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Originally Posted by Iamcanadian7  Personally, I'm a huge fan of ASUS boards. Their customer service has always been stellar and they have never provided me a board I didn't love (can't say the same for EVGA or MSI). The R2E is by far the best board I've owned, it looks great aesthetically, is a dream to overclock with and has a boatload of features. I've also heard great thing about the EVGA board, but I stay away due to bad previous experiences with their 790i board and the resulting customer support. The P6T is a great board as well. It overclocks well and has both Xfire and SLI support as well and a nice layout. FYI though, save your money and don't get the OC palm. It's pretty gimmicky and I've never been comfortable with overclocking on the fly or in windows for that matter.
My suggestion would be the P6T first, and either of the Gigabyte or the EVGA board second. (assuming you've totally ruled out the R2E).
Cooler wise, you will definetly need a new air cooler. The 9500 is barely enough to handle an OC'd Q6600 let alone an i7 chip. IMO the 1200 isin't exactly WC friendly, how ever if you can make it work, it's well worth the added potential performance margin. Though realize that you have to maintain the system much more than an air cooled one.
HDD wise, those 320's or the 640's are great drives for a great price. Velociraptors do make a difference, however I would reccomend only putting money into them if you already have high end parts everywhere else.
Hope I was helpful. |
Yeah, the only thing I'm still stuck on is if my heatsink will suffice.. from what you guys are saying sounds like it won't, but like I was saying I have a lot of faith in my case to help it, worst case I will end up getting a new one anyways. I have the hard drive scenario down pat, I did a lot of reading on that and learned the 320-640 drives are faster due to better platter lay-out. 2 of those 320 in raid 0 will be great, faster than a single velociraptor at a fraction of the price, with much more storage space.
I am pretty set on the P6T also, along with that ram, I upped to 1866mhz just for kicks since I saved some money on the hard drive configuration. And I swapped for the non palm version, I never really thought of that lol, not like I'm going to be overclocking everyday... more like find a setting that works at leave it.
As far as water cooling goes, I have little to zero knowledge about it. I wouln't really like to since it's more maintenance, difficult setup, higher price, and something about water in my case turns me off
How would the Zalman 9700 be for cooling? It's same as mine just larger, I really like the design and the blue LED.. I really don't follow heatsinks that well either... I might have to make a post in the air cooling thread about that.
Thanks for the help so far, I've learned a lot from reading further on.. this is a big purchase for me, good thing I have some time before my payment to get it figured out the right way before just hitting checkout!
Here is the cart, 1400... not too bad..
January 13, 2009, 09:08 AM
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