Help New PC Advice

[Adari]

Hello techies,

A friend of mine helped (read: spend hours to explain) to compose a PC for. Specs are below.

What I want is a reliable PC I can use for gaming, recent games as well as games coming out in a year or two, as I tend to upgrade every two years. Think of games like Planetside, UO, Civ IV, which I currently play. I'd be interested in trying games like Assassin's Creed, Gears of War, Overlord, and future games like AoC/Warhammer/Starcraft II etc. You get what I mean. All I ask is that they run smooth and look fine/good, and whether thats possible with the system below, so if anyone could answer that to start with Id be happy.

I also put in some questions in between the specs.

Uw aanbevolen configuratie

Case: Antec Performance One P180
I'm going to have to wait a week or two before ordering, if the P182 becomes available meanwhile I'll switch. Also, my room gets _really_ hot, in a way you can't sleep at night because of the heat, hence the following:
Case cooling: Sharkoon Silent Eagle 1000 (120 mm) x 4
More of those here.

Mobo: Socket 775 -GigaByte P35-DS3L
Other mobo's here.
CPU: Socket 775 Core 2 DuoIntel® Core™ 2 Duo E8400
CPU Cooler: Arctic-Cooling Freezer 7 Pro
Memory: DDR2-800 -GeiL 2 GB DDR2-800 Kit

GFX: PCIe -XFX GF8800GT XXX "Alpha Dog Edition"
This cause I hear it outpeforms the GTX. More cards are here.

PSU: Seasonic S12-550HT
This is a 550 watt PSU, will this be okay? There's also these corsair one's which are quite cheap. This page has PSU's till 600 watt.

Then a pioneer DVD RW, A samsung spinpoint F1 hdd, and I have yet to decide on which creative sound card to use. I think I'll get a Bose audi speaker set with it (I play a lot of music).

I have to use the site I link to as it's the only descent PC component shop there is, and they will put everything together, which I'm bad at.

Any advice or suggestions, with the above said in mind, will be greatly appreciated.

 

[inactionman]

Look's pretty good, but some suggestions:

Look at getting Noctua fans, they perform very well and are almost silent, not sure what there availability is like over there though.

Any reason for not going Quad core? It's increasing used in games now.

Get 4Gb of ram, it's so cheap it's silly not to. These should do, as I've never liked the fact that you have to send GeIL's back to Taiwan if something goes wrong. If you do get 4Gb, make sure you get the 64-bit version of Vista.

The seasonic is fine, I had the 600W version until I got my new BFG ES-800. Although the corsair 520HX should do you just as well and will save some cash.

Don't get a soundblaster, get a Xonar. Great cards and do everything a soundblaster does, including the stuff they currently can't do in Vista (you can't hardware accelerate sound in Vista).

Bose are over-rated, particularly as they use sound processing to get around their strange cone designs. Get a decent amp and some decent audio speakers from an AV shop instead.

 

[Adari]

Quad core really? I hear only like, crysis and supreme commander use it. Noctua fans I've heard about also, I'll see if I can get them.

I'll get 4gb too. Thanks for the feedback.

 

[dysfunction]

Is it really worth getting a Sound Card? I thought these days the onboard sound was good enough for most things...

 

[Kryten]

It's only really worth a separate sound card if you're really going to notice some effects or quality - i.e. your music editing or gaming and really want the best out of it. Onboard sound these days isn't the laughing stock it once was, however it's not quite the quality of SoundStorm, for those of us that had nForce2 motherboards with it on.
I think it's more a case of performance over quality, but then again that's not great. A PCI card will take load off the processor, but very, very negligable amounts.

And just about everything will make use of your quad core. Maybe not as "properly" as Crysis does, i.e. by allocating certain tasks to certain cores, but just general load spreading occurs on games as old as Quake 3. I'm not talking about major performance boost there but every little helps, as they say.
And of course it's daft buying something that just works for now. It's all very well and good that "the only game that uses it is Crysis, and I don't play that" - when in the next year or so, you buy several games all that use it. Then you'd be miffed

 

[Embattle]

The spec is fine, as for quad core it should just be seen as a possible future bonus but certainly nothing to worry too much over.