£950-£1000 AMD Gaming Build - UK Based

[joeboy235]

Hi,

I'm looking build a computer from scratch which main purpose will be gaming. I've assessed my options and my current budget is from £950 to £1000. I'm leaning towards AMD because I've been used to AMD builds so far.
I'm going to be playing at a 1920x1080/1200 resolution, depending on which monitor I buy.

AMD 6 Core Build:

Antec 900 Nine Hundred - Gaming Case with 200mm Top Fan - No PSU
£70.48 - £60 ex Vat

G-Skill 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz/PC3-12800 Ripjaw Memory Kit CL7(7-8-7-24) 1.65V
£83.58 - £72 ex Vat

Asus M4N98TD EVO nForce 980a SLI Socket AM3 DDR3
£96.26 - £82 ex Vat

Samsung HD103SJ Spinpoint F3 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 32MB Cache - OEM
£47.99 - £41 ex Vat

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium - Licence and media - 1 PC - OEM - DVD - 64-bit - English
£75.20 - £64 ex Vat

PALIT GTX 460 SONIC 1024MB GDDR5 DUAL-DVI HDMI VGA Out PCI-E Graphics Card - X2
£328.96 - £280 ex Vat

Corsair 750W HX Modular PSU
£112.76 - £96 ex Vat

AMD Phenom II X6 1055T 2.8GHz 9MB Cache Socket AM3 Retail Box Processor
£156.20 - £133 ex Vat

Samsung SH-S223 22x DVD±RW DL & RAM SATA Optical Drive - OEM Black
£12.99 - £11 ex Vat

Total = £982.90 - £837 ex Vat


My particular concerns are:
- That the PSU should run everything fine.
- That the AM3 motherboard would run 2 GTX 460's in SLI fine.
- That the case would have suffecient cooling and space for everything.

I intend to purchase the items as soon as possible.
I'm UK based, so i would preferable use ebuyer and overclockers.co.uk

Thanks in advance for reading through this.

 

[joeboy235]

I've looked around a bit and seen some bad reviews reguarding the heat of the PALIT GTX460, so i'm going to go with something like this:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/232853

Gigabyte GTX 460 OC 1GB GDDR5

£169.46 - 145 ex Vat.

 

[Silvune]

Yes the PSU will be plenty. You can get 750W 80Plus Silver PSUs for under £100, but they are at scan. There are also cheaper 80Plus Bronze units available that are cheaper. You can also get the XFX 850W for a similar price to the 750HX.

Yes, but it seems to be accepted wisdom that if you want to SLI, using a Nvidia chipset on the AMD platform isn't the best way to do it. In some ways it would be better to go Intel.

Yes the Antec 900 is a pretty good case for cooling components.

At stock the AMD Phenom II X6 1055T will perform worse than (at best the same as) the cheaper II X4 955/65.

 

[joeboy235]

Thanks for the reply,

I've opted for the 1055T because;

-It was only £35 more than the Phenom II X4 965
-And i thought that, in the future, it might start to improve as more games start to support 6 cores.

Also, do you think that, at stock/slight GPU OC'ing, that this rig should run games more or less max, 1920x1080/1200?

And are there any benchmarks, or examples you could point me towards, regarding SLI on an NVIDIA AM3 Motherboard.

 

[tomate2]

if u can maybe u should wait for the new bulldozer

 

[joeboy235]

Also, where can I buy an SLI connector for my two GTX460's, I can't seem to find any.

 

[Silvune]

Thanks for the reply,

I've opted for the 1055T because;

-It was only £35 more than the Phenom II X4 965
-And i thought that, in the future, it might start to improve as more games start to support 6 cores.

Also, do you think that, at stock/slight GPU OC'ing, that this rig should run games more or less max, 1920x1080/1200?

And are there any benchmarks, or examples you could point me towards, regarding SLI on an NVIDIA AM3 Motherboard.

Also, where can I buy an SLI connector for my two GTX460's, I can't seem to find any.

You should only get the 965 if the 955 isn't available - the 965 is a factory OCed 955 and the price difference doesn't justify the frequency difference anyway, so you could save yourself ~£50 getting the 955. But if that's what you want to do then fair enough.

Yes two GTX 460s should run most games at very high settings at that res.

Ok, it seems like the issue isn't to do with gaming performance, it's just that the chipsets are feature poor, even compared to the older 700 series chipset and in particular OC poorly (on the CPU) and has a slower (compared to AMD chipsets) storage controller. So if you're fine with that then cool.

There should be an SLI bridge with the motherboard.