ANOTHER "i'm making a pc" thread

[letdown427]

Have just been talking to my boss for a while, he quite fancies a bit of pc gaming. he started oc'ing his 9700pro last night, and anyway, he's obviously been browsing and looking up prices on some expensive stuff.

Anyway, I think he'd do pretty well with

OC a 3700+ to 2.4Ghz, if not more.
1 x 7800GT
He's got 1GB of ram already, worth getting more/better quality?
can keep old hard disk, monitor etc
Mobo suggestions? A8N-SLi? New GA-K8N Pro SLi? Just fast, good OC'er and stable. Needn't be the fastest available.
Oh, and a PSU too, his current 300W ain't gna be man enough for OC'ing n things IMO


He's got a (8ms response time) 19" monitor, so 1600x1200 isn't going to be necessary, and so i said SLi would be a bit excessive right now for anything other than your e-penis.

Any opinions on dual screen gaming? Is it widely supported, will the 7800gt be a match for it? Obviously i know it depends on settings, but generally...

Budget? well, not just "as much as it takes" lol, but I mean, he can spend it if necessary, but I don't think it's necessary to spend £550 on an fx-57 when a 3700+ for £120 has been regularly seen at 2.7-2.8Ghz and so on.

Thanks for any input.

 

[emilyek]

If no SLI and on something of a budget, then:

A solid NF4 Ultra motherboard, like the Epox or the DFI Ultra D or the MSI

3700 Sandy, 3800 dual core--or an Opteron 146/148 (and overclock it) if he wants to save a little money and be one of the cool kids with a sub $300 FX 57.

A gig kit of some 2-2-2-5 RAM, or a 2 gig kit of 2-3-2-5 ram

7800GT or GTX'

PSU of 400W or better in the $75-$100 range-- no 600w glowing disco ball junk PSU

SATA/SATA II HD-- 16mb cache drive if its in the budget

At least a DVD ROM + CDRW-- a dual layer DVDRW is only about $10 more

A floppy disk drive just in case

A case

 

[xanis]

If he's only going to be using one 7800GT, then there is no need to get an SLI motherboard. For this application, I would suggest the EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra motherboard. It's a good OC'er and it's very stable.

I'm not sure what memory he has currently, but you would probably want to get a 2GB kit of some performance stuff to get some tight timings which is necessary for OCing.

The PSU is critical here, so I would suggest a Seasonic, OCZ or Antec 500W PSU. The key is reliability and power.