I've decided that the XPS are ridiculously overpriced, and a few mates convinced me I had to build for once. I'm getting everything from hardwareversand.de, it's dirt cheap. This build would be at least €200 dearer elsewhere, from my calculations...Here's my current list, I'm ordering tomorrow, so please tell me if anything is wrong, or if I've forgotten something crucial (which happened, I had already made an order but forgot a CPU cooler, and had to cancel :shy

Plus €30 for postage of the lot. I already have a 500GB hard drive, so the 250GB one here will be for the OS and user files. I have a OEM copy of Vista Ultimate 64-bit (not cracked actually, the real deal :nod, so that'll be my OS. I was going to stick with XP, but I decided that with on a powerful rig, Vista isn't really going to make much difference...my only worry is that some programs still have issues with 64-bit

If I'm missing any small cables or anything, I can get them of Komplett, I'll be ordering case lights off of them once I have it built anyway

Any advice/criticism/etc. is greatly appreciated

"M'eh" at the mobo tbh - i'd get a DS3R as it's got RAID and it's only a few £/$/€ more.

Also get an ATi 48xx card over the nVidia one - they are better.

Also - Arctic Silver 5 > Your stuff.

Is it only the RAID that the R has extra? The DS3R is only €15 more, so I'll swap for that one if there's anything else extra, but I'm not going to be needing RAID, I'll have 750GB with my 2 HDDs, which is plenty

I heard the 9800GTX was better, plus the 4870 is a good €40 more, which I'd rather not spend. Is the extra €40 justified with the 4870?

Silver 5 isn't on HWV, but if it's on Komplett, or I can borrow some off a mate, I'll use it instead.

Thanks for the advice Jakg

The 4850 is better than the GTX (I think).

The R model has the ICH9R southbridge, which just adds RAID, but in the UK the price difference is about £3 so it's a no-brainer.

Why is it a no-brainer? Surely saving £3 is a good thing if you don't need what it provides, it will mean the board is less cluttered, and is more likely to run a teensy bit cooler, it's less to go wrong, and you can spend the £3 on better thermal paste (for example).

A fool and his money are soon parted (which is why poor people exist). Don't be a mug.

It's not as though future-proofing is a worry, as computers have never been future proof. I don't think I've ever taken advantage of 'future-proofing' other than extra PCI slots. By the time I want more RAM I need a whole new computer essentially.

I'm trying to spend as little as possible, while still hacing a decent gaming platform. It's €15 extra for me (~£10), which is something that could be spend on the obligatory neon lights, fluffy dice, and colouredy fans

I'll never be using RAID, ever, so there's no need for the R then. If in the future, I do decide I want to use RAID, I could get a PCI controller for ~€15 instead.

I'll do a bit of research on the 2 cards, if there is a significant difference, then I might switch to the 4870. The 4850 definitely seems to be less powerful than the 9800GTX though.

Quote from tristancliffe :

Why is it a no-brainer? Surely saving £3 is a good thing if you don't need what it provides, it will mean the board is less cluttered, and is more likely to run a teensy bit cooler, it's less to go wrong, and you can spend the £3 on better thermal paste (for example).

Resale value wise it'll be worth more than it's counterpart if you ever sell it, and just because you don't need RAID now you may well want to run RAID0 later...

The DS3 and DS3R look identical to me anyway layout wise.

Oops didn't see you already had 4GB of memory....

The Radeon 4870 really is the way to go like JakG said, it is more powerful than the 9800GTX and it has DX10.1!

If you want RAID later, you can always get a RAID controller card.

the e8400 runs most games faster stock and oc's better and is cooler and uses less power. if you do lots of video editing and other multithreaded cpu intensive things, you might prefer the quadcore.

Nehalem is coming out in september and Deneb is coming out soon too

I got a good cooler, and the case is supposed to have a pretty good airflow, so I'm hoping to overclock the CPU to around 3.0Ghz, maybe a little more, which would make it the same as a stock E8400, but it would still be only using half of it's power. A few people have been able to get to almost 4.0Ghz with water-cooling, apparently

I've been going on about quad core for a while, because I reckon that new games will start having proper support (*cough* LFS) for multiple cores soon, in the next year anyway. Which would mean that the 3.0Ghz OC'd quad would mop the floor with a 3.6Ghz OC'd dual any time And it's not that much dearer, only an extra €10.

