Possible rig -- Comments & suggestions needed! - Page 2

I have the 900 and i love it. The fans are quiet. I have them all on the lowest speed and they do a great job at moving air. My xbox360 and ps3 are louder than my pc.

Arctic Silver instead of the cheap goop that comes with either the stock unit or the add-on units. One tube will last you several builds, the smallest tube they sell is like...3 or 4 bucks, and its plenty. You need a tiny, tiny amount.

All the chips are expected to drop quite massively in price in a weeks time. The E6600 I just bought for $210 will likely be more like $120 pretty soon, I think if you jump over to firingsquad.com they have the review of the new chips coming out and show upcoming pricing.


Here's my Quadcore 2 cents: Dual Core is already absurdly fast. No games out there now take advantage of more than 2 cores (well, Supreme Commander does I guess). Those that take advantage of more than 1 core can be counted on one hand. MHZ is still king for pushing framerates.

My goal was to buy the cheapest chip I could get with 4 megs of cache and overclock it nicely. When there are 2, 3, 4 games out that utilize quad cores (or more!), I will upgrade to one of those Quad chips. Pop mine out, pop the new one in. This is assuming, of course, that the performance of my MERE Dual Core is not up to snuff at the time.

Also, Quad cores run hotter....so you have to increase the cooling capacity of your case. What advantage do you get with the quad over the dual core system besides added heat? You get better processing speed on apps, but really not much on games. I really dont care if it takes 1/2 the time to encode a DVD on a quad versus a dual, when the dual core only takes 5 minutes to begin with...that kinda thing is what steered me to dual. Its like "Its faster, but faster than an already fast system".


Only you can decide what U really need!

Yep, love the case. The cooling system is great, perfect fan setup, and on low settings they don't really make much noise. My only complaint would maybe be the HDD cages, it can be a bit time consuming to take the cage out, screw in a drive, etc. But that complaint is largely because I switched over from a Sonata II which had the best harddrive cages ever made, imo (side loading with trays).


Gigabyte 965P-DS3 rev3, it's more of a budget overclocking board, no SLI, but supports the new 1333FSB chips so I have room to upgrade later on.

HeadRusch: do you remain happy with your MSI platinum mobo? Are you using the RAID controller? I'm interested in this board and would welcome simple raid 0 configuration. My last personal build (almost 2 years ago) I went with a DFI NF4 SLI board because it was blazing fast.. but I had to run a custom bios to get it to boot to windows, and I modify the RAID drivers myself to get it working. aka a PITA

Also a couple other things: Intel P35 boards that support DDR3 do not have SLI as far as I can tell, and from what I've been reading, aren't problem free either.. I would wait for second gen boards to come out before I made this step.

I think some of the most expensive 680i boards have 8 and 12 step voltage regulation! Pretty intense.

So far, so good. But..its been 2 weeks so...


Nope, RAID is not for me..my data isn't that important and the speed benefits of something like a RAID 0 array don't really interest me.


..which to me is the same as having 2 or 4 Ethernet ports on the back. Question: Why?

I mean if you're running a game server on a LAN thats one thing...but how many people *do* that?

PS: on the cases, make sure you decide beforehand if you want a door or not.

I hate cases with Doors on them, they just get in the way (IMHO)......thats why the case I chose had no front doors or panels.

Something to keep in mind, you may *want* a door on yours.......does Thomas like to eject CD's and eat them?

Wait till next year and get Sun's 16 core cpu then you can play all your favorite games at the same time while surfing, e-mailing, encoding, scanning and folding!

Dual Core, as to which one? Well we'll want to see how the new ones OVERCLOCK

Can't go wrong with an E6600, but if the 2.66Ghz one is only $20 or $30 more, I'd buy that....assuming of course these chips are as good of overclockers as their previous generation has been.

DaverJ : I am using stock cooling for my processor and vidcard. i have a 8800 GTS 640.

Its an E6300 running stock speeds. My motherboard doesn't have overclocking options :/ But hey i got the cpu, motherboard, and vista ultimate for 250 bucks so i can't complain too much. Looking at getting a new motherboard soon and the thermalright 120 heatsink. I can run most games i play now (bf2, c&c3, quake4, bf2142, ETQW, etc) with all options on at 1920 x 1200 just fine so i find myself spending my cash on HT stuff :P Its an expensive hobby.

I haven't seen bench marks for the new E6850, but I have for the E6750.

Here are the results.
E6750 @ 1333Mhz outperforms the E6700 and E6750 @ 1066Mhz by several FPS at low to middle resolutions.

E6750 @ 1333Mhz is on par with the Core 2 Extreme QX6800 and X6800.. sometimes its up a few FPS, sometimes down a few FPS.

I've seen the E6750 being clocked as high as 3.96GHz where it decimated everything at low and medium resolutions, even beating a new Extreme QX6850 at 3.83GHz. At higher resolutions (1600x1200) every Intel CPU is pretty much even regardless of clock speed.. within 5-10FPS on all current games (I'm talking new chips at almost 4GHz all the way down to the E6600).

