Building a new PC, any comments?

[Sean6180]

This is the PC I intend to build (mainly for gaming and music as I'll be going to uni ;P);

Btw I am British so unfortunately I don't have newegg, however there is scan.co.uk which I shall probably use for most of my components.

Intel core 2 duo E6400/E6600
Asus P5W DH Deluxe
Corsair 2GB TWIN2X2048-5400C4/6400
250 Gb Samsung SP2514N SpinPoint P120
Pioneer DVR-111
Plextor Black PX130A/T3BPB 16x DVD-ROM + 52x CD-ROM (oem)
Thermaltake Tsunami va3000swa
Thermaltake W0116RB 750W Toughpower Psu
Razer copperhead mouse
HDA Digital X-Mystique 7.1 Gold
20.1" Viewsonic VX2025wm widescreen
ATI RADEON X1900XT


This will be my first PC so I would appreciate all the help I can get.

I want to build it before october so there isn't much point wait for the DX10 cards, is there?

Also I read that the PS is larger than normal will this cause problems?

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

Welcome to AT.

I don't know how much a 750watt thermaltake is costing you, but if I was buying a PSU to match that system it wouldn't be a Thermaltake.

Are you sure you want the X-Mystique? Hooking up to a receiver without 5.1 analog input?

 

[Bobthelost]

Not scam, for god's sakes not scam! Check out ebuyer, the shipping is excellent (£9 for next day) and the prices are the lowest i could find.

What do you want to do with the machine for a start and what's your budget.

Now, as to your build it looks like a general purpose/gaming machine that you're planning on overclocking. If that's not the case then you've got the wrong motherboard.


Intel core 2 duo E6400 Enough power, unless you're encoding you won't notice the difference, if you are encoding and you are overclocking then you're not going to miss the difference, you will miss the £70+ you save.

Asus P5W DH Deluxe Good board for heavy OCing, otherwise a waste of money, check out the Gigabyte P965 DS3 for a cheaper overclocking board

RAM DDR2 6400 Cheap is cheerful, don't worry too much about it

250 Gb Samsung SP2514N SpinPoint P120 Nice low noise drive, performance is ok but not great. Are you going for low noise, if so then your GPU is a poor choice. But i'm guessing you just picked it because it was cheap

Pioneer DVR-111 I prefer the Phillips 1660 (it's a rebrand of the BenQ 1650, best drive around imo)

Plextor Black PX130A/T3BPB 16x DVD-ROM + 52x CD-ROM (oem) For the money you might as well get a second DVDRW, think liteon, different brands mean you've more chance reading damaged discs

Thermaltake Tsunami va3000swa It's alright, i grew out of my bling years though so i'm more into lian lis or the antec P180 /P150 (Got one of each)

Thermaltake W0116RB 750W Toughpower PsuI will find you and hurt you if you waste your money on this . More later

HDA Digital X-Mystique 7.1 Gold Not a clue, onboard sound is alright unless your speakers are really good

Razer copperhead mouse
20.1" Viewsonic VX2025wm widescreen All good

ATI RADEON X1900XT Nice card, bit loud, annoyingly high power draw

First of all get rid of the TT PSU, even with an ATI graphics card you don't need more than 450W of power. Buying an expensive PSU for futureproofing is a bad idea. If you need a new PSU when you upgrade your graphics card then get one at the same time and sell your current one on. Even if you want to waste money on futureproofing (a bit of a pet hate of mine ) then don't go TT. Seasonic, Corsair (rebranded seasonics), Enermax (the liberty line is nice), Antec (ONLY the Neo HE line), Fortron, FSP, Silverstone OCZ and PCP&C are all better options. I recomend getting a 430 or 450W PSU, check out the P150 case + PSU combo, £75 or so and it's a lovely little case (needs 2x92mm fans though, sold seperatly).

 

[Operandi]

Drop the Thermaltake case and PSU. Personally I like Lian Li for the high-end and InWin for mid to lower-end cases. For the PSU I suggest Seasonic, Forton-Source, Enhance, and Zalman.

Use the onboard HD-audio on the P5W; it's of very good quality.

