Re: Upgrade - never built an Intel system

"Fitz" <akfitz@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:la6dnR8RCrpbVXbVnZ2dnUVZ_iydnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I've been an AMD fan for years, but the time has come to upgrade and I
want to go with Intel's Q9650.
The components I've selected may be "overkill" and if there are better
choices (especially if I can save a
few $ without sacrificing performance) I'd like to hear your suggestions.

Motherboard: Asus Rampage Formula
Memory: 4 GB OCZ Reaper PC 8500 (1066) (not on QVL, but has gotten
excellent reviews)
Power Supply: Corsair HX1000
Video: 2 X GeForce 260 Max Core OC2
Hard Drives: Existing 2 X 74 GB Raptors (Raid 0), 36 GB Raptor (Scratch
disk), WD 320 GB storage disk
Case: Existing Antec P180

The Asus motherboard is rather pricey, and unless you intend to overclock
the nuts off the system, you are probably wasting your money. A P45 based
motherboard will do all you are asking of it and cost you half what the
Rampage will.

I'm probably going to get flamed for this, but personally I wouldn't bother
with the Raptors. Your RAID0 using Raptors will be very fast, but you will
not really notice this unless you deliberately benchmark it against other
machines. I would spend the same amount of money on one or more a couple of
Samsung 1TB Spinpoint F1 drives. Personally I would have them in RAID1
(mirror), rather than RAID0 (striped). This gives you redundency if(when) a
drive goes bad.

Your idea of having a scratch HD is nice, but I really doubt it will make
any difference to your system speed.

If you are going to install 64bit Vista rather than 32bit XP, I would
suggest it might be worth upping the memory to 8GB rather than 4GB.
Especially if you are going to install video cards with loads of memory.
Remember that the video memory is subtracted from the 4GB addressable space
under 32bit XP, so a 4GB machine with a 1Gb video card will only get about
2.5Gb usable memory. In your case you would loose almost 1.8GB to those two
260s!

Talking of video cards, personally I would drop the pair of 260s in favour
of a Radeon 4870x2. The Radeon is faster, cheaper and uses less power. And
the Radeon is a single slot card, so no messing about with SLI!

I assume you are a hardcore gamer if you going to be spending so much money
on graphics cards... A standard x280 or Radeon 4870 will run any game on the
market at the moment and anything in the foreseeable future too.

Will the heatsink/fan that comes with the processor be sufficient, or do I
need to get a 3rd party one (won't
be overclocking to start).

In general the Intel stock fans are OK to use unless you want to overclock.

<SNIP>
Cosair HX620 power supply (I'd like to reuse it, but the Nvidia website
list only the HX1000 for 260 series SLI and

Thats because the nVidia cards are SOoooo power hungry. Each 260 needs over
180W! The Radeon 4870x2 needs only 250W in total.

with 4 harddrives, 5 fans, bluetooth keyboard/mouse and front panel LCD I
don't want to under power the system).

It is always worth buying a PSU 20%-30% over what you absolutely need. It is
much better to run a PSU at 60% of its rated power rather than 95% of it!

To justify the price tag, I would need to get a significant amount of
performance improvement and longevity out
of the new build - are my expectations to high, or does this seem
reasonable?

Again I run the risk of being flamed here, but my personal opinion is that
future proofing is a waste of money. I upgrade my PC about once a year or
so. I spend a few hundred each time and buy equipment about half to one
generation behind the bleeding edge. That way I get good stuff and don't pay
the bleeding edge prices.

When Armed Assault came out, my mates and I needed to upgrade to play it.
They built new PCs for about £1000 buying top spec PCs. I spent £300
upgrading (new CPU, mobo and graphics card) and got a PC good enough to run
ArmA. This year I spent another £300 upgrading the CPU and mobo again and
adding memory and I now have a PC that out performs theirs. I spent 2/3 what
they did and have a better PC.

Rarius


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