Please Rate My New System

Hi Guys,

New to this board and thought I'd get some pros/cons with my new system build. After spending many hours on forums, fan sites and reading reviews I decided to upgrade my system with a mid-range/gamer system. Here are my specs. I used Tom's System Builder Marathon as a starting point and referenced the budget and mid - range systems. During the time of the reviews, the new Radeon 4850/4870's were not available but after reading all the pros, i decided to go for it. So what do you guys think? any comments, positive and/or negative are appreciated as long as they are constructive.


All Prices in Canadian Dollars
CPU - Intel Q6600 Quad - $215
CPU Fan - OCZ Vendetta 2 - $39 - 10 Mail in Rebate
RAM - OCZ DDR2 PC2-8500 Reaper HPC Edition $129 - $35 Mail in Rebate
GFX - Asus Radeon HD 4870 - $ 295 - 30 Mail in Rebate
MOBO - Gigabyte P45 - DS3L - $125
HD1 - Hitachi SATA II 500 GB - $70 - $10 Instant - $10 Mail in Rebate
HD2 - reused Western Digital SATA II 300 GB
DVD - reused Pioneer DVD-Rom/Writer
Case - Antec Sonata III - $110

Total = 973 + Taxes 1.13 = $1099 - MiR = $1014.49

The only Cons would be

1:"IF" you want to Crossfire that board only has 1 PCIe x16 slot

2:"IF" you want to add more RAM the heatsinks on the Reaper HPC make it so you cant use 4 sticks of HPC in some motherboards. Get the OCZ Platinum PC2-8500(the are the exact same memory chips) plus you can have 4 without installation problems and its cheaper.

1Haplo

1Haplo, i decided not to go for the CrossFire configuration but i figured i left myself wide open if i do decide to do cross fire.

Here's my Logic on that topic. Next year, the 8 Cores will be coming out. And by then, the X48 Mobo's as well as the Qx9800 chips will drop and by which a new crazy video card will be out. So i can easily upgrade chip/mobo/video card IF i need to.

And as for the RAM, that's some new information i hadn't thought of. But it's too little too late, i already purchased the OCZ Reapers. I checked and it does look like i'd have enough clearance to have 8 gb of ram on this particular mobo.

For the q6600 i was talking online ^^ 188 at directcanada
http://www.directcanada.com/produc [...] ture=INTEL

If you ever shop online in canada, www.ncix.com and www.directcanada.com are your firends. And www.shopbot.ca but thats another story.