kirennia
Part of the furniture
- Joined
- Dec 26, 2003
- Messages
- 3,857
Thought as I finally got my new PC I'd give a review of how some of the parts perform for those of you considering buying one at this time.
Corsair XMS2 2x2gb DDR2 800MHz RAM - Unfortunately for me, one of the sticks was broken on delivery although Corsair are usually very good on this front. The vista32 bit issue of only being able to take x amount of RAM was confirmed after running dxdiag and having it display 3.325gb RAM shortly before the 2nd stick failed. Not a lot you can say about RAM really; easy to fit ofc, even after having just 2gb it still hasn't complained while running certain high spec programs.
Samsung SpinPoint 1TB HD 32mb cache - Not a lot that can be said really expect for £75, you simply can't get better at the moment. Very fast, very quiet, very big. End of
Asus P5Q-E 775 Socket MB - Very nice piece of kit with all the extra gubbins required for future upgrades; nicely spaced PCI2.0 slots for more then one large graphics card, as well as being crossfire AND SLI ready which is a cheeky bonus I didn't find on many other MBs. Very recommended for anyone going for a core duo or quad processor as well as any type of graphics card setup.
ATI Radeon 4870 1gb DDR5 - The drivers themselves have allowed me to view the running temperature while stress testing it playing crysis; maybe the temperature performance can be attested as much to the case as the card but idle it's been running at 50 degrees, running it never broke 60 with auto adjustable fan speeds. Even when the fan ramps up however, the thing is still nigh on silent and very powerful. It would be wrong to list program performances based solely on the card as it's a combination of the components but looking over at comparison sites, the 1gb version is rarely listed (it's usually the 512mb version). Easy to fit with 2 6pin sockets, very cool and very fast. For £193, I'd struggle to find a better card for the price.
Q9550 2.83Ghz, 1333FSB, 12MB cache processor - Going any higher in the range would have meant huge leaps in the price of the piece so I thought this would be a nice middle ground. With others having lower cache, comparing the price of other quad cores, you definitely get what you pay for with this piece. I'm sure I'll be finding out more of its power when multi thread programming but for now, even with games still not completely quad core compatible, the fact that it's 2.83 Ghz means it'll still give high spec programs a kick in the nuts before it gives in... which I have yet to see it do. I'd suggest this as the final step before spending silly money and gaining very little; processor charts tend to say the same thing at the moment too.
Arctic Cooling AC-FRZ-7P Processor Cooler - An absolute pig to install. Personally I don't trust the small clips which came with it and you have to dismount the fan before you can mount the thing over your processor. Okay so far it's kept the processor nicely quiet and cool but I'm sure there are alternatives on the market which are easier to install. Many times I worried for the safety of other components while mounting it and the plastic screw mounts really aren't great. It's also very heavy and large making me worry a bit about transport but then, I just worry too much about things like that anyway. Avoid if there is a better alternative though.
Antec 300 case - Quiet as hell and very cool even when the above system is being stress tested. A gripe for me however is that the two mounted fans have adjustable speed switches but they're located inside the case. Why on earth they didn't give a back plate which they could be clipped into I'll never know but at the moment I don't really need them going faster. The lack of a PC speaker made life a bit more difficult when determining why the system wasn't loading when I had the duff piece of RAM as well. After finally figuring it out, I nabbed one from my other case just in case future problems occur; this isn't really a huge problem, just something I personally still like to have. The power/HDD LEDs are very small too. Good if you sleep in the same room as your PC
Was overall very surprised how quiet the system was with 2x case fans,+ PSU fan + GFX fan + processor fan but they still do the job. How fast the machine runs as a whole, running crysis 1.21 patch, 1650x1050 (iirc) with 8xAA, everything on very high it had occasional jolts (one or two frames as the RAM emptied) which I'd put down to only having 2gb ram at the moment. Bare in mind around 600mb of which is just running vista and it's easy to see why there are jolts at the moment.
Very happy with it and thanks to the guys on here who helped me pick it out; fingers crossed it's a machine which will last for a while yet allowing me to program and game a lot easier then before
Oh yeah, the cost, around £800 but that was literally nothing salvaged from the old machine other then monitor/cables/keyboard/mouse. Any questions/other feedback, feel free to ask.
