This is it... Please Look Before I Pull the Trigger!

I like the IP 35 Pro instead (heard its on sale for $149) but your build looks great to me.

You a puzzy? 3.6 is child play.

A perfect overclocker. Carry on.

Looks good, the only thing I'm not sure is the power supply. It will ok but if you ever add other things it will be just, maybe 600w-750w will be better and more stable.

Nice choices. Yeah, the 620HX is worth it because it gives you more room for upgrades.
Edit: I also like the PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610W, same quality as the 620HX, cheaper at newegg now because it's on sale, rated tier 1, but not modular.

If you have some money left, you could upgrade the motherboard to GA-P35-DS4. That one overclocks like a champ, and it may be worth the price difference over the DS3R because it has a second video card slot and FireWire and eSATA. It depends on your needs. (Gee, I have recommended the DS3R hundreds of times, now I get to tell somebody NOT to buy it ) The second video card slot won't do you much good with an nVidia card because you won't be able to do Crossfire, but it can be used for a cheap second card to handle its own monitor(s).

I object to your choice of burner, but that's mostly because Sony is on my black list since the rootkit scandal. I'd get a Samsung SH-S203B or SH-S203N (the N costs $3 more and adds Lightscribe).

The Gigabyte version of the 8800GT has a very nice cooler, check it out too. This one doesn't need an after-market cooler.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814125087

If you get one of the hot versions of the 8800GT, consider a good aftermarket cooler for it. E.g. Accelero S1 or Thermalright HR-03GT. (Edit: and the DuOrb, yeah...)

The Heatsink fan you picked moves a lot of air but makes a bit too much noise. Check out the Scythe S-Flex SFF21E and SFF21F too.
Thermalright A1280: 78 cfm, 34 dbA
SFF21F: 63.f cfm, 28 dbA
SFF21E: 49 cfm, 20.1 dbA
That is, with the A2180 (and some expensive RAM) you might establish a record overclock, but it will be noisy. With the SFF21E it will still reach very nice clocks and you won't hear it.

Yeah, the P182 absorbs a lot of noise, I love it.

Tough choice, between the 620HX and the DS4. Technically, you don't need either of them. You'd be happy with the 520HX and DS3R. But both are so tempting

Upgrading the 520HX to 620HX would give you no benefit right away, it's strictly for the future.

Upgrading the DS3R to DS4 would give you some benefits right away. Let's try to figure out if you need any of them:
- I assume you don't care about FireWire.
- I also assume that a monitor at 1920x1200 plus the ability to add a second one to the same 8800GT is enough for you, so you won't need a second PCI-E x16 slot any time soon.
- This means the only immediate benefit you'd get from DS4 is eSATA. If you have an external hard disk with eSATA and use it a lot then this is useful, otherwise it isn't.

Maybe you should just stay with the 520HX and DS3R...

Instead of buying an 8800GT and an aftermarket cooler, you might as well go ahead and get a 512MB 8800GTS.

That's a great looking build, but honestly unless you are interested in RAID you can save a few bucks and get the DS3L.

more wattage, more gigabytes. (Your choice of modest 250gb surprised me the most)

He is recommending a bigger PSU (which you don't need) and a bigger hard drive (a good suggestion). Get at least a 320GB drive. The price difference is minimal and you can never have enough hard drive space.

The 520w is more than enough power.
The only way he would ever come close to needing more than that is with SLI.
He does not have an SLI mobo.

If you really want a steal for a high powered PSU.........
Buy.com has the 750w Corsair for $119 After Rebates.

Anybody interested in an 8800GT, read this. I'm sure you'll find it interesting. This guy used an Accelero S1 and got some impressive results.

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1261100

After reading the article on the front page... I'm wondering about PCI-E 2.0... Do I need to looking at a Mobo that supports that? Is it worth it?

I guess I don't understand if it will impact my 8800GT or if its only a Crossfire/SLI thing.

Great article aevm. In it he speaks of updating the BIOS on the 8800GT to improve the cooling. I did read a question on the forum here about someone not being able to find the new BIOS on GIGABYTE'S site. Anyone know anything about this? Is this a reason to not go with GIGABYTE?

Damn that Accerlero is sexy.

If you are putting together a new build I would say you would HAVE TO go with PCI Express 2.0. It is what I would do.

THE REASON: I believe the future of videocards is Multi-GPU cores. Today ATI's new graphic card the HD3870X2 came out. A single HD3870 by itself has enough bandwidth to fill up a PCI Express x16 slot. Now imagine how much bandwidth TWO HD3870 GPU chips on a single card would pour out in to a single PCI Express x16 slot? I think the data would bottleneck. That is what the HD3870X2 will do. That is like pouring Crossfire in to a single slot that normally fills two slots.

Dual GPU cards are going to revolutize the Graphics Industry just like Dual Core CPUs revolutionized the Processor industry. In order to accomadate that you need PCI Express 2.0 type bandwidth.

I read an article that ATI's new R700 chip this summer is going to come in 3 flavors
One core - Entry Level
two cores - Gaming level
three cores - Enthusiast level

That is 3 GPU chips on one single card.

With games like Crysis single cards are going to have to be built with multiple GPUs to handle tomorrow games.

