Hey guys am building a new gaming pc wonder if use can confirm a good build. Motherboard - Asus P7P55D PRO Intel P55 Express 1156 Motherboard £111.10 CPU - Intel CPU i5 760 Quad Core Processor £144.70 HDD - 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 Hard Drive - HDD HD103SJ £41.78 GPU - No sur what to go for here yet.. ATI or Nvidia Case - NZXT M59 Classic Series, Black, Mid Tower Gaming Case, with Side Window, w/o PSU £46.73 PSU - Corsair TX 850 W Power Supply (PSU) £96.10 Total of £440.49(600) roughly with graphics am guessing Few others things i need are Wireless card, not sure about colling system for the machine. and what size of monitor should i go for or, kill 2 birds with one stone and buy a new TV for my ps3 and use as monitor as well ? all help much appreciated Cheers Chiddy
The 850W PSU is massive overkill unless you're going to spend nearly £1000 on graphics cards. To give you an idea how much power 850W is, I run an overclocked quad core CPU, and two Radeon HD4870X2s (rated at 572W total - the average graphics card is 150W), and yet my total system power in the most demanding games is just over 700W. It all depends what you're after in terms of games performance. If you just want some games but don't care if you have to run them on low settings and/or get some lag, you don't need to spend much. However if you want good graphics and good performance, you will obviously have to spend a bit more. Far and away the best value graphics cards out there at the moment are the newly-released Radeon HD6850 and HD6870, at around £140 and £175 respectively. It wouldn't give you much room to upgrade, but you could run the HD6850 happily off a Corsair CX 400W PSU. The HD6870 you'd want the 550W VX, and that would be ample. If you want a really high-end card (the HD6870 is very similar to the HD5870, so it's still very powerful) then you would be best waiting for the HD6950 and HD6970 in November, which will be a bit more powerful (roughly 25% and 50% respectively) but a lot more expensive. HDTVs as gaming monitors are OK, but consoles work well with big HDTVs when you sit a distance from them. Big HDTVs do not work very well as PC monitors as their definition is very low. Lastly, ditch the Asus motherboard. Asus boards are pretty problematic and unreliable these days. Swap it for a Gigabyte P55A-UD3 instead. Remember, you need RAM with your system. I always recommend Corsair XMS3, 1600mhz.
Cheers dude, emm i was gonna go for the 4 gig of ram corsair mate i thought i had that down.. my price budget is about £800. onlything thats hold me back is the Graphics basicly not sure what to go for. I play FPS ( CoD, CS:s) and ?MMoRPG(wow) and few others. i know the asus board whats for SLI, = Nvidia, take it the gigabyte is for ATI radeon? Where do u recommend buying parts from. im in the UK Cheers
The Asus board has a License for SLI, the Gigabyte doesn't, but they both support ATI Crossfire. You don't need SLI or crossfire unless you're using more than one video card, which I only ever recommend to people spending £1000 or more on their PC, and only on the base unit, not any peripherals. I'm also from the UK, and I rate www.ebuyer.com , www.scan.co.uk and www.cclonline.com as the best retailers. CCL probably have the best service, but Scan often have better prices, and ebuyer a better product range. You can get free delivery for orders over £20 at both scan and CCL by making 20 posts at Hexus, and bit-tech forums respectively.
cool cool so what kinda system would you recommend for about £800 with a monitor mate, and for the kind of games i play?
Can anyone confirm of this system being ok and compatible. Case - NZXT M59 Classic Series, Black, Mid Tower Gaming Case, with Side Window, w/o PSU Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3, Intel P55 Express, S1156, PCI-E 2.0, DDR3 2200, SATA 6Gb/s, RAID, USB 3.0, ATX CPU - Intel i5 760, S1156, Lynnfield Quad Core, 2.8 GHz, 8MB Cache, Core Ratio 21x, 95W, Retail PSU - 750W Corsair CMPSU-750TX, SLi, Single 12V Rail, Quiet & Cool, Max 87%+ Eff GPU - 1GB Sapphire HD 6870, 4200MHz GDDR5, GPU 900MHz, 1120 Stream Processors, DL DVI-I/ DVI-D/ HDMI/ mDP RAM - 4GB (2x2GB) Corsair XMS3 DDR3 PC3-12800 (1600), Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 9-9-9-24, XMP, 1.65V HDD - 1TB Samsung HD103SJ Spinpoint F3, SATA 3Gb/s, 7200rpm, 32MB Cache, 8.9 ms, NCQ, OEM optical drive - Samsung TS-H353B Black 48x CD-ROM 16x DVD-ROM, SATA, OEM Wireless card - Netgear WG311GE PCI NIC/ENet 11g 54Mbps Wireless PCI Card
Only if you're likely to use two 6870s. 750W is overkill for all but top-end systems, the only reason you want it over a smaller 550/650 unit is that it has four PCIe connectors, of which an HD6870 requires two. The actual power consumption of an HD6870 is such that a 450-500W unit would actually be able to power two of the cards perfectly fine, it's simply that you would need the extra connectors.
ahhh right, well the 550vx seems to be out of stock at Scan just now. so not sure weather to wait for that?
You could always go with a 650W TX if finding the 550 VX is difficult. It's a slightly better unit anyway, as the 650 is a different design underneath compared to the 550/750.
So the 650w TX would be more than good enough then mate,? and you think the system ive pickd is good. comming to a total of £820, with mouse - keyboard - monitor, few extra sata cables, emm the standard fan will be fine ?
The M59 isn't very well specified as standard for cooling. If there's extra room in your budget it may be an idea to upgrade to something like the NZXT Tempest Evo. If you're unwilling to spend on a case, or are dead-set on the appearance of the M59 then that's fine, but I would recommend the purchase of the additional fans the M59 allows to be fitted. It's not mandatory as HD6870s don't get hot, but it may prove useful once the PC becomes older and dustier, to prevent overheating mishaps.
ok, for the price difference which is around £30, i see the tempest evo has extra fans so would it not be better just to buy extra fans like you said and install them my self? and what fans do u recommend mate? cheers
There's a bit more to it than the extra fans it contains. It's from a design perspective, available space, cooling as a result of layout, and so on. As for fans, if you don't care about noise/performance you can basically buy any fan you like. I quite like Scythe slipstream fans as they can produce a lot of air when required, but with a decent fan controller [I use two Scythe Kaze Masters] they can also be set to be effectively silent.
Processor:Intel Core2 Duo CPU E6550 @ 2.33GHz (2 CPUs) Memory:4GB RAM Keyboard:Logitech G15 Keyboard Mouse:Razer Lachesis Mouse Surface:Cyber Snipa Tracer Mouse Surface Hard Drive:180 GB Video Card:NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT Monitor:Acer 22" 1680 x 1050 LCD Monitor Sound Card:SoundMAX HD Audio Speakers/Headphones:Razer Barrucuda Operating System:Windows XP Professional
