My New System Build

[Chronictank]

AMD Opteron UP 165 Dual Core San Diego 1.8GHz 2MB Cache (Socket 939) - Retail (CP-151-AM)
£224.95(£264.32)
Asus A8N32-SLi Deluxe nForce4 SLi X16 (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-118-AS)
£119.95(£140.94)
HIS Excalibur ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB GDDR3 AVIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-048-HT)
£279.95(£328.94)
Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 120GB 1200JS SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-055-WD)
£43.95 (£51.64)
Seasonic S12 600W Silent ATX2.0 Power Supply (CA-002-SS)
£87.95 (£103.34)
Corsair 2GB DDR XMS3500LL Pro TwinX (2x1GB) CAS2 (MY-093-CS)
£189.95(£223.19)

TOTAL: £946.7(£1112.37 inc Vat)

Any improvements/suggestions?

 

[Chronictank]

delete this plz,
just noticed i got a SLi board in there and a ATi card so spec is a load of pish

 

[confused]

Also you might want to go for the modular Enermax Liberty 620W psu, bit more expencive, but saves with wires, and especially with PSU's you get what you pay for. Also you might want to go for the mushkin redlines, seing as you're going for expencive ram and using an opteron, i'm guessing your overclocking, in which case this stuff should do you good. Also mobo isn't as bad as you think as there's a crossfire version of the a8n delux

MY-002-MK Mushkin 2GB DDR XP4000 Redline Extreme Performance Dual Channel Kit (2x1GB) (991493) (MY-002-MK) 1
£199.95 £199.95
MB-131-AS Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe Crossfire (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-131-AS) 1
£114.95 £114.95
CP-151-AM AMD Opteron UP 165 Dual Core San Diego 1.8GHz 2MB Cache (Socket 939) - Retail (CP-151-AM) 1
£219.95 £219.95
HD-024-SA Samsung SpinPoint P HD160JJ 160GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-024-SA) 1
£45.95 £45.95
CA-024-EN Enermax Liberty 620W ELT620AWT ATX2.2 Modular SLI Compliant PSU (CA-024-EN) 1
£89.95 £89.95
GX-112-SP Sapphire ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB GDDR3 AVIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-112-SP) 1
£279.95 £279.95
Subtotal £950.70
Shipping (City Link Parcel Next Day (Delivered Mon-Fri)) £9.95
VAT £168.12
Total £1,128.77

Hope that helps

 

[Chronictank]

Also you might want to go for the modular Enermax Liberty 620W psu, bit more expencive, but saves with wires, and especially with PSU's you get what you pay for. Also you might want to go for the mushkin redlines, seing as you're going for expencive ram and using an opteron, i'm guessing your overclocking, in which case this stuff should do you good. Also mobo isn't as bad as you think as there's a crossfire version of the a8n delux

aye but whole selling point for me as the fanless design which the deulx doesnt have. The PSU i selected on quietness as the computer is going to be in my room (Enermax ones are very noisy in comparison if i remember correctly).
My final build is here:

AMD Opteron UP 165 Dual Core San Diego 1.8GHz 2MB Cache (Socket 939) - Retail (CP-151-AM)
£224.95(£264.32)
DFI LanParty UT NF4 Ultra-D (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-014-DF)
£79.95 (£93.94)
HIS Excalibur ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB GDDR3 AVIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-048-HT)
£279.95(£328.94)
Western Digital Raptor 74GB WD740GD 10,000RPM SATA 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-015-WD)
£93.95 (£110.39)
Seasonic S12 600W Silent ATX2.0 Power Supply (CA-002-SS)
£87.95 (£103.34)
G.Skill 2GB DDR HS PC3200 (2x1GB) CAS2.5 Dual Channel Kit (F1-3200USU2-2GBHS) (MY-007-GS)
£124.95(£146.82)

TOTAL: £1047.75 inc Vat

I didnt really want to spend over a grand, so i went cheap on the hdd (will be using a 74gb raptor for the majority of r/w since its twice as fast as a normal drive and a 200gb Seagate for the rest) and i went little bit cheaper on the RAM if i had a bit more spending room i would have gone for the more expensive G.Skill 2GB DDR ZX PC3200 (2x1GB) CAS2 Dual Channel Kit as it has 2-3-2-5 timings

 

[Krait]

For a power supply I'd recommend Ocz Powerstream

For a hard drive the new Raptor

Both are a bit pricier,but superb gear.

