About to build a new system
 

Hey everyone :]

I posted a thread regarding a gaming system I was going to put together a while ago but due to some set backs I had to put off on getting the parts and building the PC. Everything is all good now and I'm ready to get this started again, yay.

I made some revisions to my original list which I think are much more affordable and will be a system powerful enough for what it will be used for and more (mainly gaming). Again I'm totally open to suggestions and comments.

Case - Thermaltake Armour Black Full-Tower W/ 25cm side fan
CPU - Intel q6600
Hard Drive - Western Digital 500GB (5000 AAKS)
PSU - CM eXtream 650w

The only thing that I'm still unsure of is the motherboard... The memory I'm looking at is the Corsair XMS2 2GB PC6400 DDR2-800MH and for video a GeForce 8800gts 320mb, so basically I need a board that can support the Intel CPU, memory between 800 - 1066mhz and the video card. SLI would be nice too :]

Also not sure which company to get the card from. BFG has lifetime warranty and eVGA has some nice perks as well. I was thinking eVGA, seems like the best IMO.

I am in the same boat I only can buy a couple of pieces ( not allot of money coming in)at a time the first thing I bought was OCZ ATI Crossfire PC2-6400 2GB 2X1GB DDR2-800 CL5-5-5-15 240PIN DIMM Dual Channel Memory Kit
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L ATX LGA775 P35 1333FSB 1PCI-E16 3PCI-E1 3PCI SATA2 Sound GBLAN Motherboard ( supposed to be a cheap board that is good for OC
I am thinking that the last thing I am going to buy is the Q6600 with G0 stepping. and the GeForce 8800gts in hopes that the prices will drop within the next couple of months whicjh I am thinking wioll be happening because of the time of year.Everything else from the power supply to the water cooling I am getting as fast as possible.

SLI is something everyone wants to do but never does.

If you DO tho you'll only have a choice of 3 boards that does it as they are all 680i and the best out there and they are: P5N32-E SLI, evga 680i, and Striker Extreme.

I like the P5N32 but others like different.

Ok that narrows it down quite a bit, but I think I might ditch the SLI thing altogether. If so which boards would be ideal for what I have listed here?

Giga p35-ds3l works well oc'ing my quads as a dedicated folding rig and <$100.

If you want raid, p35-ds3R oc's as well or maybe slightly better than the ds3l, and has a little better cooling.

Intel chipset mobo's are prolly gonna oc the best, and certainly the easiest.

I used to use mostly asus but they fell off my preferred list when they introduced their p35 mobos due to dropping the ps/2 kb port and higher power consumption. Prices are also higher. They have a nicer bios and i miss the power on idiot light on the mobo since i run mine caseless. Other feature differences don't matter to me since i run them as minimally config'ed dedicated folding rigs.

you might save a few $ going with 965 chipset mobos but i would rather have p35's. X38's don't seem to offer much if any performance advantage other than dual 16x pci-e which will only matter to a very few.

Gigabyte boards are not good for raid as most of them unless they've changed only allow JBOD for this. Asus and Intel boards are the best but you have to make sure the raid controller ends with a R ie... ICHxR for true raid setup.

** Edit ** The board suggested uses Southbridge: Intel® ICH9R so its good.

But again RAID really serves no purpose in a desktop environment so rethink that idea too.

The DS3L wil do you good - it's cheap, and oc'es well. Check out my sig.

John

enaberif I was looking at your sig and noticed that you are using the aurora case are you also water cool8ing? I am asking because I am thinking of getting the same case and even though I am a nube at building and water cooling I want to make a custom water cooling unit but all inside that case so if you are water cooling I am currious on your water cooling set up

I'm not but the inside of the case is HUGE with lots of room for watercooling if you wanted to go that route.

All the current gigabyte intel chipset mobo's with an R on the end indicate ich8r or 9r.

And to say raid serves no purpose on a desktop mobo is very untrue ... try to recover your data when your only hard drive has failed!

My main work at home rig uses raid 5+0 and my backup main rig runs raid 1.

My son runs raid 5+0 and my daughter runs raid 1.

At least twice one of us has been very happy to just need to plug in a new drive to restore full raid protection with no loss of use of the puter while waiting for a replacement drive and 0 loss of data.

If you only game and surf on a rig, raid isn't as valuable to protect data, but it still protects against loss of use of the rig and all the re-install time to get it running again after a hdd fails. Of course raid 0 is NO protecton and also doubles the probability of rig down due to single hdd failure.