New Gaming Rig - one piece at a time!

I assume the target price range for the graphics card is $200-250. If so, the cards to look at are the one already chosen and the HD5830 from the opposing team. The HD5830 is a bit more expensive, but it's faster overall than the GTX260.
 
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There used to be graphics cards with silent cooling solutions out of the box. I'm not aware if there are still such bundles with Arctic Cooling or Zalman coolers.
 
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Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB / 1 TB is good; slightly noisy compared Caviar Green according to reviews i read. No biggy though, faster choice like SSD are still expensive.


I have the WD Caviar Black Edition 1TB, it's fast as hell and very quiet.
 
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Seagate drives are the loud ones (I haven't tried the newer models though). WDs are rather silent in comparison. Samsung and Hitachi also makes reliable drives.
 
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My point is that there's no reason paying for a product just cause you like the company,you're hurting only your wallet by doing so.
5xxx are newer,quieter,cooler,have lower power consumption,perform better and support DX11.


Of course any product is going to look good when you're comparing it to an older generation.
 
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Who the hell cares? Just compare what's currently available along with their prices. Right now AMD has the best offerings.
 
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@Remus- On the win7 home/professional question, home doesnt have "XP mode", which i want just in case I need it. Also, I remember being left out of a lot of run commands in home edition of xp which were in xp professional, that kinda stuff they seem to leave out of the official list of version comparisons.

On the video card issue - I was up til 3'ish last night agonizing over it til my friggen eyes started to bleed. I picked the Nvidia GTX 260 not only because my best cards have been Nvidia, but all the good reviews and "testimonial posts" of consumers on product sites and forums about GTX 260. It looks like a really good card.

Meanwhile, I'm seeing people bitching left and right about the absolute myriad of Radeons. Getting errors, noisy, running hot, not the card in the picture. Diamond one sucks but the Sapphire one's good, but the Sapphire's way more expensive so maybe the vision-tek one, but people are crying about errors on the vision-tek one, but not if you are using this particular setup, but then it's only available over there, and the 5### which is slightly better than the 5###… go to hell. Seriously.
……..it's 3am and the BFG GTX 260 overclocked out of the box is looking pretty damn good for my $228 out the door. I'm betting it'll run The Witcher, Dragon Age, Majesty2, and Dawn of War games just beautifully for me.

I got a deal on the Antec 650 watt w/ modular cables - it was only 99 bucks! So $108.00 out the door.

Which makes up for the shank I willingly took on the processor. $290 at big store that was sold out, so I stopped in to an obscure little shop of horrors I always grab weird adapters and stuff at - thought I'd be a nice guy and support their little place. $299.99 okay ten bucks more when it all shakes out, whatevs. Overcharged me like 5 bucks extra, so like 30.00 tax + the other 15.00 extra for being a nice guy. I bought a couple other things so I didnt notice, end of the day money starts to become a blur. Think I may go back there tomorrow and return the thing on principle.

Scored on the RAM pretty good - got 8gb of Kingston 1600 HyperX on sale for $238.00 out the door. Admitted to the resident RAM geek that I was pretty much lost in the conucopia of memory there (started getting Radeon 5### headache again), and he assured me with convincing and wordy personal testimonial that i was getting a good deal w/ this RAM. I subsequently read this review where some overclocking geek is doing backflips in joy over the product, so i'm thinking I may have settled for a good one.
 
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Look like you got everything you need; lets us know when the rig is up and running!
 
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as usual, unanticipated things happen and I'm having to re-evaluate a little bit -

For one, the "modular" nature of that Antec Truepower 650w isnt quite the amount of teh cool that I anticipated.. while yes, it does offer some cords that can be plugged into the supply, they are all of the extraneous 6 and 8 pin PCI-e and extra HDD variety. Which I'm 99% sure I'll never use. All the usual standard mass of wiring is still hard-wired to the main supply. Now that I look at the pics of the unit, I totally saw the jacks on the supply itself and didnt take in the thickness of the standard wiring to the immediate left… or my own brain. Looking at other supplies advertised as modular, like a similar corsair model, they have the same thing.

So what, I'm just gonna roll w/ it. The cabling that it has is all very nicely wrapped, and since the unit sits on the bottom of this case, I can bind them all up and set them right in front of it or run them beneath the board. The plugs are well done too, there are double 6-pin PCI-e plugs on the end of a wire that will do my new card nicely.