Edit.........the Ocz is very very quiet even with 2 fans.

 

[Cylian]

Enermax PSUs are very quiet unless you got rather high temperature inside the case, in which case you'd actually want the fans to speed up.

A completly fanless setup is something you shouldn't consider for high end parts.
You'll just risk damaging small parts that don't get a cooling of their own without the airflow inside the case.

Currently got an ST-11Pro case by Silentmaxx, got a spot for a 120mm in the floor panel... the reduction in temperature and noise by that design alone is pretty impressive. The Enermax Liberty 500W is barely audible as well.

 

[confused]

I'm using that psu infact (the enermax), much quieter than my zamlan 9500 cooler on 7v and my zamlan vf700 on my gfx card also running at 7v.... 7v being silent mode, though the case fans i've got ruin it for me Also the psu has got a very good rep for reliability, which tbh is the main reason you're not going to spend £20 on a 7000w q-teq one which fries you comp before you even get to turning it on

 

[Darzil]

Personally I'd get an SLi motherboard, as it doesn't cost that much more, and if SLi support from games improves, it may be a good way to go.

Darzil

 

[Herjulf]

Get a ring of heavens and a scalars in there and itl pwn.

 

[confused]

Personally I'd get an SLi motherboard, as it doesn't cost that much more, and if SLi support from games improves, it may be a good way to go.

Darzil

yeah get an sli when going for ati cards.... very useful

 

[Bonelamencer]

yeah get an sli when going for ati cards.... very useful

that's a point LOL

 

[Bahumat]

My fan was quite noisy and not very powerful, i hired these thai brides to blow cool air into my pc

 

[crispy]

I was about to suggest that DFI motherboard, but you found it yourself

btw: http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/index.php

There might be one or two boards that are better for your system, but you will never get as good support as you do with a DFI board.

 

[Chronictank]

that's a point LOL

plz dont misinform people,
SLi is the standard for Nvidia dual gfx cards, this is because on a Nvidia rig you dont need a "master" card so you will be effecitvely be paying premium for 2x 16x lanes of which you can only use 1 aswell as the fact you cant ever use 2 ati cards without buying a new board. The reason i picked that particular board was the silent cooling (i.e the motherboard had no fans on it, just heat pipes).
Whereas ATi cards use a system called CrossFire, with newer board usually with the CrossFire Xpress 3200 chip (altho newer version is due out in a couple of months), but the other way round you cant run 2 Nvidia cards on this board

Im not flaming you, but telling people things which are completely wrong will be a expensive mistake for them if they are buying high end boards and 2 gfx cards resulting in 1 not working

The x1900 beats any Nvidia card hands down when using 1 card (like me), but if you plan to use 2 gfx cards you would be better with the 2x 7900 GTX's which run cooler and have less power consumption

 

[crispy]

bad post from me that is...

 

[Svartmetall]

ATi card....is a load of pish

You're not wrong there

 

[Svartmetall]

Seriously:

Get the 16MB cache version of that HDD, you'll really notice the difference.

Avoid Seasonic PSUs (they blow up), get the Enermax NoiseTaker 600W jobby, which is also cheaper by £20

If you're dead-set on an ATI card, then go for it; but every time I've seen a weird graphics issue or bug - and I mean every time - it's been an ATI card.

 

[Svartmetall]

The x1900 beats any Nvidia card hands down...

Not so.

http://images.tomshardware.com/2006/03/09/ati_and_nvidias_same_day_mega_launch_mayhem/image003.gif

http://images.tomshardware.com/2006/03/09/ati_and_nvidias_same_day_mega_launch_mayhem/image005.gif

http://images.tomshardware.com/2006/03/09/ati_and_nvidias_same_day_mega_launch_mayhem/image011.gif

http://images.tomshardware.com/2006/03/09/ati_and_nvidias_same_day_mega_launch_mayhem/image013.gif

http://images.tomshardware.com/2006/03/09/ati_and_nvidias_same_day_mega_launch_mayhem/image007.gif

http://images.tomshardware.com/2006/03/09/ati_and_nvidias_same_day_mega_launch_mayhem/image015.gif

http://images.tomshardware.com/2006/03/09/ati_and_nvidias_same_day_mega_launch_mayhem/image016.gif

 

[Chronictank]

Not so.

http://images.tomshardware.com/2006/03/09/ati_and_nvidias_same_day_mega_launch_mayhem/image003.gif

snip

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http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17548061
long read but explains it alot better than i could

 

[Svartmetall]

Weird, those images open fine for me..basically they show the 7900GTX beating the X1900x cards in almost all apps, and when the ATI card scores higher it does so by a far smaller margin than when the Nvidia card scores higher.

