Building a desktop PC

[edyzmedieval]

Dearest Orgahs, I need your techy help!

I need to replace my old computer and replace it with a new one, custom built with components of my choice, and I'm looking to get the best performance for the games that are coming up (Shogun 2 Total War comes to mind the most, but not only) but also to keep it working for the next four-five years.

Here's the line up:

- case - Antec Tower 1200
- motherboard - ASUS P6X58D-E, IntelX58, LGA1366
- processor - Intel Quad Core i7 950 3.06GHZ
- HDD - Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB 10000rpm
- RAM memory - Corsair 8GB Triple Channel 1866MHZ
- video card - GIGABYTE nVIDIA GeForce GTX470 1.2GB
- processor cooler - Master Hyper 212 Plus
- power supply - Zalman ZM 1000HP 1000W
- sound card - ASUS Xonar D-1
- optical drive - LG DVD RW (don't need Blu Ray)

At this powerhouse I might need custom cooling to be honest, even if the case already comes with five ventilators included.

Any thoughts on this?
Your help would be greatly appreciated.

[Lemur]

A kilowatt power supply seems like overkill, given that you're running a single pro, single videocard and single HD. I'll bet you could get by with an 850 or 750 and still have juice for SLI if you ever wanted to go that way. I mean, hey, I'm all about overbuilding the infrastructure, but your PS seems a bit much.

[Raz]

Whilst I'm certainly not an expert, custom cooling I'd only really consider if you were going to be overclocking.
Chances are though, since it would shorten the life of your components and you want this to last for at least 4 years, you won't be overclocking at all.

5 stock fans should be plenty fine, especially if you drop the wattage as Lemur has said.

[Tellos Athenaios]

You don't need that big a PSU for that system, and unless you are doing something really weird you can probably even run this thing on stock coolers (albeit it would run hotter than if you used the aftermarket CPU cooler). I'm also kind of wondering why you would go for Nvidia if your aim is to be running the thing 4-5 years hence without much maintenance efforts. (You get more and more serious random [driver related] nonsense with Nvidia than you get with ATI, or at least that has been my subjective experience.) I guess it is worth pointing out that if you are not in love with the Raptor or something, you can get an SSD + data driver for similar price but better day to day performance (mainly because SSD's are much better at random read/writes as they do not need to seek all over the disk).

[edyzmedieval]

I scaled down my PSU to a 850W, possibly a Corsair AX850 as suggested on another forum. There's too much RAM so I'll stick with 6 for the moment, and I will get a cheaper HDD and a smaller SSD for the more important information to stock it in there. The video card will remain the same, I'm sticking to NVIDIA, I'm a fanboy. I'm not going to overclock until maybe later on, so indeed, custom cooling is a bit too much. I don't need to overclock, never needed to to be honest.

[Beskar]

Actually, I would hold off or consider changing some details:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11430069

Get a non-bios motherboard aka UEFI one instead.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Get an Apple motherboard? EFI is all well and good but I don't think it's actually worth waiting two/three years when support for it (on the OS/software side as well as on the motherboard/tech support side) is more mature. BIOS may be old, may be laggy, but it is also pretty well understood and it gets the job done.

EDIT: Those few extra seconds of boot time are also fairly insignificant if your machine is to have long uptimes, too.

[edyzmedieval]

I don't quite care about loading times, so the motherboard doesn't quite do it for me. I mean, I'm using it for gaming and work, and I want my games to run perfectly and ultra high settings, the loading times when I boot the computer can be a bit slower, I don't mind.

[Lemur]

Yeah, I think it's a bit early in the game to jump to EFI. Likewise, I wouldn't wait for DisplayPort. New technologies are coming, sure, but when aren't they?

[naut]

I really would urge you to revise your status as an nVidia fanboy. With the new AMD Radeon HD 6xxx coming out in October you'll be able to potentially get some very good bargains on the current range of ATI cards, such as the 5770 and 5870. Or, you could shell out for the 6870, which will quite frankly blow the GTX470 out of the water.

Or better yet, wait till early 2011 when AMD is bringing out the 7xxx series with new architecture.

[Crandaeolon]

Re: hard drives, one possible option to consider is getting a couple of 500 GB Momentus XT hybrid SSD/platter drives and slapping them into a RAID 0 setup. Quote from overclockersclub:

Right now, a 128GB SSD will run you an about $300, but the Seagate Momentus XT will have a MSRP of ~ $156 for the 500GB drive we tested here. So for the price of one 128GB SSD, you can purchase two Momentus XT drives, run them in a RAID 0 configuration, almost match the speed, and get eight times the storage. I don't know about you, but a terabyte of storage with speeds almost as fast an SSD, sure sounds great to me. When it comes to buying a hard drive, I look for price and for performance. On that note, I’m very impressed with Momentus XT. It’s been great testing this new device and I definitely recommend it.

Does anyone here have personal experience about such a setup?

[edyzmedieval]

Here's more or less the final component list.


- case - Master Cooler HAF X
- motherboard - ASUS P6X Premium Edition
- processor - Intel Core i7 960, 3200MHZ, 8MB cache, LGA 1366
- HDD - Western Digital Black Caviar 1TB
- RAM - Corsair 6GB 2000MHZ Triple Channel
- video card - GIGABYTE nVIDIA GeForce GTX470 Windforce S.O.C. 1.2GB
- power supply - Corsair AX850W
- processor cooler - Master Cooler V6
- optical drive - LG DVD RW (don't need Blu Ray)

- monitor - Samsung PX2370

Any thoughts on this?

[Lemur]

Looks good. I would consider moving up to a 2 terabyte drive, maybe, since they're out there and they're a good deal. But then, I like to have elbow room for a lot of installed stuff, and I tend to back up my machines to one another, so there's no such thing as a too-big drive for this lemur.

I would also weigh carefully the Nvidia/ATI (or is it AMD now?) thing, but I think you've expressed elsewhere that this is a non-negotiable thing for you, so nevermind.

[naut]

The Cooler Master V6 is meant to be an absolute pain to mount and runs very loud for the actual amount of cooling it provides. Three alternatives you really should consider are:

Thermaltake FRIO
or
Noctua NH-D14
or
Scythe Mugen-2 Revision B

[Judge]

nice build mate, tri channel great stuff, if you wish to overclock your processor to around 3.60ghz no problem at all as long as your after market cooler is adequate.

look here http://www.overclockers.co.uk/produc...id=1395&rows=0

good luck