoping some of you hardware enthusiasts could help me make the right choices for the best bang for the buck upgrade. Please make any recommendations on my new PC specs. I do primarily game and would like to overclock, but I'm leaning more towards air cooling this time because my setup is a little on the loud side and the cleaning of the liquid/blocks is a little too tedious for me. But I recommend everyone water-cool at least one PC!

I will be reusing some hardware and selling whatever I don't use. Price is a slight factor, but I'm willing to splurge on anything that is a definite must have or big performance booster.

Current setup:
Case- Thermaltake Armor-ATX Full Tower Aluminum Computer Case w/ 25CM Side Fan
Water Cooling- Swiftech H2O-220 APEX Ultra Liquid Cooling Kit + VGA Block
Processor- AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Toledo 2.4ghz (stable at 2.8ghz)
Motherboard- ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce
Video Card- eVGA 768-P2-N831-AR GeForce 8800GTX 768MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16
Power Supply- OCZ GameXStream OCZ700GXSSLI ATX12V 700W power
RAM- OCZ Gold GX 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 500 (PC 4000)
Hard Drive- Seagate 750gb
Sound Card- Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio 7.1

and some Pics:

Pic 1
Pic 2
Pic 3
Pic 4
Pic 5

Proposed New PC Components:

Case- Thermaltake Armor-ATX Full Tower Aluminum Computer Case w/ 25CM Side Fan
Processor- Intel Q9450 Quad Processor 2.66G 12MB 1333MHZ FSB
Heatsink - Noctua NH-U12P Universal heatsink (Dual fan for push/pull)
Motherboard- EVGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI (need recommendation; 790i needed?)
Video Card- Dual eVGA GeForce 8800GTX 768MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 in SLI
Power Supply- OCZ GameXStream OCZ700GXSSLI ATX12V 700W power
RAM- need recommendation
Hard Drive- Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFD 150GB 10000 RPM SATA 1.5Gb/s
Sound Card- Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio 7.1

Please feel free to comment on any of the hardware, not just the ones I marked with "need recommendation".
I appreciate everyones help and comments.

Thanks
 
I recommend getting a better quality power supply. The GameXSteam is based off the FSP Episilon PSU design which has out of spec ripple, or voltage fluctuations, at high loads that can damage or kill your system. Your old system was perfectly fine with that PSU. However, your new setup may actually reach the high loads and therefore cause the out of spec ripple. Especially if you plan to OC. So I recommend getting this PSU instead:
Corsair 750TX 750W PSU - $105

Awesome price for good quality 750W PSU.

As for RAM recommendation, this set will allow you to hit a 4.0Ghz OC:
G.SKILL F2-8000CL5D-4GBPQ 2 x 2GB DDR2 1000 RAM - $90

As for motherboard, I recommend getting this SLI motherboard instead since it's seems to be a bit more stable than other SLI motherboards:
eVGA 123-YW-E175-A nForce 750i FTW SLI Motherboard - $200
 
I agree with Danny.

Also, I wouldn't purchase an old raptor right now. Current 7200RPM drives have higher throughput, which outperforms raptors in most things, despite the slower seek times. There's a new raptor coming out, Velociraptor. So, if you want some serious single drive speed, wait for it. Don't waste your money on an old raptor.
 
Thanks Danny and Enginurd for your quick replies.

I think I will go with all of your suggestions and be done with it. If they do ever release the 780i FTW mobo, I'll use the eVGA step-up program to get it, if it's even worth the hassle.

Maybe someone can answer me this question. Say I buy the Velociraptor, but I don't want to buy two of them. I have another 300gb Seagate drive. If I hardware RAID 1 them, I'm going to lose all performance benifit of the Velociraptor drive because I probably won't be able to specify (in the hardware RAID settings) which one is the primary, aren't I? So it might use the Seagate as primary and mirror to the Velociraptor. Or RAID1 might even alternate between the two, so sometimes it might be fast, other times not because it is writing/reading from the seagate drive, not sure. Goofy question, I know.

Thanks
 
Yes you will lose any performance benefit from the Velociraptor if you RAID1 it with that Seagate drive.
 
Just for redundancy on the drives in case of a failure. Then I wouldn't lose anything and would have time to RMA a drive and replace it in the array. It's not a big deal, just curious about the performance in my scenario above. But, when I think about it, it's a pretty goofy scenario and I agree I would lose all performance benefit of the Velociraptor. The only thing to do is to buy 2 raptors (expensive) or do weekly backups/images.

Thanks again for your help guys. I think I'll order the parts tonight.
 
Yah, so to minimize downtime in case of primary drive failure, I have a small OS partition on my storage drive that I can boot to. As for backups, I do weekly backups of my important files to an external HDD.
 
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