any last word before build?

[sasmn]

OK, newbie first build. Want power for my son's gaming. Never oc'd so may try it a little, but stability and speed more important - hey, first build! Want to have fun with it. Cost not much of an issue. What do you think of this setup, please. Thanks.

Gigabyte 3D Aurora (big so easy to work in and cool, good reviews)
E6700
Zalman CNPS9500 LED CPU cooler
Asus p5b deluxe (stability of p965, doubtful benefit of SLI, want RAID)
EVGA 640 P2 GeForce 8800 GTS
Patriot eXtreme Performance 2Gig (2x1)
OCZ GameXStream 700W PSU
Samsung T166 SpinPoint HD501LJ 500G (x3) 2 for SATA 1, 1 for OS etc
LiteOn 20x dvd +-R
Floppy just in case
Creative Xfi (ASUS mobo poor sound say reviews)
CyberPower 1500VA 900 Watt UPS
XP Pro

No decision yet on mouse, keyboard, monitor

I am no techie, so will learn a ton from doing this with my son. Excited. Advice?

 

[Roguestar]

Read www.mechBgon.com, there is a good guide on building a PC on it.

Get the E6600 instead of the E6700. Too big a price gap for such little performance (which you can overclock out of the E6600 anyway).
Those hard drives aren't too great. Seagate 7200.10 or Western Digital KS models are what you should look at.
Do not use RAID 0. Just don't. DON'T! Unless by "SATA 1" you meant RAID 1. In which case, consider what your backup plan will be should the RAID controller die.
Your PSU is way, way overkill. Get a PSU at around 500 Watts. OCZ, Corsair, Seasonic, Enermax are good brands.
Don't get that RAM, whatever it is. I didn't even bother looking up the specs. Get whatever DDR2-800 is on offer at newegg (or whereever you're buying it).
While it's a good cooler (I have one in my PC and I'm pleased with it) get the slightly better 9700.
900 Watt UPS? Well... ok, I guess. But you won't need anything more than 600W, if you buy a more reasonable PSU.

 

[Modelworks]

I might would get a higher spec ups. Dont forget to figure in the usage of the monitor, speakers, modems, etc that will also run off that ups.
Its also best to limit yourself to about half of what the ups limit is, otherwise you get really short run times on outages.

That can be fine if your just going to shut down the pc and walk away from it, but what happens when the power goes out for a couple minutes, the ups runs off the battery
and the system shuts down.

Then an hour later you come back and use the pc again and another outage occurs ; this time though the ups can only run for 30 secs because it hasn't had time
to restore the battery charge. Battery charging on a ups can take several hours.

I like to keep a minimum 20 minutes on battery reserve.


I'm not a big fan of creative, I actually really really hate them, but to each his own

Monitor:
I'm still a fan of crt monitors.
Yes they are big and bulky and use more power, but I like the resolution flexibility and not native resolutions.
They are also cheap !

 

[bamacre]

Wait three weeks and get a Q6600, or the E6850. Also, I think your PSU is overkill, especially with no SLI.

 

[duragezic]

Any reason that Samsung is bad? I researched a lot of the competing 500GB drives - that Samsung T166, Seagate 7200.10, WD KS, and Hitachi whatever-they-call-it, and the Samsung was best for price, arguably best for noise and possibly heat, and performed just as well as the 7200.10 and competing 500GB drives. It came out way above the 7200.10 and even the Raptors in some tests, yet feel behind in others, so overall I found it to be right on track with the rest. The only thing that swayed me towards a Seagate is that I like their 5yr warranty, but the Samsung was cheaper and 3yrs is adequate at least.

I'm not blindly justifying my purchase of that drive, but from what I read while researching drives, it is an underrated drive.

 

[bamacre]

Originally posted by: duragezic
Any reason that Samsung is bad? I researched a lot of the competing 500GB drives - that Samsung T166, Seagate 7200.10, WD KS, and Hitachi whatever-they-call-it, and the Samsung was best for price, arguably best for noise and possibly heat, and performed just as well as the 7200.10 and competing 500GB drives. It came out way above the 7200.10 and even the Raptors in some tests, yet feel behind in others, so overall I found it to be right on track with the rest. The only thing that swayed me towards a Seagate is that I like their 5yr warranty, but the Samsung was cheaper and 3yrs is adequate at least.

