Good Build? Good Price? Where do I go next.....?!

[Fiftyfifth]

Hi

I've just finished putting the last part in my computer - a new heatsink! Please give me your opinion of my build, the price and most importantly, is there anything I should do to improve this?

Here's my first build:

CoolerMaster 430 Elite Case
CoolerMaster GX650 psu
Asus P8Z68-vLX mobo
Intel i5 2500K
16GB (4x4) Corsair XMS 1600MHz
Asus GeForce GTX560 ti (900Mhz overclocked edition) with Battlefield 3 ^ ^
1 x 140mm CoolerMaster Blue LED Fan
3 x Noctua 140mm NF14FLX fans
Noctua NH-U12P 2SE Heatsink

Seagate 650GB HDD 3Gb/s
Generic DVD Drive

Cost: £770/$1200

Additional parts I already had:

Windows Wireless Desktop Entertainment 8000 Keyboard and Mouse (could do with replacing)
Belkin Wireless N1 Card + N1 Router
LG32" LCD TV as monitor
Sony 7.1 GA500 Headphones
2.1 desktop speakers
Microsoft HD webcam

Heatsink was my best buy out of this for me because my stock heatsink was idling at about 35-40'c but was running up to 80'c on load (BF3 ultra settings).. which I wasn't happy with - not to mention my fans were screaming at me! It's now idling at 30'c and 50'c on load.

I'd appreciate any feedback! Esp. any good recommendations for improvements. The areas I'm looking to improve atm are probably my keyboard & mouse and HDD - know nothing about HDDs apart from the difference between bytes, megabytes etc.

Here are some images for anyone interested:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9722483@N02/sets/72157629599323011/
Slideshow:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9722483@N02/sets/72157629599323011/show/

 

[willard]

With a built at that price point, I absolutely would recommend getting a 120GB SSD. If you watch the sales you can snag them for $130 USD for a high end consumer drive. Will do wonderful things for your computer's responsiveness.

Aside from that upgrade, I probably would have gone with less memory. Unless you're doing video/image editing/rendering, your system will rarely use more than 5GB or so. It's not like it's expensive or anything, but I would have taken the opportunity to get better latencies rather than more capacity.

30/50 temps are pretty damn good. Are you overclocking yet? You've got a healthy chunk of thermal headroom to work with if you're not. The 2500k has tons of "free" performance just for tweaking a couple settings in the BIOS.

 

[paulrharrison]

Good build...I'd also HIGHLY recommend an SSD drive...

If you're running 64bit OS, don't worry about having too much ram...you'll never run short...

On the SSD drive, make sure the SATA III controller is set in the BIOS to use AHCI instead of IDE...and also, when installing, make sure that you get it connected to the SATA III (6Gbs) ports on the mobo...

On the CPU cooler, just make sure you take the fan off of it occassionaly and clean it out..."stuff" will clog the fins easily...


Visit our BF3 server sometime...~A.K.S~ American Kill Squad...

Game on !!!

 

[Fiftyfifth]

With a built at that price point, I absolutely would recommend getting a 120GB SSD. If you watch the sales you can snag them for $130 USD for a high end consumer drive. Will do wonderful things for your computer's responsiveness.

Aside from that upgrade, I probably would have gone with less memory. Unless you're doing video/image editing/rendering, your system will rarely use more than 5GB or so. It's not like it's expensive or anything, but I would have taken the opportunity to get better latencies rather than more capacity.

30/50 temps are pretty damn good. Are you overclocking yet? You've got a healthy chunk of thermal headroom to work with if you're not. The 2500k has tons of "free" performance just for tweaking a couple settings in the BIOS.

I'm only overclocking by 100mhz at the minute (i5@3400). I don't know much about overclocking but I've taken overclocking into consideration when making my decisions. Unfortunately I'm lost when it comes to voltage etc. I'm not stupid so it's just a matter of reading up.. but that takes time, which I don't have a lot of.

I got 16G RAM because I got the CPU, Mobo and RAM in a £300 ($470) bundle. But it is E X T R E M E L Y useful because I do photography part-time and have to edit about 100 images after every shoot - I was previously doing this with 2G RAM and I've probably cut down my editing time by hours lol... instead of loading 5 photos at a time I just load 20 and run through them!

Well since two people have come with this one recommendation I guess that's what I'll do! I was thinking about it but was kind of undecided because I didn't know if I'd have as much benefit. One question though, do I just use this for gaming etc.. or should I run my OS on it too???

Oh and also, should I scrap my 3gb/s HDD and get a 6gb/s?

 

[Fiftyfifth]

Good build...I'd also HIGHLY recommend an SSD drive...

If you're running 64bit OS, don't worry about having too much ram...you'll never run short...

On the SSD drive, make sure the SATA III controller is set in the BIOS to use AHCI instead of IDE...and also, when installing, make sure that you get it connected to the SATA III (6Gbs) ports on the mobo...

On the CPU cooler, just make sure you take the fan off of it occassionaly and clean it out..."stuff" will clog the fins easily...


Visit our BF3 server sometime...~A.K.S~ American Kill Squad...

Game on !!!

Thanks for the message!! I will definitely use the information you have provided once I have an SSD ^ ^ I'll first do a little bit of shopping around because I'd like to get a good price!! I'm not a total rookie so I know about cleaning fans, filters and heatsinks but thanks anyway!

I'll look you guys up on BF. Check us out @ AcF
RUSH: http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/servers/show/a99f189b-c141-4c2e-8b38-36c478d91004/AcF-Clan-nl-RUSH-Fast-Vehicle-Spawn-1PL-start/
TDM: http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/servers/show/0cab0768-4c73-4264-aaf2-83cff93b4566/AcF-Clan-nl-TDM-NO-SMAW-RPG-M320-MORTAR-CLAY/