Hi all, At the moment I have a P4 3.2Ghz HT @ FSB 800Mhz with 1Gb RAM (2x 512Mb), 256mb AGP 8x graphics. I am looking at building my next PC which I will be doing an awfull lot of graphic design work on (Using Photoshop, Illustrator etc) and I am wanting to really make a nice system this time around. I am looking at building something similar in spec to the Mac I use at work so I was thinking of basing this PC around the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz CPU. Motherboard Not too sure which one to go for, ideally i would like a dual CPU setup so I can add a further CPU if i wanted to later. And if this is possible use 2x E6700's or better. Not too sure yet, so any suggestions on M/B's would be very welcome!! RAM At least 2Gb, but not too sure which brand / configuration would be better. 1x 2GB Stick 2x 1GB Stick 4x 512Mb Sticks? Graphics Don't know what kind of graphics card I will need. Obviously PCI-Express, and would need dual monitor support, prefereably via HMDI / DVI. Again any suggestions? Storage Not a priority as I have a storage FS on my network with over 3Tb of storage, but I will need a rapid RAID 0 setup so was thinking of some raptors RAID'd. Obviously a DVD burner. Any suggestions would be much appreciated guys. Cheers!!
How much have you got to spend? This sounds like a high grade professional job (It'll need to be if you want two CPUs, dual CPU motherboards aren't cheap). I'm afraid I haven't done much research into the dual CPU motherboard area so I can't help you with which one you want, but if you buy a modern single CPU board, it will be ready for the new Quad core CPUs if you ever want to upgrade to one of those. A single Quad core will probably suffice if you overclock it. As for the RAM, why not go with a pair of 2GB sticks to make 4GB? Doing this is relatively cheap now given the falling price of memory. As for Graphics card, do the applications you use require a powerful graphics card? If they don't, you could get an HD2000 series card with HDMI. If they do, you'll have to use DVI, and you can get something like an 8800GT or Radeon HD3870. As for storage, you'll ideally want some redundancy, so if you want blazing speed as well, you may wish to consider 4 raptors in RAID10. This means you will get the capacity of 2 raptors, with the speed of two raptors in RAID0, but the redundancy of RAID1.
Well I cannot find any dual socket motherboards for the Quad-Core CPU's, so this is what I have decided on. CPU - Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz SLACR G0 M/B - MSI P35 Neo2-FR RAM - Ballistix DDR2 PC2-8500 5-5-5-15 Unbuffered NON-ECC (2x 2GB) G/C - INNO3D GeForce 7300GT 256MB DDR2 PCI-E Eventually I will go on to overclock it, as there seems to be some really nice results with little effort using this processor. Any suggestions on cooling? Apparently you can O/C this from 2.4Ghz to 3.4Ghz using 1:1 on air cooling with load temps of 87-90 degrees!!! I will obviously want a nice cooling system. Will liquid do for this? As I haven't done it before some advice would be nice!! Cheers
Sorry Sam, but with the right version of the Quad core (G0 95W Version - X80562Q6600SLACR), a decent HSF, and a little fine tuning you can. This guy got it to 41 Degrees on load. http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=152722 Kinda cool to achieve.
52C is excellent for 3.7Ghz, but I don't see any proof of the 41C at 3.4Ghz. Hats off to him for spending all that time lapping the cooler though.
Hell yeah, I would give up well before that point!! lol Its the last set of results he shows it at 3.4Ghz @ 41 degrees
Heh, just goes to show the impressive cooling performance of the Ultra 120 with a bit of work. Realistically though, you can expect somewhat higher temps than that unless you've got an entire day to spend sanding off your heatsink.
