Re: Upgrade - never built an Intel system



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.

Change to ASUS P5Q Deluxe (change processor to Q9550)

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.

I already have the Raptors in my current system- don't see the need to change them out.
Currently using 320 GB drive to back up data I don't want to use (ex: Quicken automatically
backs up to this drive when I close the program).


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

Dedicated to Photoshop Elements- it does help that application.

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!

Using Windows Vista 64- upping memory to 8 GB.

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!

Done!

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

Keeping HX620. After changing components, I ran a PS calculator again and found
the current power supply to be sufficient.



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

Thanks for your help- (saving some $ with the changes, still good upgrade)
Fitz
.

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