Geek boys says......

Joined: May 17, 2006 Posts: 34 Location: Portsmouth

Hi Iceman,

I assume that you have a 754 socket nforce 3 motherboard and that upgrading that is a bit pointless?? No heead room if you upgrade it etc.

I am a bit of a geek hardware wise and have been keeping up with whats good and whats bad.

First AM2 is no better than 939 socket. The prospect is that the newer smaller process chips will come out for this and mean an upgrade path in the future. As of now there is no performance increase clock frequancy to clock frequancy. Sad

boo AMD.

The Core 2 Duo is a really good chip, AMD are worried hence the last price drop. My brother in law just got a E6600 and a £150 motherboard with the kitchen sink on it. This is by far the best option if you have the money to splash. It runs very cool and is highly overclockable there is a small performance gain for high speed memory, DDR2 800. You should be fine with DDR2 667. As far as Graphics cards go Nvidia have taken back the lead. Not so much in performance which is pretty even across the board. Nvidia at the moment run cooler and so need less cooling. I am not a beliver in dual Graphics cards either. The price of a bigger card is less than the price of two of the card below it normaly and you do not get twice the performance from two G cards. I belive that getting a single card as big as you can is the best, with at least 256Mb ram.

I do not know the money you have to spend but the thing to keep in mind is that the bigger Harddrive you have the better. I have a raid array which is set to strip, the fastest setting, but not the safest. You could get a raptor disk which is quicker access. I am not a big beliver in getting the fastest Harddrive setup going I belive its better to have the fastest, largest memory you can buy and the best video card you can afford.
The core of a harddrive 7K+ rpm runs at less than 100Mbs weither it is a IDE, a SATA150 or a SATA300. The raptor has a 10K+ speed so it should be faster by a percentage. Do not think its 30% faster!!

so....

I would go for a Core 2 duo E6600 or E6700.
with 2Gb of DDR2 800Mhz memory at least.
and a GForce 7000 series G Card (7900+ ?).
and also Asus Asus P5W DH Deluxe WiFi or Asus P5WDG2-WS.
but also 2 xSeagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB ST3320620AS SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (HD-078-SE)

Hope that helps

www.overclockers.co.uk and Komplett.co.uk

These are the sites I'd recomend Smile

Warrent

Joined: Oct 04, 2005 Posts: 193 Location: Leeds, UK

nice post

very helpful

Posted: Mon Sep 25, 2006 1:12 pm

Very helpful, and kinda says what i was guna say. Apart from, i would not run your hard drives in a raid configuration. If you are not pc friendly it is not a good idea in my opinion. Plus the performance difference is not that high to say the stress it could cause you.

Instead of the seagate disks i would get the Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 SATA II. I have this disk, and as most of you will know i get into game super quick most of the time. This is down to Hitachi making excellent gaming hard drives. It has been the recommended hard drive in Custom PC magazine for about 6months. Sata II is a must, it rocks! Make sure you get the 250GB version, even if you dont need the space, as the way it is built this is the optimum size.

Other than that the core 2 duo is the way to go, get the best you can afford and dont be stingy when it comes to a motherboard, as everything essentially goes through this. Good motherboard makes are Asus, Abit, Gigabytte and DFI. DFI are pro, and i would probs get one of these if it were me. However at the mo i have and Asus and it is v.good.

One thing to consider is your case and power supply. You will need a new power supply, this is often overlooked, and can be disastrous. You will need at least 550W+, and buy a decent make, like Tagan, Antec, OCZ, Seisonic. Make sure it has PCI-Express.

You may need a new case, that depends on what you have already tho.

Hope this helps matey, plus go to WHSmiths and buy Custom PC. That will give you the right idea.

LT!