Speccing up a new PC, advice please.

[8 I3ALL]

Originally Posted by semi-pro waster

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I might also consider getting a fast pendrive to take advantage of Vista's usage of flash memory for the page file, can't remember what it is called at the moment but someone else might be able to give you the name of that feature.

ReadyBoost

I'd also change the 6700 to a 6600 for the simple reason that it costs a lot less but will almost certainly overclock to the same degree

i agree with that 100%

[Feek]

Originally Posted by semi-pro waster

It is good but I'd make a couple of changes aside from what has already been mentioned. The Corsair 620w PSU or even the 520w version would be fine for that system, very solid and modular, built by Seasonic as a combination of the best points of the S12 and M12 ranges but to even higher standards.

The 620w Corsair is more expensive than the one I've listed, what's the benefit of that over it, and would the 520w be enough as a 600w is recommended.

Originally Posted by semi-pro waster

I'd also change the 6700 to a 6600 for the simple reason that it costs a lot less but will almost certainly overclock to the same degree, particularly with a good cooler such as the Noctua.

I'm not planning on overclocking as I've not had much luck doing that for quite a long time now.

Originally Posted by semi-pro waster

I might also consider getting a fast pendrive to take advantage of Vista's usage of flash memory for the page file, can't remember what it is called at the moment but someone else might be able to give you the name of that feature.

Originally Posted by 8 I3ALL

ReadyBoost

Oooo, hadn't heard of that - Looks like a great idea, thanks

Originally Posted by semi-pro waster

What size is your monitor? If the resolution is less than say 1600x1200 then you might be as well getting the 320mb version of the 8800GTS as the performance is little different until you get to high resolutions.

Running two screens, one at 1680x950 (or whatever the exact widescreen resolution is) and the other at 1280x1024. Both are likely to have fairly intensive graphics on them at the same time which is why I went for the higher memory version. I don't want to find memory being a limiting factor.

Originally Posted by harib0

did you get the ram back?

I did, thanks

[semi-pro waster]

The Corsair is modular so makes it easier to keep the case tidy but that might not be a big issue to you, particularly if you don't mess around inside the PC much. The main thing that sways it for me is the fact that is it Seasonic quality+ and it has a 5 year warranty which is unheard of in the PSU market. However since many people dump their PCs after a couple of years it is probably academic.

The Core2Duos seem almost ridiculously easy to overclock but if you don't want to then fair enough. The 6700 does cost around £150 more over the 6600 for not that much extra speed though even at stock.

The 640mb version of the 8800GTS is probably the better bet for you then as with one screen alone you'd just about be on the cusp of the benefits from the higher memory anyway.

[Daz]

Couple of notes on ReadyBoost:

The theory is that it helps your boot times, and in reality it does, though not as much as we were lead to believe. Where it does help though, is with application launch times - as an extension to prefetch cache, ReadyBoost will make the system seem a lot more responsive. It doesn't make a great deal once the application as started though - batch encoding MP3's or resizing pictures wont be any quicker in real terms - but it is worth doing. Also, benchmarks show that ReadyBoost works better still if the USB stick is formatted NTFS. No good if you plan to stick it in other devices, but if not then there's extra benefit to be had there.

They say you should have a 1:1 ratio pagefile:ReadyBoost, but I doubt that'd be practical with 4GB physical memory.

[Will]

Personally I like to have more than 1 physical harddrive. I can then keep all my data on a separate drive/parition, and use a nice fast smaller (ergo cheaper) drive as my boot partition.

If you're bothered with RAID then yes that's also very good, but frankly for me it's over kill and SATA drives now are so fast that unless you need the redundancy (which I don't as I backup regularly) there's not much point in doing it IMO. But the boys here know more about home rigs than I do - servers are a different kettle of fish.

To me that looks like a great rig.

Just to let you know my home "powerful" system which I use for most things, scored 4.7 on the Vista performance scoring, 5 is the highest you can get. So I reckon yours will hit 5 with ease - actually it'll be way over 5, as my PC is about 2years old. It boots up in 30s flat once loaded things are almost instantaneous. Not sure if I like it yet - but I'm giving it a go.

[Daz]

Originally Posted by Le Hoff

If you're bothered with RAID then yes that's also very good, but frankly for me it's over kill and SATA drives now are so fast that unless you need the redundancy (which I don't as I backup regularly) there's not much point in doing it IMO.

All depends on what you're doing dude I virtualise quite a bit and need the disk bandwidth, but regardless, I like 3 hard drives in a rig. 2 striped for bandwidth, 1 for backup. At home I have that plus the 500GB external for a second backup. And 2 extra external hard drives if I need them.

[Will]

Yeah of course it depends on your requirements. But I have similar to yourself, external drive for major backup, and a 2nd drive for data storage, and my OS system partitions are on a separate disc so that I can kill them without any data loss as I keep all important data separately.

Striping does make it nice and fast I agree though.

[Robert]

Originally Posted by DRZ

Well if your mobo is half-decent you can just use the onboard "fakeraid" for the RAID levels you would want to be using - if you are looking for uber-fast windows performance a couple of Raptors in RAID1 (so mirrored) would be the best tradeoff for me (writes slightly compromised but absolutely blinding read speed), and if you couldnt stretch to Raptors perhaps just a couple of Seagate Barracuda 160Gb SATAIIs, again in RAID1 would give you faster than a single big disk (much much faster). I would probably then just add a single 320Gb version of the disk you were already going to buy and leave it at that.

I am currently running Vista with 2Gb ram and its positively rapid with 2Gb of RAM - assuming you arent running vista (else you wouldnt be picking an NVidia card ) then there is no benefit in choosing more RAM over a significant boost in HDD speed

2GB (2x1GB) CorsairTwinX XMS2 Dominator,DDR2 PC2-6400,240 Pins, NonECC Unbuffered, CAS 4-4-4-12, EPP £144.64 £169.95
LN17713
Asus P5NT-WS SLI, NF680i SLI, 775, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 533/667/800, SATA II, SATA RAID, ATX £132.00 £155.10
LN15742
200 Gb Seagate ST3200820AS Barracuda 7200.10, SATA300, 7200 rpm, 8MB Cache, NCQ £39.29 £92.33
LN14639
400 Gb Samsung HD400LJ Spinpoint T, SATA300, 7200 rpm, 8MB Cache, 8.9 ms, NCQ £56.99 £66.96
LN17688
640MB BFG Technology 8800GTS Overclocked PCI-E(x16) Mem 1600MHz GPU 550MHz 96 Streams HDTV/2 x DVI-I £223.29 £262.37
LN15050
Intel Core 2 Duo E6700, Socket 775, 2.67 GHz, 1066MHz FSB, 4MB Cache, Retail

et Total £914.59

Carriage £11.74

V.A.T. £162.11

TOTAL £1,088.44

Obviosly not included HSF/PSU/Case etc but as a ballpark, is that about what you had in mind?

Nvidia drivers are OK atm for vista. I have no real issues with them at present.

[Daz]

Missed that, but yes I agree. There are still a couple of minor niggles (enabling second screens on Laptops can be a bit funny for example), but it's largely ok now I hear. They were awful during the beta period though, no doubt.

[Feek]

I'm still leaning very much towards Vista - Is there any real specific reason I shouldn't buy an OEM copy of the 64 bit version of Home Premium?