 

[Sean6180]

Nice response. I posted pretty much the same in THG forums and got one guy who replied.

BTW I'm not overclocking at the moment, maybe later.

Scan isn't that bad. £12 delivery. I checked the processor scan was cheaper, checked the MB ebuyer was cheaper. The main difference is the diversity. Scan has a much wider range of components than ebuyer (in my experience, this might not be the case), ebuyer didn't even have the ram.

I'll look into the MB, any reason the P5W DH is better other than overclocking?

With the GPU you said it was noisy, not that this bothers me that much but have you got anything else in mind, I was thinking of ATi so I could use crossfire when I need a new gfx card. However I wouldn't mind getting a gainward golden sample 7900gt but it's the same price and from what I can gather the X1900XT is faster.

I would rather get a DVD-rom as I've heard it causes less damage to the disks and more importantly it's slightly faster. (Not totally sure but I don't think I'll change this)

Any reason why you prfer the Phillips 1660?

I also like the look of the P180 and some of the lian lis but the're quite a bit more and I still prefer the look Tsunami, anyway it's got pretty good reviews.

What's wrong with the PS! It got excellent reviews. I know the thermaltakes lower models are pretty awful but like I say it got great reviews. It costs £73.46 (with VAT) I would have loved to have got the Tagan 600w but again more expensive and it has less power (I don't really need more than 600w but it could be useful later on). However I will look into other PSUs.

The reason the HDA Digital X-Mystique sound card is that it is one of very few sound cards to have DDL meaning it can encode the sound to produce actual 5.1 sound unlike the creatives which can only produce 5.1 if it has already been encoded (ie DD movies). I plan to have pretty good speakers. BTW why did you say 'Hooking up to a receiver without 5.1 analog input?' YOyoYOhowsDAjello?

 

[Bobthelost]

You're right about the RAM options, pretty crap.

Excluding Overclocking there is very little that the P5W DH does better than a cheap board, the sound is excellent, but since you're going seperate it's irrelevant.

A high end 7900GT is faster than a low end X1900XT, it gets complicated quickly. Don't worry about crossfire, it's a crap upgrade path, G80 and the next gen of ATI stuff will be out by the time you want to upgrade and you'll want DX10 as well. If you go eVGA then you can use a voltmod, stick a 3rd party cooler like a VF900 on it and still keep the warranty. The problem is finding eVGA in the UK.

DVD roms are no easier on discs than DVDRWs, nor are they faster (that depends on the drive). If you want to find out what the best drive around is check out cdfreaks.com, look in the newbie forum, the question will have been asked at least once in the last 24 hours . I like the Phillips because it's flexible wihtout having to install cracked BIOS, cheap, has lots of features and gets excellent writeups.

If you want the Tsunami then go for it, at the end of the day it's a case.

Where did it get these excellent reviews? Odds are they are mostly from 3rd tier reviewers or 2nd at best. Nearly all the reviews you find are done using computers that won't draw more than 200W at most, tested with software rather than multimeters and with no comparison to other products.

If you know what you're doing on the soundcard front i'm not going to argue with you. Enjoy.

Edit: Seems scan's prices have improved since i gave up on them, mgiht have to reconsider...

 

[Howard]

<<A high end 7900GT is faster than a low end X1900XT>>
I suppose you're talking about the 7900GT KO Superclocked? Honestly, they're about same price right now and you can actually OC the X1900XT too.

 

[Sean6180]

These are the reviews for the PS, they seem to be fairly well done (obviously some better than others)

-http://www.techspot.com/review/5-thermaltake_toughpower_750w/page3.html
-http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=266&type=expert&pid=5
-http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=940&pageID=2436
-http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardw...ews/thermaltake_toughpower_750w/4.html
-http://www.legitreviews.com/article/348/14/

Although there are some better ones they all seem to be more expensive.

I have a choice I could either put £60 towards the processor to get an e6600 or put it towards getting a sapphire X1900XTX, I could also get a 7900gtx but from what I can gather the X1900XTX is better in terms of performance. Or I could just save it but where's the fun in that ;p

Also I'm kind of confused with the sound card now as I read that the X-fi sounded better even without the DDL so I think I'll probably go for the X-fi. However is there any other way I could get DDL/DTS and is music ever DDL/DTS encoded?