And what a monster that card is, by the way. I dont think I've ever personally held a video card this big, it's like a steel brick… awesome.

The hard drive was also an oversight. In getting "the easy part" knocked out, I grabbed a "blue" Western Digital internal drive which was on sale for 48 bucks. Which in retrospect was not necessarily a bad choice - but a "black" grade drive as JDR mentioned would be a better choice for my purposes. Comes down to a 32mb cache on a drive, doubling the 16mb cache on the "blue" version. When the rubber hits the road, perhaps it doesnt really mean squat and it's all just a reason to milk a little more out of us, Ive seen that argument thrown around in the last day of research. I'm gonna go back and spend the little extra I saved on other components and get the black.
 
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The hard drive was also an oversight. In getting "the easy part" knocked out, I grabbed a "blue" Western Digital internal drive which was on sale for 48 bucks. Which in retrospect was not necessarily a bad choice - but a "black" grade drive as JDR mentioned would be a better choice for my purposes. Comes down to a 32mb cache on a drive, doubling the 16mb cache on the "blue" version. When the rubber hits the road, perhaps it doesnt really mean squat and it's all just a reason to milk a little more out of us, Ive seen that argument thrown around in the last day of research. I'm gonna go back and spend the little extra I saved on other components and get the black.


Another difference, besides the extra cache, is that the Black Edition also features a dual processor, which boost performance even further. The extra money is definitely worth it imo, especially for a gamer.
 
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Scored on the RAM pretty good - got 8gb of Kingston 1600 HyperX on sale for $238.00 out the door. Admitted to the resident RAM geek that I was pretty much lost in the conucopia of memory there (started getting Radeon 5### headache again), and he assured me with convincing and wordy personal testimonial that i was getting a good deal w/ this RAM. I subsequently read this review where some overclocking geek is doing backflips in joy over the product, so i'm thinking I may have settled for a good one.

If you don't overclock though, those nifty 1600 MHz memory sticks will only run in 1333 MHz. You'll need to edit some BIOS settings to run them higher than that. The "stock" DDR3 voltage is 1.5V, but the specification for those memory modules requires 1.65V.

Another tip for Core i7 is that when you want/need the best FPS you should disable HyperThreading. By clumping two threads together on one core that would otherwise run on two cores, performance is often actually worse on the i7 (if HT is on) than on the i5 (which doesn't have HT).
 
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thanks for the tips, keep 'em coming!

I ended up taking back the WD "BLUE" scoring a 1TB WD Caviar Black, wasnt bad for $109.
 
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The beast LIVES!!!

Really had a good time putting it all together. Spent yesterday evening doing all the component installation, tonight I did all the wire routing and OS install. Thankfully it went off without a hitch. Good looking case, quiet (for 4 fans) very customized and gamer-friendly, a far cry from the stock things and Dells that ive always used. I read a few nightmare stories about installing win7, and problems w/ lots of ram, so I was prepared for the worst - I even grabbed an old system speaker off one of my other pcs (surprisingly this case didnt come w/ one) in case I had to do some beep code translation.

Nope, all I got was the telltale single beep of a POST gone right, and 8g of ram recognized. Damn this thing's quick, even the onboard ethernet is twice the speed of my prior computer. DL'd 120 mB file in just over a minute, no kidding…

As far as the 1600 ram goes - yes it's reporting at 1333. Although Ive pretty much combed the BIOS a few times for general once-over, and see where I can turn up the voltage, I'm not messing w/ it yet since I dont know what I'm doing. I have a feeling it's not as simple as cranking the MB dimm voltage up to 1.65v, need to research that a bit more.

shit, it's midnight….. i wonder if they'll believe me if i call in sick
 
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Enjoy the new rig! any pic?

Remember to test or burn-in the system with prime95.
 
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Damn this thing's quick, even the onboard ethernet is twice the speed of my prior computer. DL'd 120 mB file in just over a minute, no kidding…
The new NIC gives increased DL speeds off the internet? o_O

As far as the 1600 ram goes - yes it's reporting at 1333. Although Ive pretty much combed the BIOS a few times for general once-over, and see where I can turn up the voltage, I'm not messing w/ it yet since I dont know what I'm doing. I have a feeling it's not as simple as cranking the MB dimm voltage up to 1.65v, need to research that a bit more.
You're right, you need to set the other values as well, it won't hop up to 1600 MHz automatically by increasing the voltage. I haven't tried it though, I bought 1333 MHz memory and didn't overclock the processor.
 