Corsair XMS2 2x2gb DDR2 800MHz RAM - Unfortunately for me, one of the sticks was broken on delivery although Corsair are usually very good on this front. The vista32 bit issue of only being able to take x amount of RAM was confirmed after running dxdiag and having it display 3.325gb RAM shortly before the 2nd stick failed. Not a lot you can say about RAM really; easy to fit ofc, even after having just 2gb it still hasn't complained while running certain high spec programs.
Samsung SpinPoint 1TB HD 32mb cache - Not a lot that can be said really expect for £75, you simply can't get better at the moment. Very fast, very quiet, very big. End of
Asus P5Q-E 775 Socket MB - Very nice piece of kit with all the extra gubbins required for future upgrades; nicely spaced PCI2.0 slots for more then one large graphics card, as well as being crossfire AND SLI ready which is a cheeky bonus I didn't find on many other MBs. Very recommended for anyone going for a core duo or quad processor as well as any type of graphics card setup.
ATI Radeon 4870 1gb DDR5 - The drivers themselves have allowed me to view the running temperature while stress testing it playing crysis; maybe the temperature performance can be attested as much to the case as the card but idle it's been running at 50 degrees, running it never broke 60 with auto adjustable fan speeds. Even when the fan ramps up however, the thing is still nigh on silent and very powerful. It would be wrong to list program performances based solely on the card as it's a combination of the components but looking over at comparison sites, the 1gb version is rarely listed (it's usually the 512mb version). Easy to fit with 2 6pin sockets, very cool and very fast. For £193, I'd struggle to find a better card for the price.
Q9550 2.83Ghz, 1333FSB, 12MB cache processor - Going any higher in the range would have meant huge leaps in the price of the piece so I thought this would be a nice middle ground. With others having lower cache, comparing the price of other quad cores, you definitely get what you pay for with this piece. I'm sure I'll be finding out more of its power when multi thread programming but for now, even with games still not completely quad core compatible, the fact that it's 2.83 Ghz means it'll still give high spec programs a kick in the nuts before it gives in... which I have yet to see it do. I'd suggest this as the final step before spending silly money and gaining very little; processor charts tend to say the same thing at the moment too.
Arctic Cooling AC-FRZ-7P Processor Cooler - An absolute pig to install. Personally I don't trust the small clips which came with it and you have to dismount the fan before you can mount the thing over your processor. Okay so far it's kept the processor nicely quiet and cool but I'm sure there are alternatives on the market which are easier to install. Many times I worried for the safety of other components while mounting it and the plastic screw mounts really aren't great. It's also very heavy and large making me worry a bit about transport but then, I just worry too much about things like that anyway. Avoid if there is a better alternative though.
Antec 300 case - Quiet as hell and very cool even when the above system is being stress tested. A gripe for me however is that the two mounted fans have adjustable speed switches but they're located inside the case. Why on earth they didn't give a back plate which they could be clipped into I'll never know but at the moment I don't really need them going faster. The lack of a PC speaker made life a bit more difficult when determining why the system wasn't loading when I had the duff piece of RAM as well. After finally figuring it out, I nabbed one from my other case just in case future problems occur; this isn't really a huge problem, just something I personally still like to have. The power/HDD LEDs are very small too. Good if you sleep in the same room as your PC
Was overall very surprised how quiet the system was with 2x case fans,+ PSU fan + GFX fan + processor fan but they still do the job. How fast the machine runs as a whole, running crysis 1.21 patch, 1650x1050 (iirc) with 8xAA, everything on very high it had occasional jolts (one or two frames as the RAM emptied) which I'd put down to only having 2gb ram at the moment. Bare in mind around 600mb of which is just running vista and it's easy to see why there are jolts at the moment.
Very happy with it and thanks to the guys on here who helped me pick it out; fingers crossed it's a machine which will last for a while yet allowing me to program and game a lot easier then before
Oh yeah, the cost, around £800 but that was literally nothing salvaged from the old machine other then monitor/cables/keyboard/mouse. Any questions/other feedback, feel free to ask.