Now I have listed ATI in every example I have given but I am sure that Nvidia is heading down the same multi-gpu path also. Their 9800GX2 is coming out and I am sure the GT200 coming out this summer will be multicore for several cards.

So I say to you if you are building today, build planning for tomorrow.

Considering that hard drives are the slowest part of a computer I would agree that RAID is highly desireable.

A Q6600 and a single HD is whacky...what's the point of that? 99% of the games out can't even use 4-cores.
Loading your OS on it's own and games on another greatly increases performance (go for 2x250gb 16mb cache)

Why not ditch the Q6600 and $40+ cooler and get the 3.0ghz 8400 45nm Wolfdale with it's 6mb L2 cache for $220?

But if you're stuck on the Q6600, buy it OEM (no fan) and a known stepping (G0) for overclocking, while saving $$:
http://clubit.com/product_detail.cfm?itemno=A1938460

At 19x12, a single 8800GT seems lacking. At buy.com you can get the XfX 8800GTS for $270 if you sign up for their Visa $30/$20 rebate/$10 google checkout with free shipping. This card not only has a little more power, it has a dual slot cooler stock.

That case is also killing your budget. Newegg just had a 24 hours sale on ALL case yesterday. You could have gotten a nice Lian Li for $89 shipped (vs $130+$15+ shipping original price)....

Vista is not the future. It's a bump in the road to Windows 7 in 2009. I have Vista Home Premium on my laptop and can't stand it...it feels like it's made for old people, kids and stupid people who know nothing about PC's. There are more illicit ways of getting an OS and putting more in your build...

Im looking to build a new gaming PC around March-April and the components that ive been looking at are very similar to the OP's.

I've got a head full of questions, would be great if anyone can clear things up a bit for me.

Im currently looking at a BFG 8800GT clocked at 675MHz from OCUK, is this a better choice than going for a similar GTS version? worried about cooling mainly.

Also im hoping that in the future i can add another card (SLI?) in when prices fall and games demand more power, what sort of mobo is the best option for this setup.

The processor that i have been looking at is the Q6600, but ive read magazines saying that there will be a Q6600 with a penryn architecture(?) out soon and that its worth waiting for, is that just magazine blabber?


Vista or XP 64-bit? ive not heard anything good about Vista but im not that great with computers and im not sure how an OS can restrict performance, will the 64-bit version of XP work fine if im planning to use a Quad-core PCU and around 4GB of RAM?

What sort of storage setup should i be looking at? RAID or just a single HDD?
Ive been looking at 10K RPM drives as storage for games to boost loading, but ive also seen people saying that "Express Card SSD" is better for loading times, are they any good?

Listen here Mr. Hijack-my-thread....



Most of these questions are going to take some reading. I spent HOURS in the Vista section reading. There are many, many factors to consider. In the end I went with Vista 64 because A) Its the future (although Noya disagrees) and B) I wanted to use 4GB of RAM.

There are many differing opinions out there, but my take from reading it all was that maybe, just maybe, its to the point where VISTA's pros outweight her cons. Especially if you plan on buying everything new. If you have a lot of legacy equipment/software, XP might still be the better choice.

This MOBO cannot SLI, so you need to look at something different. But from everything I read, SLI / Crossfire just doesn't justify the cost. Its mostly for people with extra money to burn who want crazy perforamance at any cost.

It looks like the Penryn chips are delayed. They will be better than the Q6600 (10% or so?), but my computer is dying (and 4 years old) so I need to move now and can't wait.

And the question of the best way to configure the hard drive(s) still eludes me. I've asked a lot of questions, but I haven't really found an easy answer. In a perfect world I would get XP and Vista on seperate drives and Dual Boot. But finanacially that just isn't in the cards for me.

Look at this post. It has lots of good information on setting up a Hard Drive for maximum performance. I was going to follow it, but now I'm just not sure.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] n#t1737771

Read the post that aevm linked above in regards to the 8800GT. Lots of good information in there.... (especially about cooling).

Sorry about that, i was reading away and saw your PC was looking like what i was after so i thought id save making a new topic

Thanks for all the information tho, hope it helps other people aswel.

One last question, will there be any problems putting 4GB of RAM into Windows XP-32bit Home?

Yeh, i think Vista needs some time to smooth out, hopefully they will make a lite version with less of the non-essential shiny things.

Buy.com has the 620HX too;
http://www.buy.com/prod/corsair-62 [...] 70718.html

CLICK THE "BUY NOW" BUTTON!

ITS DONE.

I wasn't this nervous the last time I bought a car, or even when I got my wife's diamond.

(oh and Jack, I checked out that combo at NEWEGG with the 650W PSU... but got nervous when I saw that the last 5 or 6 reviews spoke of how terrible it was... and even started a few fires. All the reviews before that were good, so maybe there was just a bad batch? I dunno... but a fire in my case scares me... )

NICE!!! Hopefully you'll get your CPU soon, so you can complete the package!! Let us know how it all works out for you.

I think your missing the tie wraps? Ahhhh, I think your going to have to deny the package and have it shipped back until you get the tie wraps with it! LOL!!!

Did you look at the picture? It has a 8800gts Alpha Dog in it. Unless I'm mistaken, it's a 8800gts?

Good Pick!! I like XFX any how. If I were to go Nvidia on my next build I would go with XFX or EVGA. Probably XFX.