My New Intel Core i7 920 Build - Page 2

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Now that I found out about the student windows 7 deal for 20 bucks. I'm going to be buying windows 7 most likely unless I can make my friend find my original windows vista disk.

I do have a question though and it may or may not seem silly but I',m wondering so I'm just gonna ask, will Microsoft send you another disk if you tell them you lost yours and or broke it? I still have the serial number from the OEM sticker on my current system. So it would make since if they would mail me one but I guess I'd understand why they wouldn't

You can do it only if your current system is not a Dell or HP..because they lock the OS to their motherboard

The ASRock X58 Extreme? Other than the incredibly trite name, it's awesome so far.

I haven't had time to dig into the BIOS and tweak yet, but I tried the built-in overclocking and it is stupid-easy. I've got my 920 at 3.6 and it is rock solid. Not bad for an overclock that took all of 2 seconds. I'll push it a little harder later, but I'm happy with this as a 24/7 solution for now.

Someone earlier mentioned not wanting to overclock because they want the CPU to last a year or so. Prior to this system, I had a e4300 C2D (1.8 GHz) that was running at 2.83 GHz 24/7 for 2.5 years on stock cooling. If you don't go nuts with your overclock, you'll be fine.

Yeah man I'll post on how if I like the MOBO or not.

Crucial 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model CT2KIT25664BA1339 for $74.

Speed is easily upped to 1600, timing on my i7 920 is 7-7-7-19. You don't need Triple Channel Memory,you won't notice the difference, and synthetic benchmarks are actually faster.

Buy for right now. In a year, we'll be at DDR4 and Triple Channel Memory will be cheaper, but still not worth it if it still doesn't add real world performance. $50 - $60 is a Graphics Card upgrade! You'll notice more of a performance boost with that.

Not sure what his budget is, but I'm still arguing that Triple Channel is not better. It's assumed it's better, but tests have showed that it's not. Price-to-performance is what we're going for. If it was just performance, we'd just be arguing about what's top of the line.

http://www.insidehw.com/Reviews/Me [...] -Mode.html
http://xtreview.com/review232.htm
http://www.ninjalane.com/articles/ [...] ualvtriple (this person tests Triple Channel DDR3 vs Dual Channel DDR2)

I've tested it on my system, and there's no performance boost.

Lol, you know what's funny? I read that the Crucial 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model CT2KIT25664BA1339 is actually the same modules they use for their Triple Channel Kit, the CT3KIT25664BA1339.

I recently ordered another 4GB since it was cheap (I have 4GB on my Phenom II x3 720 BE, and 8GB on my i7 920). My i7 920 states my memory as being in Triple Channel.

Therefore, I just need to subtract a 2GB module on my i7 and put it on my Phenom II and make both of them Triple Channel. All that, and for $3 cheaper.

You wouldn't be able to fit it in without sanding down the slot. The modules are keyed differently.

Alright guys, this Friday I'm going to be ordering a GPU and a HSF finally...

Anyways though do you guys think I should go with the pretty new Radeon HD 5850 ? It got great reviews so far but I just wanna ask what you guys think.

OOOOO the 5850s are actually out now. Nice, I missed that. Anyway, the 5850 should last a nice long time, and can xFire, particularly when the prices come down. You mentioned that you had up to $300 for the GPU, so I would recommend the 5850, a good buy by anyone's standards right now. The reviews have been solid for it. And I think you mentioned the Hanns 28, which is native at 19x12.

Here is the Tom's review of the 5850. If you look through the article you can see how the 5850 performed at that native resolution. http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] ,2433.html

I also just ordered the AsRock x58 Extreme. Any update? I am curious as to how it is. I read a comment from 5 days ago on youtube about the board not having any Windows 7 drivers. Have you heard anything about that? Nice build and good luck.

Yeah I'm most likely going to buy a 5850 as well, and even though there are already quite a few other write ups about them I'd still like to here your opinion on the card as well.

Hey man, downloading the drivers now, only thing I've noticed so far, it is much heavier than the 4870 Almost exactly the same length. Here's a couple pics, I'll write more later after I play with it. Sorry they are so big.

Thanks for letting me know what you thought of the 5850 I'm gonna buy it next Fri now

Hopefully I'm satisfied enough and I won't buy a 5890/GT300 when they are released...probably not

I actually ended up buying the ATI 4890 to be honest with you. The exact model I ended up buying was the HIS Turbo OC+ 1Gb Model, I wanted to buy the 5850 but by the time I got my paycheck newegg was sold out of them... Sad part is that now the price of the 5850's has gone up. So sadly I don't think they are really worth the extra 100 bucks over the Turbo OC+ HIS 4890 card you can buy for only 189.99 on newegg but that's just my opinion. If they ever go back down to 259 or 269.99 again I'll buy it in a heart beat but I just don't wanna pay 300 for a GPU, i know it seems silly considering I mostly buy all gaming parts. But the truth is I'd rather just use a 4890 for now since they are great cards and are currently worth it when you compare dollars to performance ratio's.

As for the rest of my parts I'll gladly let you know what all I ended up using. Also incase you where wondering I have really been enjoying using my i7 build, I'm really happy I didn't decide to try to save a few bucks by doing a AMD build. The truth is that this i7 build is a really fast system by my standards. Although I'm not totally done building it technically since I still plan to buy a new Power Supply unit sometime in the next couple weeks and I also plan to buy another HIS 4890 and the 40Gb Kingston SSD for under 100 bucks that is coming out here within the next few days.

But as for now the only parts I haven't updated with pictures are my HIS 4890 GPU and my 640Gb Western Digital Harddrive that I bought along with my copy of Windows 7 Home premium I bought

I was able to re-use my two ASUS DVD-RW _ CD-RW but if you plug in the average cost for two DVD/cd rw combo drives then the total amount of money I spent on my build including my Windows 7 Home Premium FULL edition was just under 1200 bucks ($1184.33). That includes shipping and everything.