But, to each his own, I guess.

 

[Chronictank]

Seriously:

Get the 16MB cache version of that HDD, you'll really notice the difference.

Avoid Seasonic PSUs (they blow up), get the Enermax NoiseTaker 600W jobby, which is also cheaper by £20

If you're dead-set on an ATI card, then go for it; but every time I've seen a weird graphics issue or bug - and I mean every time - it's been an ATI card.

The Raptor has a a small buffer because of the size of the hdd, the bigger drives have 16mb cache.
The reason i went raptor was it runs twice as fast as a normal drive

 

[Bonelamencer]

plz dont misinform people,

i was sarcastic :touch:

 

[Krait]

The Raptor has a a small buffer because of the size of the hdd, the bigger drives have 16mb cache.
The reason i went raptor was it runs twice as fast as a normal drive

The new 150gb Raptors with 16mb cache are really quite awesome,although they cost £200+ atm................Did'nt stop me buying one though.

 

[Lamp]

Four NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GPUs and an NVIDIA nForce4 SLI MCP combine to take NVIDIA SLI technology to the next level. 48 gigapixels/sec. of raw graphics performance and 6 teraflops of computing power. 96 pixel pipes and 2 GB of on-board graphics memory for stunning visual effects. Turn it ALL on. Run your favorite games at extreme HD resolutions. Crank up the resolution to an unbelievable 2560x1600 while maintaining silky smooth frame rates. 32x antialiasing and 16x anisotropic filtering. raise the bar for image quality. Maximize your shader and texture settings for a truly immersive gaming experience. Handcrafted for excellence like a Ferrari Enzo. Elite technology delivers performance in a class by itself.

 

[confused]

But 2x x1900 are going to be signifcantly cheaper than 2x 7900gtx's and will out perform, when in crossfire, the 7900gtx's when in sli modes

 

[Konah]

Any improvements/suggestions?

wait for socket M

 

[Darzil]

But 2x x1900 are going to be signifcantly cheaper than 2x 7900gtx's and will out perform, when in crossfire, the 7900gtx's when in sli modes

Which if Camelot got any significant advantage from teamed graphics cards, would be a good thing.

Or am I wrong and it does ?

Darzil

 

[confused]

Which if Camelot got any significant advantage from teamed graphics cards, would be a good thing.

Or am I wrong and it does ?

Darzil

Well naturally two gfx cards will perform better than one in 99.99999% of situations, but not a huge advantage unless you're really looking into overclocking and benchmarking, otherwise a single x1900xt will play all games max spec on 1600x 1200 easily, and atm single card wise the ati is ahead of nvidia, and the prices of the x1900 cards are stupidly low at overclockers atm

 

[Darzil]

The reason I asked is that if you look at Tests like this : http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/02/vga_charts_viii/page5.html, you'll see that :

Age of Empires III - 1 Card is faster than 2 of same card in SLi
Fable - The Lost Chapters - 1 Card is faster than 2 of same card in SLi
Serious Sam 2 - 1 Card is faster than 2 of same card in SLi
Quake 4 - SLi is faster than 1 of same Card
Black and White 2 - SLi is faster than 1 of same Card
F.E.A.R. - SLi is faster than 1 of same Card

So, they question has to be, which is Camelot most like. I've heard that (at the moment), it's like the first three, and gets no benefit from running in SLi.

Whilst ATi is generally better than Nvidia in technology, it tends to lack in Drivers, and I've read far more issues here with ATi cards than Nvidia ones. So personally, I'll be staying away from them with Camelot.

Darzil

 

[Svartmetall]

Absolutely. I am not even considering an ATI card for my new rig, given the endless list of woes I've seen from ATI users while Nvidia's drivers are 100% rock solid all the time. And that's not just here; I do tech support professionally and every damn time I see a weird graphics bug or problem, every time, it's an ATI card. I just don't trust them.