[HELP] New kit recommendation and help

[Big G]

Hi all,

Finally decided after musing about a Mac, a Dell or upgrading my PC that I'm going to stick with the PC business and upgrade what I have. However, I've not upgraded for over five years so I could use some sound advice on what i've picked or if you could identify any pitfalls.

I've already bought a Samsung Spinpoint F1 SATA hard disk and a copy of Windows Vista 32bit Home Premium, so it's the core parts I need help on.

I'm planning to go for:

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 LGA775 'Wolfdale' 3.00GHz (1333FSB) - Retail

Asus P5Q-E Intel P45 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard

OCZ 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-8500C5 1066MHz Reaper HPC Edition Dual Channel DDR2 (OCZ2RPR10662GK))

Leadtek GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail

This is unlikely to be used for gaming; maybe CS source, maybe CoD4 and some others so it doesn't have to be uber for gaming (hence the choice if the GTX+ and not an ATi variant). However, I want something reasonably meaty. Overclocking isn't important to me.

Any advice welcome, or suggestions for a different mobo or anything. There seems to be a raft of choice on the motherboard front.

Cheers

G

[Overdriven]

I'd say knock another 1gb of RAM onto that, just because it's vista.

[Big G]

OK, is that ram overkill (in terms of it being 1066MHz)? What is the correct ram?

Would this ram work as well?

OCZ 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-6400C5 Dual Channel Vista Gold Series DDR2 (OCZ2G8004GK))

Sorry, i've been out the game a long time. I'd have thought i'd need 1066 MHz ram over the 800 MHz, but I dunno much about these new fangled processors.

[nath]

Shamelessly stolen from Kryt in the bargain thread:

Sapphire HD 4870 512MB GDDR5 Dual DVI HDTV Out PCI-E Graphics Card - Ebuyer

Only 30 quid more but as I understand it's a *much* better card. Could be worth stretching depending on your budget, I expect it'd give you a bit of future proofing too.

Alternatively: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/146705

Others might be better at advising, but I believe that the current run of ATI's are all better than NVidias offerings.

Also - I dunno about you, but I've had (and heard of from friends) awful experiences with Overclockers. Might be worth going to scan/ebuyer.

[Helme]

Else you could just go with the HD4850, it's cheaper than the 9800GTX+, and performs about the same.

[Big G]

Ok cheers all.

Any advice on the correct RAM? The FSB of the E8400 is 1333 MHz, so I don't understand how 800 MHz ram would cut it?

[Overdriven]

800mhz is fine, 1066 is faster (Need Kryt for specifics) so it should work. I suggest not going above 3gb though, since 32 bit is capped at 3.2gb (so 3gb ram) unless you go for a 64x operating system.

[Kryten]

The speed of the ram isn't specifically tied to the speed of the processor, the chipset balances that automatically, and even if it didn't there'd be no gain from a 1333mhz bus processor on 1333mhz ram, due to processing speed and chipset/bus overheads.

800mhz ram is very suitable, it's not going to sit there and be an annoying bottleneck, the difference going up to 1066mhz is negatable. Part of the reason for this is timing - to run at that speed, sort of ironically the memory has to be slowed down. Sounds odd but this is mostly a marketing thing although does help with overclocking and synthetic (non real world performance based) benchmarks. But if you're only talking a tenner in price, get the pc8500 (1066mhz) stuff. Otherwise you won't be lagging behind with the cheaper kit.


Can only echo the comments about getting an ATI card currently, even if not gaming the software is more stable and allows use of TV out and other functions currently struggling to work on nVidia kit.

[Big G]

Thanks Kryt, huge help for clearing that up on the memory.

Thanks all.

[Dreamor]

For Overclockers, I've had a number of products from them and I'd say about 2/3 of it has been dead on arrival, monitors I had 3/3 go wrong right out the box. There delivery company (forget who it is now) can be a pain in the arse. One thing I would say is that they are pretty quick to replace and there support line is very good.

Never had any problems with Ebuyer or any others