Hi everyone. I have a couple questions aboue building a new pc. This will be the first pc I've built. It will be used for standard pc duties plus gaming and anything else I can find to do with its power. Here is what I have in mind.
EVGA 680i SLI motherboard A1 version
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (until the QX6850's drop in price)
2GB Corsair Dominator DDR2 PC8500
1 EVGA 8800 Ultra (for now, will upgrade to 2 later)
PC power and cooling 750 Watt single rail PSU
2 36gb WD Raptors RAID 0
2 250gb Seagate Barracudas RAID 0
1 500gb Seagate Barracuda for backup
I don't think I missed anything but all of this will be air cooled and overclocked a little bit. My questions are:
How good is the EVGA motherboard, I have read really good things about it but I have also read some bad stuff about the BIOS.
Is the 8800 ultra really worth it or should I just go with the GTX and cool it better and overclock it? It looks to me like the ultra would be the best choice but any input it appreciated.
Also as far as a budget setup goes how does this sound? I use budget a little loosely because I don't have like 5000-7000 to spend on a machine so about 2000-2500 is budget for me. So if you would change anything what would it be and what would you change it for? Keep in mind I will not go with AMD or ATI and I would prefer Corsair memory. But any input will be cinsidered. Thank you in advance for any help on this.
hi mjohns930, it looks like you want the best and want to stay in a price range so this is what i would do. these are in Can\money but you will get the picture..
$250 evga 680iSLI motherboard
$300 Intel Q6600
$250 BFG GeForce 8600GTS OC2 (720Mhz)(2.22GHZ)or same in other brand
it has DirectX 10 for new video games and hd video playback.
$150 OCZ DDR2 PC2 8500 or the Dominator is great to for $30 more
$220 PC power 750watt or an Enermax of same value
$100 cooler master cosmos1000 case (this this is awesome take a look at it)
$40 dvd-Asus DRW-1814BLT has sata and not ide as for hard drives i would not go with the 36GB raptors you should move up to the 75GB or 150GB in a raid0. but two Western Digital Caviar (WD5000AAKS) 500GB HD would be cheeper and you would not see a difference in speed for every day use. you could go with four of them and you would only be at 400 dollars.
$ 400 hard drives two in a raid 0 two for storage thats 1.5T (nice)
so for $1710 what would be one kick ass computer and if you wanted to start doing some overclocking i would put in a Zalmans 9700 cpu cooler as they are one of the best on the market for $70. or just go H2O... FN68ROD
Well, only a few of them. I personally regard S-ATA optical drives as unnecessary, especially when you use lots of hard drives and run out of S-ATA ports.
sammorris what board would you go with if not the evga? also I agree with fn68rod in that I dont really care about IDE. if I run out of SATA ports then I guess I'll go with IDE for the dvd drive(s). also I think I'll skip out on the 2 36gb raptors in RAID 0 and just get one 74gb for the OS to free up a SATA port. SATA may be unnessary for dvd drives but I don't want and IDE cables in my case unless I absolutely have to. and the coolermaster cosmos case is high on my list for case choices. thanks for the input i need all the help i can get in selecting components. also what is anyones recommendation for a case other than the coolermaster cosmos. the only things that i dont like about the coolermaster is its weight and it doesnt have a window. a window is not a huge selling point for me but i like to be able to see the fruits of my labor so any recommendation on a conservatively styled windowed case would be appreciated.
One other thing. How well do the q6600's overclock. I don't need to reach 1.29 billion ghz. Is the multiplier locked and if so at what, and on average how high would you say with a moderate overclock could be hit on air with the proper cooler.
The multiplier is locked on almost all desktop CPU processors, including the Q6600. The best overclocks on air are about 3Ghz, and the best with water are around 3.4, far less than the Duos.