So, it seems like the E6750 @ 1333MHz will be as good as or better than every Intel CPU before it. Also, based on the numbers I've seen on the QX6850, I have to think the E6850 is going to be biting at its heels.. literally.

I believe the E6750 is going to retail for $183, while the faster E6850 will retail at $266 (both rumors.. probably a little higher), making it a worthwhile upgrade IMO for a few extra FPS (whats $80?).. and an absolute steal compared to the core 2 extreme processors new and old.

Keep in mind this is with current games not optimized for dual/quad cores.. when these arrive, I expect the QX6850 to pull away.. however.. It will retail for over $1000!!!

GENIUS!


A Capacitor's job is to hold energy.....sometimes to charge up and hand to your friends and watch them jump as they get electrocuted. Heh heh heh. Err..ok.

Non-solid capacitors have a tendency to wear out faster and pop, but they're cheap. Solid capacitors are much more durable, and are used as a selling point these days after a rash of bad motherboard problems from 2004, 2005, 2006 when MB manufacturers switched to cheaper capacitors.


This MB seems to have most of the quality bases covered....there are MB's with more features, and with more bios options, but this one seems pretty solid for a reasonable price....a kind of "jack of all trades". Plus one of those sites got some very good O/Cing numbers out of this board.

These days I generally ignore Asus because they are too pricy, so its DFI or GIgabyte or now MSI for folks not wanting ot shell out $300 for a MB.

Head over to firingsquad.com. They have links on the front page to their latest E6750 and QX6850 benchmark tests, so you can see how close all the chips are on current non-optimized games (HL2, Quake4, etc)

Also, you may have seen this already.. but here is a great writeup about all the new and current Intel offerings compared to the top couple AMD chips. http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/int...oc.aspx?i=3038. Basically, it doesn't make sense to buy an old core 2 duo CPU. They also outline the new pricing, and based on how much you want to pay: sub $200 - E6750, AMD 6000+; ~$266 - E6850, Q6600; $500-600 - Q6700, FX-74; $1000 - QX6850, you can compare performance of the different core chips at those levels.

http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/int...oc.aspx?i=3038

Based on everything I'm seeing so far, I will be picking up an E6850 in a month or so. It should overclock like crazy (4GHz or damn close to it). Also, I'm not sure about the 650i chipset, but I know the 680i chipset will support the new Intel 45nm Penryn core coming out later this year with a bios flash.. so upgrading or Ocing for more performance should be easy.

edit: but hrm. I could OC the Q6600 to 3Ghz and have the best of both worlds??? oh no, I'm lost

I'm also planning on getting the MSI board, and the E6750. And I'll have to get memory too, 2 GB of DDR2 at least (I have 2 Gigs of DDR1 right now). That'll be entertaining.

Interesting....last night I ran the half life stress test on my 3.3Ghz E6600 and 8800GTX (overclocked).

With no AA and 8xaf I get 178fps. With 2xaa and 8xaf I get...177fps. Wow, 2xaa is free.
At 4xaa I get 158fps.

3DMARK 06 I'm getting 12,200. My 8800GTX is currently clocked past a stock Ultra speed (630 on the core and 980 on the ram, hmmm ok the ram is a TAD short).

I can't complain at all...nearly a 1ghz overclock, and a videocard that clocks very, very nicely.

Default, which is 1280x1024......for purposes of comparison thats what you use to bump up against reviews on the web that also use the default settings for the tool.

Hopefully this weekend I can actually install some GAMES on the thing

The problem is that 06 use CPU's in the equation as well....so you have to make sure if you are comparing results you're comparing against a dual core system, because a quad core system will bump that overall score up higher.

OH if you meant the HL test, that was 1920x1080, my monitors max rez

Better check if those cases are large enough to hold a full size 8800GTX board and whatever cooling choice you're going with.

120mm fans can be replaced with softer versions for a few dollars....well maybe $15 or so for really quiet fans.

large enough to accommodate a full sized 8800GTX and your Power supply are big concerns. We all know the GTX's are quite long, but some PSUs are huge as well and won't fit in some mid-tower ATX cases.. this might be a difficult thing to verify though.

I am a big fan of removable HD cage, and specifically, screwless HD cages.. you don't know what you're missing

Tucking away wiring is also a big plus, which is helped by a Mobo tray, or adequate room behind the mobo. The less wires in the case the more airflow you will get.. this will allow you to turn the fans down those few extra RPMs and help with noise. every bit counts!

I just got a P182 yesterday from Amazon (free shipping,no tax). I'm putting a system together this weekend. Looks like a real nice case and from what I read it should be pretty quite. There is a nice video on Antecs site about it. Here is what I'll be putting in it.

P5K Deluxe
E6850
2 GB G.Skil DDR2 800
EVGA 8800 GTX
WD 320GB SE16 HD SATA along with my old 250GB SE16 HD SATA
ASUS CD/DVD SATA Burner
ASUS CD/DVD Standard SATA Drive
Corsair 620 P/S

Will try onboard sound for now and will stick with XP for now. Will start putting everything together tomorrow and hope it all works

Jim