Speccing up a new PC, advice please.

[Feek]

In the next month or so I'm going to be buying a complete new PC. My Shuttle is starting to strain now and it's time for a change.

With advice from a friend who's just bought some bits, I've specced up the following:

2 x OCZ 2GB (2 x 1GB) PC2-6400 Dual Channel Platinum (total 4Gb)
Samsung SpinPoint T HD501LJ 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache
Asus P5N-E SLi nForce 650 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
Lian-Li PC-7 PLUS Midi-Tower Case
Antec TruePower Trio 650W PSU
BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC 640MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express)
Intel Core 2 DUO E6700 LGA775 Conroe @ 2.67GHz
Noctua NH-U12F HSF

I don't need an optical drive as I bought a new Samsung Lightscribe drive a couple of months ago and I'm not bothered about a floppy drive.

How does that look? I want it to be reasonably decent and last me for a while.

[Dr. Z]

"Reasonably decent" hehehe!

Other than perhaps a different drive setup (RAID1 for the OS disk and a smaller SATAII storage disk) and me not really liking nvidia cards that much, thats quite a beast

[Daz]

Agree with DRZ, with the cost of storage so cheap, if you can afford to splurge on that sort of setup then you should also consider a RAID option, be it for redundancy or performance (I opt for the latter, as I backup religiously anyway).

So long as the Core 2's are happy with 4 DIMMS (I honestly dont know), then it looks good to me

[Stan_Lite]

Impressive spec dude

I like the Samsung spinpoint drives - nice and quiet and (so far) reliable.
I'd be interested to hear how you get on with the 8800. All of the high end cards I've had have been ATI and I had toyed with the idea of trying one of those beasts for size.
My XPS M1710 has the Geforce GO 7900 GTX in it and is very, very good - so although I was waiting for the R600 cards from ATI before my next build, I'm not a "fanboy" and would quite happily SLI a couple of those babies if they are up to the task.

Also interested in the Noctua HSF - never heard about it before but the reviews I just Googled look favourable.

All in all, a top notch machine (better than my current best rig ). I look forward to hearing how you get on with the build.

That's a damn sight better than decent and should keep you going for a long time.

Stan

[Feek]

Great, thanks

Performance would be the reason, I'm right at my cash limit so I'd either have to drop to 2Gb or reduce the CPU, I think dropping memory would be the best option as I don't have the hassle of removing and replacing the CPU later.

Not up to speed on RAID these days, got any specific suggestions?

[Dr. Z]

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?

[Feek]

I may be running Vista, not 100% sure yet. It all depends on the prices really and whether I can get the OS at a good price or via work, which would be a very good price.

Anyway, from what I see, the motherboard doesn't have a raid controller anyway so the raid is a moot point.

Part of the reason behind wanting 4Gb is to have a dedicated partition for a certain disk intensive game and to run a decent sized cache using SuperCache II® and SuperVolume® just on that partition and still have enough memory for the system to speed along.

Not sure what your references to Vista and nVidia are about?

And what's fakeraid?

[Dr. Z]

well, its software raid emulation through a hardware interface that has "some" functionality - no different do setting up a software raid array in windows, ultimately.

As for the whole nvidia/vista thing, I think I am right in saying that they are a bit behind in getting something stable together for their cards. Being an ATI man I am not 100% sure but I have heard it a couple of times now that the drivers arent quite there.

[Mark]

Looks like a nice spec to me.

I'm also an ATI man, which is why I wasn't bothered with SLi in my brand new (as in built yesterday) system. I'm also not so keen on ASUS stuff having had a few support issues with them in the past, so I went Gigabyte this time (yes, I know they used to have a bad reputation).

So far, so good with mine.

[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.

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 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.

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.