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As far as the 1600 ram goes - yes it's reporting at 1333. Although Ive pretty much combed the BIOS a few times for general once-over, and see where I can turn up the voltage, I'm not messing w/ it yet since I dont know what I'm doing. I have a feeling it's not as simple as cranking the MB dimm voltage up to 1.65v, need to research that a bit more.

I'm not all that familiar with gigabyte's BIOS as I'm somewhat of a DFI fan… However, I have tried to keep up the the latest and greatest tech(wish I could afford a new nehalem based build).

Anyway,(if I'm not completely mistaken) if you wish to increase the memory speed to 1600 mhz you'll need to increase Base Clock(BCLK). Memory frequency is calculated as the base clock(stock - 133mhz) times the system memory multiplier. There are 3 selectable system memory multipliers - 6, 8 or 10. Since you're at 1333mhz now and stock across the board that means you're already running the highest selectable multi(10). Thus you'll need BCLK @ 160 to achieve the desired memory spd. TBH, I would not be surprised if your chip could run 3.2ghz(160x20) on stock voltage; though you might have to bump up vDIMM if auto sets the memory voltage too low…

OverclockersClub has a decent review with tons of BIOS pics that can help guide you…

http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/gigabyte_p55aud6_p55aud4p/5.htm
 
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Thanks for the advice, MasterKromm. Looks like I got a bit of research to do.

Remus - yeah, i documented the whole procedure, I'm going to make a post on my gaming blog w/ pics. Then, once I figure out the RAM thing, I'll probably put a guide to that on there as well.

Thinking of what games I'm gonna put on, I know that I need to finish Dragon Age asap, probably throw Wh40kII, Demigod (which Ive barely played because it ran like such hell), and The Witcher on there. Been dying to see Witcher on a nice system, since it looked great even on my old one. LOtrO will go on there too.

The new NIC gives increased DL speeds off the internet? o_O
Well, seeing as I'm coming from the generic onboard ethernet of a 5 year old dell to a modern Realtek-driven gigabit ethernet controller - yeah, it's giving me way better speeds than I had before.
 
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Ive had minimal problems so far, IE8 bumps in the road, namely. For instance, out of the blue I suddenly cannot download anything in IE8. Another time, copy/paste within IE8 just wasnt working, paste was greyed out. I reset all internet settings, yadda yadda.. nothing. Restarted the pc, now it works again. Flash is acting funny, sometimes it displays sometimes not.

SO yeah, just like my abandoning of the over-bloated Adobe Acrobat for Foxit, I'm inching ever closer to ditching IE altogether for Firefox. Not having any problems whatsoever w/ Firefox.

Avira seems to work well, as does Zonealarm and Irfanview. Now to try out SAS and SB S&D, my two antispyware essentials.

It's kinda ironic that this is the biggest HD that Ive ever owned at 1TB - yet I almost dont want to put anything on it. Besides games, and the essential progammery of course. My other pc is just soooo loaded w/ crap, files of every type, internet bookmarks a mile long, it's like some huge messy garage. This pc is like a freshly painted wall - I know that things will eventually be loaded onto it, but a part of me is pretty hesitant to drive that first nail. Thinking I may just keep that other one the electronic junk drawer around here, and keep this one w/ minimal extraneous fileage.

click my sig below for some pics of my system install.
 
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Since you are using 8 gigs of RAM, how much percentage it is usually utilised by Win 7 64bit and during gaming?
 
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Due to the latest nvidia card cookout and order to roll Nvidia drivers to an earlier release, and the cutting of the OC ultilities in the control panel, and the urging of local influential geeks here in SD, I decided to take the path of least resistance and return the GTX 260 for an XFX HD 5850.

Paid a little more for the "black" edition, basically paying a little more for overclocked out of the box, and a lifetime warranty. Guess i may not need the utilities as much as i thought I would, when i open the oc utility it's pretty much cranked all the way up as is!

I turned pretty much everything off that I could and the OS seems to be using about 1.1G of ram. What it does for me in gaming is TBD.
 
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