Audiovisual / general purpose machine

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xinaes
Posts: 37
Joined: Tue Jan 25, 2011 6:48 am
Location: uk
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Audiovisual / general purpose machine

Post by xinaes » Wed Jun 08, 2011 2:58 pm

OK, so I've been posting a little bit lately, some people might recognise me and have some idea what I'm after here.
As for this thread: fairly run of the mill contemporary build in most respects.
General purpose machine for A/V programming & editing, research, procrastination (actually, I'm giving that up as of tomorrow but the machine should still be able to cope with it just in case), some gaming... I'd like to keep idle power low, since idleness will be something the machine encounters often and I feel a bit guilty wrt greenness moving away from a laptop. My last two machines have been laptops: it must be >10years since I last built a machine (and it wasn't exactly an expert build then), although I have done odd bits of tinkering on other peoples from time to time... LMK if I'm missing anything like extra cooling for the case.
I'll be running two screens ('though perhaps not both on the whole time) and am concerned about impact on power consumption... as you will see if you stalk my profile.
I will probably have a go at overclocking a bit; nothing too ambitious planned at least to start with.

All prices quoted are from Scan. I'm thinking of ordering everything apart from a new screen from there in one go, perhaps with ScanSure added.

Case: Fractal Design Define R3 £80.27
CPU: Intel Core i5 2500K £154.98
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3, Intel Z68, 1155, PCI-E 2.0 (x16), DDR3 1866/2133, SATA 6Gb/s, RAID, ATX £134.02
Onboard graphics; I might want to run Lucid Virtu with IGP as the primary graphics in order to keep power down since GPUs to run at high clocks with dual screens. It's not clear whether I'll really want to stick with that configuration to justify the onboard graphics requirement, but I do want Z68 as I intend to make full use of the CPU and find the earlier SB chipsets rather daft for preventing that.
Not going to get something without USB3
Don't particularly anticipate using many expansion slots (pretty used to everything being USB). Might get a more gamer oriented soundcard at some point.
Apart from that, FireWire is a priority as I have an Edirol FA-66 FireWire audio interface I'll be using with the machine... hope the Via FW controller is adequate; audio types often say TI controllers are the only safe bet... I have had trouble with the infamous FW controller in my Vostro in the past (with Vista & Ubuntu) but even that seems stable under both Win7 and pure:dyne, so I'm hoping that as long as the FW box is ticked I'll be ok.
Other than that, I'm not particularly discerning when it comes to motherboards; would normally probably go for something a bit cheaper TBH but this seems ok.

Memory: 8GB (2x4GB) Corsair DDR3 XMS3, PC3-12800 (1600), Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 9-9-9-27, 1.65V £64.99
Lower voltage would be better for power consumption? Anything else I'm missing that might mean I want something different?
Hard Drive: 1.5TB Western Digital WD15EARS Caviar Green £54.95
Not entirely sure what HDD I want... might find this a bit slow especially since with the current plan it'll be the only drive in the machine for data & OS for time being...
Graphics Card: 1GB Gigabyte GTX 560 Ti OC £173.47
Seems to be a good one to go for ATM?
PSU: Antec HCG-620 £49.99
Look reasonable?
Optical Drive: LiteOn IHAS122-18 £13.91
Basic cheap DVD RW. Won't get used very much, but if anyone happens to recommend something reasonably quiet LMK
Cooling: Scythe Mugen 2 £38.24
Scan don't seem to have the Rev.B that I see recommended. Anything to be concerned about?

That lot comes to £764.82 on Scan, with free shipping thanks to linking my bit-tech forum account. Extra £22.93 for Scansure if I take that.

Also, I currently have a NEC EA231WMi I'll be using with it and am thinking of adding a Dell ST2220T (for which I see the price from Dell has gone up £20 to £207 since yesterday... balls). So all in with the extra screen it should be just shy of £1000. I'll be using an MSDN copy of Windows.

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