Thanks guys

Sorry forgot to add that I've chosen the LiteON SHW-16H5S instead of the plexor however scan don't sell any benq dvd-rw or philips which is annoying so I guess I'll stick to the pioneer.

 

[Sean6180]

I just had a look at some GPU charts and it doesn't seem worth it to get anything higher than X1900XT. Does it matter what brand (they are the board makers right?) I get (eg sapphire, connect3d, ATI)?

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

Encoding into DD / DTS isn't going to make anything sound better vs a good analog card like X-Fi.

All the DDL cards are doing is.... why am I explaining this again? Here, read this
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=27&threadid=1918392&enterthread=y

 

[Sean6180]

Ah yes I read this earlier this morning. You mentioned that DDL wasn't necessary for music, does that mean that all music has already been encoded. Also what mean encoding into DDL isn't going to make anything sound better than a good analog card, isn't the whole point that you have actual surround sound which the x-fi doesn't provide even though the x-fi quality might be better?

BTW is there anything behind your name? Just curious

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

Originally posted by: Sean6180
Ah yes I read this earlier this morning. You mentioned that DDL wasn't necessary for music, does that mean that all music has already been encoded. Also what mean encoding into DDL isn't going to make anything sound better than a good analog card, isn't the whole point that you have actual surround sound which the x-fi doesn't provide even though the x-fi quality might be better?

BTW is there anything behind your name? Just curious

Dolby Digital and DTS are ways of sending discrete channel information compressed into a digital stream. Surround sound is not necessarily DD or DTS.

Pretty much all soundcards until these DDL cards came out just sent 5.1 analog out to computer speakers with then amplified the signal and sent it to the speakers.

The DDL cards take what would have been sent out in analog and then compress it and encode it into a digital stream. The digital signal is then decoded later by a receiver or a set of computer speakers with digital input.

Stereo music should be played back in stereo. You can apply 5.1 faking of your choice to it, but you're ruining it somewhat by doing that.
Music is not encoded into a DD or DTS stream unless you're talking multichannel music.
Music should be sent out from your soundcard in analog or it would be sent out digitally in a PCM stream.

So in summary any gaming card is going to be able to give you surround sound through analog. The creative cards have a monopoly on some stuff that you may want (EAX 3.0 and higher). Getting a DDL card only makes sense if you are connecting to a receiver and want to use a digital connection either by necessity or ease of setup. What makes sense for most users is to get a good analog card and connect to a set of comptuer speakers.

The name - not really... I read it on a get well card the day I signed up for AT. My first name choice was taken so I typed in this knowing it wouldn't be taken.

 

[Sean6180]

Ah, ok thats just cleared it up for me, thanks.

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

Originally posted by: Sean6180
Ah, ok thats just cleared it up for me, thanks.

:thumbsup:

 

[Icepick]

Please don't buy a X1900XTX. Go with the X1900XT and install an aftermarket heatsink/fan like a Zalman VF900, for example. That will keep the card running cooler and quiter than the stock cooler.

 

[Sean6180]

Yeah after seeing how similar the X1900XTX was to the XT I also decided it wasn't worth it. Do you think I need the cooler if I'm not going to overclock, or is that mainly for the noise. How quiet is it compared to the stock cooler?
Thanks

 

[Icepick]

In my opinion you'll need the cooler for noise issues. The X1900 line of cards is known for it's power consumption, heat production and noise output. You don't have to take my word for it. Just use the card for a few days and decide for yourself.

I'm a fan of the Zalman. The VF700 made my 6800GT silent. The VF900 is known to perform even better.

 

[Bobthelost]

I'm a fan of Arcitc cooling, much better value for money than zalman (when it was a choice between an AC NV5 rev3 or a vf700 at twice the price). Either AC or Zalman offerings will be better performing than stock cooling (With the exception of one brand that fit better heatsinks as standard, could be saphire, not up to speed on the ATI brands).