Opinions, please! A few questions also

[shawty_82]

I've finally decided to take the plunge and buy myself a new toy. The spec I'm looking at is as follows. Any opinions or recommendations would be most welcome! I shall primarily be using this as a reasonable gaming machine that should be able to take the next wave of DX10 hardware

XFX Gforce 7950GT XT Edition (overkill?)

2x Hitachi Deskstar 250Gb UDMA 133 (what about SATA?)

Asustek "Crossfire" AM2 590SLi mobo

Athlon 64 3800 (socket AM2 - don't really understand the difference between all the socket types!)

Corsair twin 1Gb PC2 6400

Thermaltake Ruby Orb (assuming I can get hold of one, they seem to be difficult to acquire!)

Was going to get Windows XP64 as well, is there much point?

Got an existing case I'm going to build it into, along with the usual DVD/CDRW etc etc and an SB Audigy 4 that I'll use until I have the money to sort myself out with something better.

What sort of power PSU would be recommended bearing in mind I shall probably go all SLi in a coupla months (once my bank accounts recovered from buying all this!)?

 

[xeenrecoil]

Sup Shawty;

Aight you say you want to do DX10, lets start at the top.

First , you have the wrong graphics card, the geforce 7 series is DX9 hardware, so you are going to need a geforce 8, the 8800GTS is a good place to start.

You would be better off going with SATA2 HDD's 2x Seagate Baracuda 7200.10 they are perpindicular recording technology with Native command queueing, also make sure your mobo chipset supports NCQ.

It would be optimal to have 2GB of memory, buy some pc2-800.

Use the stock cooling.

Download or order the 120 day trial version of XP Pro, then wait till Vista comes out at the end of January, XP wont support DX10, so its pointless to buy a brand new copy at this point.

Dont spend money on a Sound card right now use the onboard 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound. Get a sound card later when you have extra money.

Get a SATA optical drive.

For the PSU get a Fortron source (FSP) FX 700-GLN, it is powerful, and rock solid stable, with 60 amps on the Quad +12v rails for SLI if you decide to do that later.

That should get you pointed in the right direction, get back to us with any other questions you might have.

Late

 

[AlaskaFox]

They have a good SATA optical drive that works with all chipsets? last I checked the only SATA optical drive in existance worked only with intel chipsets... please correct if wrong, I might have to pick one up!
as for a comment, if you plan on going with multiple video cards in the future, get a chipset that matches manufacturer, so either hold off a bit and wait for ATI's (AMD?) response to the 8800, or get the new nvidia chipset that just came out and get the 8800. I agree with the DX10, as it is only a month away, you might as well build for that and the only video card currently supporting it (kinda) is the 8800. regardless, you wont be able to take advantage of it w/o vista, the appropriate hardware, and games written to support it.

 

[shawty_82]

Ok, cheers guys, all taken on board!

A couple more questions though!

The HDD (Seagate Barracuda's) I'm getting are SATA3.....the only info on the Crosshair mainboard I'm getting is that it supports SATA, it doesn't specify which type....is the mainboard likely to support them? ie is SATA just SATA?

Is NCQ a requirement for 7200.10 SATA drives? or is it just something good to have?

Also, what are the opinions on dual-core processors? Far as I'm aware there's not much that makes use of them at the mo, but is that set to change?

Am I right in thinking that a Heat sink/fan the fits an S939 would be useable on an AM2?

To save the pennies I'm still gonna get the 7950 instead of going all out for the 8800 (cost is half!), easy to upgrade in the future. I'm also still gonna go for WinXP64 as well....knowing Microsoft, Vista is gonna be packed full of bugs, so I'd rather wait a while and let other people make the mistake of buying the initial release and see how it goes.

 

[purplerat]

Vista would probably be less buggy then x64. x64 was never a consumer version of windows and therefore there's even less support for that then there is for Vista (rc2 is probably more supported then x64). As far as the rest of your build you seem a little confused. Why such expensive cooler, Motherboard, RAM but such a cheap CPU, hard drives and outdated GPU? I think if you were to actually build the system you described you'd be very dispapointed. Since your primary use is as you said for DX10 you should actually start with the one piece of hardware that will actually allow you to do what you want to due, an 8800 (gts if you cant afford gtx). Then build around that. A c2d 6300 and decent motherboard will cost the same as the MOBO CPU combo you've currently listed and easily outperform it while allowing you to use less expensive RAM. I think you should do some more research and see what other people are building with similar needs and budget to yours.