Enthusiast Gaming System, New Zealand

[rinmic]

Hi everyone,

I am planning on building my first system here in New Zealand in the next 2 weeks. The build is for gaming mainly and a bit of work. I was aiming at something like the enthusiast build from June and had a couple of questions. For reference: 1US$ = 1,25NZ$

1) Cl9 vs Cl8 memory: is that a huge difference? It seems that Cl8 memory is really hard to come by here, as most shops dont offer any for reasonable prices, I am often multitasking, so I suppose 8GB of memory is better than 4 for that purpose.

2) Motherboards: since I am going for a i5 3450, I thought adding a Z77 chipset mainboard was the way to go. However I am a bit confused by the huge variety of mainboards with that chipset. Is it safe to go for just the cheapes performance wise? The only helpful addition on a mainboard is wireless, in my oppinion.

3) Video card: The big price drop seems not to have arrived here yet. The cheapest 7970 I could find was still 610NZ$ + GST (Sapphire Radeon HD7970 3GB GDDR5 PCI-E HDMI / DVI / Dual Mini DP), where as the cheapes gtx 670 was 586NZ$ (Palit GF GTX 670 PCI-E 3.0 2GB 256-bit GDDR5, Base: 915 Boost: 980/6008 MHz, 2x Dual-Link DVI, HDMI, DP, Fan). Is it worth it saving 30$ and going for the GTX 670? Or should I invest roughly 80$ more for the Sapphire 7970 OC version?

4) Screen: It has been ages since I shopped for a monitor (6-7 years) and I suppose the things that mattered back than are kind of silly now. Is ok to just go with a random 21" LCD with a resolution of 1920:1080 for around 175 NZ$? Or are there things to consider? Again, gaming is the focus.

5) Online shops in general. It seems that competition here is to weak, since prices seem to be very slowly affected by new products and the like.. Does anyone know a good place to shop for hardware in NZ? I am currently using Alphacity.co.nz.

Thats alot of questions, but if anyone could help, it would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

edit: I forgot one question: The Tom's Hardware build used a 600Watts power supply. Looking at the hardware and the power intakes, shouldnt 500W be enough? I am asking because I lot of the cases here come with a 500W PSU, but not many with 600W or more.

 

[Silvune]

1) There is no noticeable difference between CL8 and CL9.

2) Yes it is fine to use a Z77 motherboard, I think it is better because how do you know if the Gigabyte P67 board in that article ships with the necessary BIOS to run an Ivy Bridge processor? If it doesn't then you'd have to go to the hassle of somehow getting access to a Sandy Bridge chip and then flashing the BIOS.

3) It is fine to go with a GTX 670. They are still really good cards, even with the recent driver improvements to the 7000 series.

4) I don't know the monitor market well enough to give advice.

5) I know of this price comparison site based in NZ:
http://pricespy.co.nz/category.php?k=1243

Yes it would be fine to use a high quality ~500W PSU for a build with a GTX 670 or 7970. But the PSUs that usually get bundled with cases are not high quality and shouldn't be used, especially in gaming builds.

 

[razgriz]

2) As far as i know one, among the main reasons a motherboard price can be skyrocketed is materials used on it. That's something that should concern you mainly if you go for overclocking.

4) I can't offer much advice either but one of the useful aspects of a gaming monitor is it's low ms. People will usually say 2ms is ideal.
But i really haven't researched that matter a lot.
What i know for sure is that the more you learn about monitors the pickier you get and the price goes up : p

 

[rinmic]

Thanks, those answers helped a lot. I will probably do some more mainboard research to decide for the right one.

Thanks!

 

[Ragnarok666]

I live in Australia and while the prices here are quite bad, they arent as bad as in NZ. Would help to know what type of gaming you do whether it be high end (BF3,FC2, SOASE etc) gaming on high graphics or lower. Do you want to overclock? Do you want double monitors? Do you want to use Double GPU (i dont think you do but im going to ask anyway).

3) A GTX 670 will be good enough to run practically any game on top settings atm, and if you plan for endurance, you can always get another one down the track.

Also the GTX 670 is a great entry level high end GPU and definitely one of the top high end price/performance GPU's, which performance wise is only slightly behind its big brother the GTX 680, while a whole lot cheaper.

4) With your monitor your right with the resolution, 1920x1080 will be fine, i would suggest you go for 2ms response time as you will benefit from it in gaming. With this type of monitor the price will range from $200 AUS upwards.

Also i would suggest going for at least 24 inch monitor but this is just personal preference.

 

[rinmic]

Best answer selected by rinmic.