High End Gaming Oriented Upgrade

bhaltair · Post by **bhaltair** » Tue Sep 26, 2006 5:35 am

I am going to be upgrading in the next few weeks from a three year old laptop. I will be spending most of the time gaming, followed by browsing, and finally watching movies and TV. I would like a relativley quiet system but performance/quality/stability are all more important to me (I want to keep the system very cool too). I am thinking of getting a interim video card until the dx10 chips come out and get one of those. Here is my system so far.

Case: Antec P180B
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
PSU: Seasonic M12 SS-700W
Motherboard: Asus P5B Deluxe
Memory: 4GB Corsair XMS 2 DDR2-800 (PC2-6400) Cas 3
HD 1: 150GB WD Raptor 10,000
HD 2: 320GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10
GPU: ????
DVD/CD: ????

This comes to about $2,400 on Newegg at the moment and I don't really want to go over $3,000. As you can see I still have questions about the interim GPU and the DVD/CD Optical drive. Will the Antec P180B be a good choice to keep this rig cool and relativley silent, or will the heat be too much? I put the 700W Seasonic PSU up there as I've read rumors that new dx10 chips take 250-300w of power. Finally I am still a little up in the air on hard drives, I want to get 2 150GB Raptors but the only thing that turns me off is that they are only SATA 1.5 and I can't help but think when I upgrade new one's will be released that are SATA 3.0 (am I just being paranoid and dumb?). I am not dead set on the motherboard yet either, I was thinking of waiting for the new DFI's based on the ATI RD600 chipset but I really don't know, has anyone heard good news about this yet? Thanks for the help everyone!

floffe · Post by **floffe** » Tue Sep 26, 2006 5:53 am

As for the harddrives, the speed is a non-issue as none of the drives push SATA-150 to the limit yet, and probably won't for at least a couple of years.
As for graphics card, the 7950GT or something should handle today's games without too much trouble (except Oblivion on high resolutions)

ryboto · Post by **ryboto** » Tue Sep 26, 2006 9:01 am

don't be so worried about the raptors speed. My friends pc is all SATA2, but mine boots quicker, accesses files faster, loads bf2 quicker. We have the same processors, same ram, the only differences are our hard drives and video cards. He's got an x1800xt, i've only got an x800pro. The raptor makes a big difference.

As far as the video card goes, I might advise against getting a dx10 card right away. First off, are you really planning on playing a specific dx10 game already? if so, which one, cause I'm interested. Otherwise, the high end from ati and nvidia will still last you a long time. Also consider the power requirements that are being rumored. Whatever the cards end up requiring, we know it's going to be a lot more than this generation, and we're already pretty high. I plan on getting an x1900 variant in a few months, when the prices drop again. If the reviews tell me the 256mb version of the card will run bf2 at 122fps @1280x1024 4xAA, 16xAF, its enough for me. I just hope I can undervolt it in 2-d mode.

bhaltair · Post by **bhaltair** » Tue Sep 26, 2006 9:31 am

I think I've found the graphics card I'm looking for, it's the Sapphire X1900XT 256MB. With that settled, I am still trying to decide on whether or not to wait for a RD600 chipset board? Also is the P180B the case for me or are their other options that will fit my needs better? Any recommendation's on a good heatsink that will work with the case I will be getting?

One last thing, what would be the better upgrade:
Keeping 4GB of the memory with the E6600 CPU
or
Upgrading to the E6800X and only getting 2GB of memory

Thanks for all the help

L3thal · Post by **L3thal** » Tue Sep 26, 2006 11:21 am

Unless you are going to use some memory intensive apps, or multi-task alot, I would say 2 GB is plenty. Besides, I think Win XP 32-bit only handles 3 GB correctly, at least with some motherboards.

For a DVD-burner, I went with a Samsung SH-S182D 18x...reasonably quiet and works great so far. If you want top of the line, and want to pay 2 arms and a leg...get a Plextor.

I have the P5B Deluxe, and it's a good board, if you don't care for SLI/crossfire, although I think newer BIOS's enable it, but I don't think the second PCI-X slot would be at full 16X speed.

If you want SLI, the new Asus P5N32-SLI Premium, which uses the Nforce 590 chipset, looks promising.

bhaltair · Post by **bhaltair** » Tue Sep 26, 2006 12:48 pm

Alright so it looks like 2GB it is then. Next is on to the question of which memory type to use, at the moment I have chosen 2GB of DDR2-800 (PC2-6400) Cas 3. I am not to familiar with how important Cas Latency is compared to the speed of the memory so would the DDR2-1066 PC2-8500 Cas 5 be a better performing choice? Or even the DDR2-1111 PC2-8888 Cas 4. Would the lower Cas make up for the higher Speed or vice versa? Keep in mind the motherboard (Asus P5B Deluxe) I plan on using because I'm not sure if it will accept those memory types.

ryboto · Post by **ryboto** » Tue Sep 26, 2006 1:08 pm

bhaltair wrote:Alright so it looks like 2GB it is then. Next is on to the question of which memory type to use, at the moment I have chosen 2GB of DDR2-800 (PC2-6400) Cas 3. I am not to familiar with how important Cas Latency is compared to the speed of the memory so would the DDR2-1066 PC2-8500 Cas 5 be a better performing choice? Or even the DDR2-1111 PC2-8888 Cas 4. Would the lower Cas make up for the higher Speed or vice versa? Keep in mind the motherboard (Asus P5B Deluxe) I plan on using because I'm not sure if it will accept those memory types.

It depends on the system. The maximum supported ram speed for an am2 system is ddr2-800. I think the core 2's use 1066ddr2. For the core 2's, latency isn't as big an issue as it is for amd's cpus with the on chip memory controller. For amd's, latency is key. For core2, i don't think it's as important, though it is a determining factor of the systems memory bandwidth(mb/s).

If you're not going to overclock the ram, just get ram that the motherboard supports. If you do plan on OC'ing, go for ram rated higher than the motherboard uses. When it isn't overclocked, it will just run at the maximum speed supported by the board. The asus p5b looks to use 1066 ddr2. So, you could buy the corsair CAS 3 sticks, and pay a small fortune, or just get some ddr-2 1066 rated ram. if you do plan on overclocking, and you want to make sure the ram can handle higher clock speeds, you could get some higher speed ram, or just change the memory divider so that when you overclock your cpu you don't alter the ram speed.

L3thal · Post by **L3thal** » Tue Sep 26, 2006 2:40 pm

For the memory, I just went for the mid-range Corsair DDR2-800 Cas 4 stuff. Although, you could probably get away with Cas 5 sticks, and wouldn't notice much of a performance drop. I would guess, if you wait a few months, prices on all DDR2 memory should be much lower.