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Thoughts on my new system specs please...

PostPosted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 10:00 pm
by Spazmogen
I'm going from a p3 1ghz system to:

E6400 Core 2 Duo 2.13ghz
2gb Patriot DDR2 ram @ 667mhz (dual channel I hope, not a matched pair).
Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 motherboard (the new F6 firmware is meant for o/c)
EVGA E-GEFORCE 7600 GT pci-e 256mb video card with VGA out. I'm still using a 19" Viewsonic CRT.

Samsung Spinpoint P Series 80GB SATA2 7200rpm HDD 8mb cache. ( I have 2 IDE hdd's to add to the system via a pci ata100 card).

total for new parts: $956.68 taxes incl. That's about $848 USD

My Lite On 52x CD-RW
NEC 4x DVD+RW yes its old, but its firmware makes me want to stick with it until it dies.
I'll be using my Chieftec Dragon case.
I bought a 585w PSU from Tiger Direct last month.
I'll stay with my existing mouse/keyboard set up.
And keep my 19" Viewsonic CRT.


It will be a home computer 1st, occasional gamer 2nd.

Your thoughts on it are appreciated.

PostPosted: Wed Oct 04, 2006 2:42 am
by hoxlund
very good choice for parts

i am partial to asus boards:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131045

if you must stick with the 965 chipset that is

after i receive the intel bundle im throwing the intel board on ebay the very same day i get it, along with my current mobo/proc/memory

this is going to be my build:
mobo:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131025

processor:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819115005

memory:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820145033

keeping everything else that is in my sig

PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2006 7:12 am
by Han
Good choice, Spaz. 8) I'm more fond of Asus boards as well, therefore I too suggest P5B Deluxe.

Actually I was thinking to leap from my trusted Asus P2B and 1 GHz P3 to Core 2 Duo just a week ago and after much consideration I decided to wait a bit more. When Core 2 Quadro will appear on the shelves, E6500 or E6600 that have 4 MB cache would be considerably cheaper. At least I hope so...

PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2006 12:19 pm
by LoneWolf
I'm a bigger fan of ASUS myself; if you don't need SLI, the P5B-E looks like a real winner, I'm tempted to use it in a new build for a family member, though at this point I may still go with an i975 chipset board due to my distrust on the JMicron IDE controller used for i965 chipset boards.

I'd also choose Seagate or Western Digital over Samsung hard disks.

PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2006 7:02 pm
by smartin4
I too am a big fan of Asus, have never used another mobo manufacturer.

I also have Asus graphics cards in 2 of my pcs, loved their cd-roms, use the E616P3 DVD-rom in 2 pcs, and have an Asus DRW-1608P. I have never had a lick of trouble with any of the components.

PostPosted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 12:51 am
by Bhairav
smartin4 wrote:I too am a big fan of Asus, have never used another mobo manufacturer.

I have never had a lick of trouble with any of the components.


I've had a bit of bad luck with my A8N-E and an older GF3Ti200 video card. The NB fan on my A8N-E was borked,and Asus's messed-up service network here told me they would take 2 weeks to replace it. Had to put pressure on them and threaten to take them to the consumer court before they fixed it on the spot..

PostPosted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 5:08 am
by Han
That's why I NEVER buy a mobo with a fan on chipset. [-X These small fans tend to fail very fast, besides they are damn noisy. :evil:

My new graphics card will be fanless, too.

PostPosted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 2:02 pm
by ruderacer
I too prefer ASUS. The mobo that Hox provided the link for looks very nice. I'm using an ASUS mobo P4G8X deluxe and was thinking of upgrading myself.

Spaz good choice of components, but consider an ASUS board.

Question for Hox: why that processor? Would you not go for a faster one?

PostPosted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 2:52 pm
by hoxlund
im getting that processor with the intel bundle

http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic. ... tel+retail

that is of course if i keep my bundle i might just sell the entire thing and overhaul my current system

PostPosted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 9:17 am
by Spazmogen
Update & new question.

System has been built for 2 weeks and stable as well.


Question: do games/softwre see a Core 2 Duo as faster than the stock cpu speed? Mine is 2.13ghz per core. Core 2 Duo has 2 cores on the cpu of course.

I'm trying to figure out if its going to be outdated soon. Some games BF2 have a 1.7ghz minimum processor speed now.

Splinter Cell: Double Agent's spec's:
Supported OS: Windows® XP (only)
Processor: 3 Ghz Pentium® 4 or AMD Athlon™ 3000 (3.5 Ghz Pentium 4 or Athlon 3500 recommended). Game optimized for Dual-processor-enabled computers.
RAM: 1 GB
Video Card: DirectX® 9.0c-compliant, Shader 3.0-enabled 128 MB video card (256 MB recommended) (see supported list*)
Sound Card: DirectX® 9.0c-compatible (EAX" recommended) - PC audio solution containing Dolby® Digital Live required for Dolby Digital audio.
DirectX Version: 9.0c or higher (9.0c included on disc)
DVD-ROM: 4x DVD-ROM or faster
Hard Drive Space: 8 GB
Peripherals Supported: Mouse, keyboard
Multiplay: Broadband connection with 128 kbps upstream or faster


*Supported Video Cards at Time of Release

ATI® X1600/X1800/X1900 NVidia® 6600 /6800/7300/7600/7800/7900

PostPosted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 3:52 pm
by LoneWolf
Spazmogen wrote:Update & new question.

System has been built for 2 weeks and stable as well.


Question: do games/softwre see a Core 2 Duo as faster than the stock cpu speed? Mine is 2.13ghz per core. Core 2 Duo has 2 cores on the cpu of course.

I'm trying to figure out if its going to be outdated soon. Some games BF2 have a 1.7ghz minimum processor speed now.


That CPU speed spec is misleading.

Considering how butt-slow the 1.7GHz P4 was, you'd need that minimum, and the devs need to tell purchasers some kind of minimum. Most 1.7GHz P4 processors are 256k cache variants (IIRC the earlier Socket 423 Willamette Celeron P4's might be 128k) with a limited 400MHz FSB, and many at that point were based on RDRAM or SDRAM. In contrast, Athlon XP processors of that time already used DDR SRAM, and didn't have to deal with the P4's problem of deep pipelines that meant you really suffered if you had an L2 cache-miss (combined with the P4 not having enough cache in its initial designs to limit cache misses). Most Northwood core P4's stepped up to 512k of cache, mainboards transitioned to DDR, and soon after that, Northwood CPU's went to a 533FSB, fixing the most glaring flaws in the P4 architecture. Most Northwood P4's sold were 2.0GHz and higher (though there are some slower ones out there), and 533FSB models began at 2.26GHz.

Sounds to me like their minimum specs are based on Intel, not AMD hardware. Furthermore, the Core 2 Duo blows every Intel processor before it away, because Intel finally decided to design based on instructions-per-clock like AMD, not maximum clockspeed. Not many games are dual-core aware yet, but as time goes by, more will be. I don't think you have anything to worry about. Your system's faster than the one in my sig, and there's nothing I can't run.

P.S. At some point, GPU becomes much more important than CPU, so there's a lot of balance going on there as well.