New Computer Parts List

[npsken]

I am going to be ordering these parts soon, and I was wondering if the people here at Anandtech would be willing to critique my choices so I could possibly make better ones.

I am mainly into media creation (Photoshop, After Effects, Audition, etc), and I am not a hardcore PC gamer, however, Crysis would be nice to run. So one of the issues I want to address is how much of a hit in performance Vista would yield if I used it rather than XP. My original plan is to triple boot XP, Vista, and Ubuntu.

I am also planning on over clocking the Q6600 to 3.2ghz.

So here is the list of parts that are of importance (Newegg item numbers) (I already have the monitor, keyboard, mouse and an HDD):

Asus 20X DVD Drive with Lightscribe (N82E16827135156)
XFX Geforce 8600 GT (N82E16814150229)
Thermaltake Purepower 500W (N82E16817153052)
G.SKILL 2GB ram (N82E16820231121)
GIGABYTE P35 (N82E16813128059)
Intel Q6600 (N82E16819115018)
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro (N82E16835186134)

In addition to this I will also be getting some Arctic Silver.

In the mean time, I have to go to work. So sorry if I don't reply until later tonight.

Thanks for the help,
- Kenneth Powers

 

[jkresh]

looks good for the most part but an 8600GT isint going to do much in Crysis, if you can budget it in you should move to either an 8800gt 256 or a 3850, both will be a significant upgrade in terms of graphics power.

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Yeah Crisis will absolutely kill that 8600gt. You have an interesting problem, you say your not a gamer but the one game you want to play happens to be the most hardware demanding game out there.

I say split the middle and get a ati 3850 it should play Crisis on low/med settings without much problems

 

[Denithor]

abit IP35 + Q6600 $375 at Mwave (after $25MIR)
ASUS Black SATA DVD Burner with LightScribe $33 at Newegg
Kingston N5 2x1GB DDR2-800 $60 at Newegg
Tuniq Tower 120 $45 at Newegg (need this cooling for Q6600 @ 3.2GHz)
OCZ 600W $70 (after $15MIR)
Radeon HD3850 512MB (OC to 720/1800) $210 at Newegg

 

[Cheex]

You say that you are mainly into media creation. Therefore I would suggest the following memory, given that the price is okay for your budget.

G.SKILL 4GB(2 x 2GB)

 

[npsken]

Wow, thankyou for all of your suggestions.

One question though: If I were to have Vista rather than Dual Boot XP and Vista what type of performance hit could I expect?

 

[Roguestar]

Very little if any.

 

[Denithor]

One final comment, if your hard drive is more than ~2 years old it's probably worth the extra $70 to buy a new 250GB drive, install Vista on that drive, and use the old one for XP by itself. Drives have a tendency to do nasty things like fail at the most inopportune times.

 

[Ausm]

Originally posted by: GuitarDaddy
Yeah Crisis will absolutely kill that 8600gt. You have an interesting problem, you say your not a gamer but the one game you want to play happens to be the most hardware demanding game out there.

I say split the middle and get a ati 3850 it should play Crisis on low/med settings without much problems

Agreed, Crysis would bring that GPU to it's knees.


Ausm