I found out my friend wants to upgrade her current setup in the near future. She designed a PC around what she "claims" she wants but I have been trying to sway her on some components. I would post the Newegg wishlist but it doesn't seem to be working right now, so here are individual links.
Just so you know she designed the list and the only thing I changed so far was the case b/c the previous one was no good.
The GPU will probably be EVGA instead of BFG.
The TV/Monitor is unchangeable (she is dead set on it).
She doesn't PC game much besides WoW right now, but will probably move beyond that in the future.
Okay so the questions:
DDR2 1066 - Isn't this overkill? I would think 800 would be fine.
Rosewill PSU - I know it's Newegg's brand, is it a risky move to use it? I have heard/read mixed reviews. Does playing Blu-ray require a lot of processing power from the GPU?
Vista 32-bit doesn't utilize 4 GB of RAM - downsize the RAM? Upgrade the OS?
Comments/questions/recommendations much appreciated!
For 4gb ram, if you have the money, upgrade OS, but do not downgrade ram. 3.3gb is just as good as 4gb for typical tasks. It's good as long as you don't run out of ram and use page file off hdd. If you already have OS, it's fine to use it since you don't have to pay. If you buy os, there is no reason to get 32bit over 64bit.
Psu, looking at the specs, should do fine, unless defective.
1066 ddr2 is overkill, you won't notice a difference from 800. Many 1066 ddr2 will default back to 800 because they're just factory clocked 800 sticks. Set them manually if that happens.
Most video codecs are cpu heavy, not gpu. In any case, both cpu and gpu you have is more than enough. Lose blue ray. It's severely inflated in price right now. They've dropped a few hundred dollars in the last few monthes, and by no means stabilized. A disk drive is easy to upgrade later, unlike, say a motherboard.
The p35 motherboard will bottleneck your e8400's overclocking. P35 runs at 1333mhz fsb natively, and reliably oc to 1600mhz. X38/48 runs at 1600mhz fsb natively, and reliably oc to 2000mhz. At 1600mhz fsb, 9x multiplier cpus (e8400, q6600) run at 3.6ghz. P35 is fine for q6600, which can't oc much beyond 3.8ghz anyway, but severely bottlenecks e8400, which easily go above 4ghz. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813128089