I'm not blindly justifying my purchase of that drive, but from what I read while researching drives, it is an underrated drive.

I don't think the Samsung is a bad choice. The thing that would sway me towards Seagate is the fact that Outpost.com usually has deals on Seagate drives. They have a 400GB SATA right now for 90 shipped.

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: Roguestar
Read www.mechBgon.com, there is a good guide on building a PC on it.

Get the E6600 instead of the E6700. Too big a price gap for such little performance (which you can overclock out of the E6600 anyway).
Those hard drives aren't too great. Seagate 7200.10 or Western Digital KS models are what you should look at.
Do not use RAID 0. Just don't. DON'T! Unless by "SATA 1" you meant RAID 1. In which case, consider what your backup plan will be should the RAID controller die.
Your PSU is way, way overkill. Get a PSU at around 500 Watts. OCZ, Corsair, Seasonic, Enermax are good brands.
Don't get that RAM, whatever it is. I didn't even bother looking up the specs. Get whatever DDR2-800 is on offer at newegg (or whereever you're buying it).
While it's a good cooler (I have one in my PC and I'm pleased with it) get the slightly better 9700.
900 Watt UPS? Well... ok, I guess. But you won't need anything more than 600W, if you buy a more reasonable PSU.

Don't get any dual core CPUs. Wait untill July 24th and Intel will be selling Quad Core cpus for the price of todays dual core.


Also look in to getting the 750GB drive from Western Digital. It has 95% of the raptors speed with a $ per GB that beats the raptor by a factor of more than 20.
Raptor= 68¢ per GB
750GB Western Digital = 2.76¢ per GB.

http://www.storagereview.com/WD7500AAKS.sr

Always buy retail hard drives, they are the most failure prone device in your PC (next is the PSU). Retail drives give you backup/migration software, technical support, and a WARRANTY.
Buy it from ZipZoomfly not newegg. ZipZoomFly has the RETAIL version for $207 plus free shipping. Newegg.com has the OEM version for $210.

 

[Googer]

Get an SLI motherboard even though you won't be using SLI. The extra PCI-e slot can be used for other things besides graphics and should come in handy sometime during the future.

 

[kush23]

I have a bad experience with samsung.... I bought a SATA 3.0gb drive and it died within a month. I RMA'd it. A month later I finally get a new hard drive.... it dies again. Stick to Seagate

 

[Roguestar]

Originally posted by: kush23
I have a bad experience with samsung.... I bought a SATA 3.0gb drive and it died within a month. I RMA'd it. A month later I finally get a new hard drive.... it dies again. Stick to Seagate

Anecdotal evidence. We've all had something like that happen to us and there's no point in assuming all Samsung drives are of bad quality or failure-prone.


OOooooooh, Googer has 9999 posts. I wanna see what happens next .

Waiting for the Q6600 is a good idea too, but I thought OP was going to buy it very soon.

 

[TallBill]

Waiting for OP to check back in. Welcome to Anandtech, pretty much everything has already been picked apart. I haven't touched a floppy in 3-4 years, but its your call.

Should be fun to build with the son, don't get frustrated if things fuck up.

 

[sasmn]

I thank you all very much. Have made changes to our order...we're geared up, but will wait a few weeks to see if we can go for a better CPU with the upcoming changes in Intel pricing and product...thanks for that by the way. Presumably I'll be back in another thread in a month to get some help when we face a few "issues" that will probably be laughable to the rest of you, but we've got to start or we'll never learn.

 

[bamacre]

Originally posted by: Googer
Get an SLI motherboard even though you won't be using SLI. The extra PCI-e slot can be used for other things besides graphics and should come in handy sometime during the future.

I would get a board with an Intel chipset rather than going with an Nvidia.