Building on Wednesday... Need some last minute help!

[nlraley]

I'm going in to order the parts this Wednesday and needing some help.

I plan on oc'ing this baby to around 3.7 and needing a few last minute advice on 2 things.

First is the RAM. I was looking at 2x2GB sticks of RAM so I can upgrade to 8GB later on down the road. However, the 2X2 sticks are slower than their 4x1 counterparts. Will I be able to hit 3.7 and above with 2x2 or do I need to step down to 4x1 in order to reach this?

Also, recommendations on what to go for?

Last but not least. I'm getting the Ultra 120 as I've heard its a beast for air cooling and should meet my needs. Will it be enough? Do I need to cover the north and south bridges as well as get some cooling for the voltage core?

Any help is greatly appreciated. Finally here's what I'm looking at so far:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 G0 Stepping Kentsfield 2.40GHz 8MB L2 LGA 775 Processor Retail BX80562Q6600 SLACR

Seagate ST3750640AS-RK 750GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - Retail

PC Power & Cooling / Silencer / 750-Watt / Quad PCI-Express / SATA-Ready / Black Power Supply


EVGA 768-P2-N835-AR GeForce 8800GTX 768MB 384-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card - Retail

EVGA 122-CK-NF68-A1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail

Antec Nine Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

Scythe S-FLEX SFF21F 120mm Case Fan - Retail (F Model Important)

Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme CPU Cooler - Retail

Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound - OEM

Microsoft Windows Vista 64-Bit Home Premium for System Builders Single Pack DVD

 

[akhilles]

Looks like you got some ideas from another thread. Good ideas at that.

CPU speed & ram sticks are unrelated. If you're talking about cpu & ram speeds, still unrelated. How? 680i can run cpu & ram unlinked.

What I doubt is that you can reach 3.7 on air. In an a/c'ed room, probably. In winter, prolly. On water, almost guaranteed. 3.4-3.6 on air is more realistic. You can try. If money is no object, go water. There are many ready-built watercooling kits. You wouldn't have to do anything other than hooking them up to the computer. As hard as installing a cpu cooler that requires the removal of the mobo. A good example is:

Swiftech H20-220 Apex Ultra

If you're worried about leaking & toasting the whole pc, don't. Chances of a prebuilt kit leaks is very slim. If it's a custom kit, there's non-conductive coolant.

As for chipset cooling, I suggest Thermaltake HR-05-SLI. Get 2 if you can afford it.

BTW, you still need ram.

 

[aevm]

Excellent choices there.

I'd get two 500 GB disks instead of one 750 GB. Check the prices, 500 GB is usually cheaper/GB.

For RAM, I'd recommend Crucial Ballistix.

You also need a DVD-RW. Try a Samsung or LG.

You do realize that the hard disk will hold back your nice 3.7 GHz CPU and it will not work at 100%, right? Even my stock 2.4 GHz Q6600 has never reached more than 81% ever since I got it. That is, if I overclocked I would get exactly 0 benefits. Go for watercooling if you care a lot about noise, but don't do it if you just want 3.7 GHz instead of 3.4 GHz, that's pointless.

 

[nlraley]

Okay, so taking on these suggestions how about looking at
2x Crucial Ballistix Tracer 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory
and then going for
2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (Perpendicular Recording) ST3500630AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
for the hard drives.

Is that a good set of the bassi RAM and I guess I should probably go with RAID for my hd's to run faster?

 

[aevm]

That memory is very high quality and will overclock well. A bit expensive. I guess it makes sense, you did get top quality components everywhere else after all.

RAID: yeah, it's probably worth it. I'll try it too one of these days, just not sure which type yet.

 

[Guest]

Beware of RAID 0. 2 drives - RAID 0. One drive goes bad ..... 2 drives worth of data gone!

Actually I should have said 2 or more drives and 1 drive goes bad ALL the data is lost!!!