Advice and recommendations

[Guest]

Hey all,

Im looking at upgrading my PC shortly with the setup shown below but there are some things im not to sure on so your opnions on what to do would be appreaciated.

Currently running a AMD 3500, 1GB DDR, ATi 9250, Enermax 620W PSU, Kandalf Case (Standard Thermaltake fans), NEC DVDRW, 2x 36GB Raptors, 1x 400GB SATA2 Seagate, Creative Soundblaster Audigy 2 Platinum Soundcard, 2x 17" TFT's.

Use - Uni work (Computer Systems 1st year), games such as Fear, Call of Duty 2, AOE3, B&W2, HL2 etc, its also my music and video player so I encode a lot of DVD's.

Now you know the above this is what I prepose:

From the old system
Hard Drives but should I run the raptors in raid or 2 seperate drives, eg one with games and one with windows etc - Seagate is storage
TFT's, PSU, Case, DVDRW

Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (Upgrade to Quad core at a later date when its dropped in price a bit)
1GB (2x512MB) PC6400 Corsair SLI RAM
Either a 7900GT or a 8800GTS depending on price at purchase not sure where to go with this what do you all think?
Nvidia 680 Chipset motherboard - any recommendations?

Now the questions:

Water or air cooling, im not really going to be doing much overclocking BUT as I watch films off my PC I dont want it to loud. If I went for water I would look at the Zalman Reserator.
I hate cables and was thinking of getting a SATA DVDRW drive as they are now cheap whats the opinions get one or are they more pain than there worth?
Do I keep the Creative Soundcard or will the onboard chip be as good if not better? - Currently only using 2.1 Surround Sound.
Is the PSU upto scratch for powering all of this lot? Might add an additional 2x 500GB SATA2 drives at a later date as well.


Thanks to all that reply

Edd

 

[WR2]

Good mission statement. The only thing you left out was your budget target.
At the moment I believe your 680i motherboard options are limited to eVga 122 CK $270 or Asus PN-32 E $300 or Asus Striker Extreme ~$350. Hopefully you'll see more 680i and some 650i choices shortly.
I don't think the 8800GTS matchs up well with your 2x17" LCDs and their 1280x1024 gaming resolution. Unless there is a higher resolution (16x12 or higher) monitor in your immediate future I'd stick with the 7950GT class video card ~$200.
Your Enermax 620W PSU should be fine going forward.
If you're not thinking about high/extreme overclocking you can probably pass on water cooling. A good quality HSF should be no louder than your current case fans. The video card will probably be the loudest part of your system.
Keep the current sound card for now and if you find you''re not happy with the quality you can always upgrade later.
Saved enough $$ to upgrade to 2GB RAM yet? I'd recommend that. And the price difference between E6300 and E6400 isnt that large @~$39 so I'd suggest that upgrade too.