Plus I tend to have lots of random applications open, now that I'm a dual screen-er

Ideally I should wait for the Nehalem, but I probably won't be able to afford it

by that pt, your quad will be obsolete and 6 and 8 core cpu's will be out even crysis @ 1280x1024, my cpu runs at maybe 70% usage max, and i'm only running at 3.4ghz w/ stock cooler and stock 1.113 voltages. the e8400 can do 4ghz on air.

By the time you need 100% of the power of an E8400, games will be multi-threaded...

BTW - on air a Q6600 willl get to around 3.4 - 3.6 GHz, an E8400 will hit 3.8 - 4 GHz.

I don't think 6 cores is possible (AFAIK it goes up like RAM), but by the time a decent octo core is released, a quad core would still be better than a dual

Interested about getting to 3.4/3.6Ghz on the Q6600, I didn't think they'd go that high on air...At least I can do some proper overclocking at last, I've been using Dell all along

Quote from dougie-lampkin :

I don't think 6 cores is possible (AFAIK it goes up like RAM), but by the time a decent octo core is released, a quad core would still be better than a dual

Why not? C2D is a dual-core architecture, with the quad-core C2Q merely being 2 dual-core dies in one package. There might be some interfacing logic necessary to make it happen, but I don't see why they couldn't do 6 cores.

AMD currently has tri-core CPU's that are merely quad-cores (natively, meaning all on one die) with one core disabled to improve yield. Clearly there's nothing wrong with odd numbers either.

The tri-core is still a quad core. You could have disabled cores, but it's still essentially going to be an even number. They could probably do some wizardry and get 3 dual cores into one processor for a hex core (I presume that's what it would be called ), but really that's more trouble than it's worth in my opinion Probably just as cheap and easy to stuff 4 dual cores into the processor

I've no idea whether or not they can make different core sizes, but it just seems that it's 1,2,4,8,16 in my opinion

the only reason AMD are able to sell a triple core is because they're actually quads that have been broken during the manufacturing process. instead of throwing them out, they just dissable the faulty core and sell it as a triple.

Quote from Jakg :

By the time you need 100% of the power of an E8400, games will be multi-threaded...

BTW - on air a Q6600 willl get to around 3.4 - 3.6 GHz, an E8400 will hit 3.8 - 4 GHz.

By that time, your q6600 will be about 100 bucks and then i'll upgrade to some new quad

Quote from dadge :

the only reason AMD are able to sell a triple core is because they're actually quads that have been broken during the manufacturing process. instead of throwing them out, they just dissable the faulty core and sell it as a triple.

You say "broken", but they just take the poorest Phenom samples - all E8xxx series CPU's start off as the top-end model, then they get binned so the highest quality silicon in the batch ends up as an E8600 (or whatever) and the poorest one becomes an E8200.

which are usually broken. you stick to intel, i'll stick to amd in a review i was reading (when phenoms were not yet released) the CEO of amd actually said "the reason we can afford to make quad core cpu's is because if the triple cores". it's something like 40% of phenoms are damaged in the building process. this alone would not be very profitable for amd to just bin the broken chips, so they dissable the broken core and sell it as a triple. it's a brilliant idea imo. still making money from your "dead" chips.

You stick to your broken reject triple cores, I'll stick to my perfectly working quad core

OK, just placed my final order (my last one, I swear!). Gonna send off the transfer tomorrow, hopefully they won't cancel the order in the mean time

Everything in stock, but there's only 1 of the PSU in stock, so hopefully they'll hold it for me

Massively pleased with the price of it, €200 cheaper than the XPS I was going to get, and is twice as good Unfortunately, the price of the GPU went up €15 since cancelling the first order...Not to worry though...

Needs moar RAMS.

What site is that btw?

Has 4 Gigabigabytes, should be plenty, no? If not, I can get 8GB onto this puppy

It's hardwareversand.de, the cheapest place to get stuff. But don't even attempt to order unless you have a bachelors degree in German I just got off the phone after a 35 minute call trying to explain that I wanted to cancel an order, with several long protracted silences as I searched google translator :rolleyes:

Ah i only saw 2GB, nevermind...