New Gaming PC (E6850)

[JuanT]

I will be purchasing these in Canada. No newegg deliveries up here sadly.

I have no brand loyalties, I'm in it purely for the efficiency.

That said, I do like the Antec P182 case but if there's a cheaper alternative I'll go with it.

This system will be for gaming primarily but some "light" video editing and PSing and so on. Mainly gaming, it's been too long since I've been able to get more than 20 fps on a new game.

I have still working software, my reliable WinXP SP2 for instance, as well as solid speakers, mouse and keyboard that I'll be keeping. For now, I'm keeping my CRT as I hunt for a decent 22-24" LCD of some kind.


I need suggestions with the following items:
Power Supply - Enough? Too much?
RAM - Do I need more to keep things fairly up to date?
Motherboard - A bit dated.
Case - ?
Hard Drive - Not soo sold on any particular brand name. I had great luck back in the day with Maxtor... but WD and Seagate are my options now I guess.



Here's what I have decided on so far:

Case: Antec P182
Power Supply: Corsair 520W ATX12V 2.2
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3
CPU: Intel E6850
HD: Seagate Barracuda 500 GB
Video Card: BFG 8800 GTS 640 MB
RAM: Corsair PC6400 XMS2 DDR2 TwinX Matched Pair

 

[bamacre]

Overclocking?

Get a P35 based motherboard, newest chipset for Intel cpu's.

Have you considered the Q6600 over the E6850?

PSU looks good, as well as the case.

 

[JuanT]

Thanks, I'll look around for a P35.

Should've mentioned no overclocking. This is more powerful than what I think I'll need for a while, having some OC'ing ability down the line would be nice but apart from the BFG card which comes pre OC'd I'll stay away from it.

As I understand it the Q6600 isn't a true quad-core so I'm not too keen on going for it, if there's a possibility that a true(r) quad-core comes down the line in the same socket.

I'm looking to mainly play TF2, Bioshock, Crysis, and Hellgate London on this (maybe World in Conflict) so I'm not too worried about performance as this should handle that fairly well.

 

[bamacre]

Originally posted by: JuanT
As I understand it the Q6600 isn't a true quad-core so I'm not too keen on going for it, if there's a possibility that a true(r) quad-core comes down the line in the same socket.

Oh screw that.

The Q6600 is going to run Crysis and other multi-threaded apps much better than the E6850.

If you are not going to OC the cpu, than an Intel P35 board is a good idea. But if you think you may OC in the future a Gigabyte P35 board is the way to go.

Also, if you go Q6600 you can get some cheaper DDR2-667 memory, as it doesn't need as much bandwidth as the E6850.

If you want to keep this cpu for a year or two, then I highly recommend the Q6600. More and more apps and games are multi-threaded, and the four cores will help.

 

[LightningRider]

Who cares if it's not a 'true' quad core, if the performance is there, what's the problem?

The 'true' quad core business is a marketing gimick as far as I'm concerned.

 

[jkresh]

there is a difference between a true quad and what the q6600, but peryn will also not be a true quad ( as far as I know, so the chance of seeing one on this socket is very small). The main difference is bandwidth/cache sharing between each set of dual cores, and for most tasks the differences are very small, for some server/workstation related apps the differences might be as high as 10%, but even with those (and especially with those, having a quad is much better hten a dual whether its a "true quad" or not).

Also note, the difference between a quad and a pentium D (which was not a true dual core) is night and day. The pentium D had a serious issue compared to an x2 (true dual core), but due to the larger cache and higher memory bandwidth the q6600 has much less of an issue compared to something like Phenom (or at least it should, can't say exactly until benchmarks are out).

 

[jeffw2767602]

q6600 > e6850
Mobo: get a p35 gigabyte board, maybe the ds4
HD: anything but seagate, run from seagate as fast as you can (bad firmware, insanely loud seek noises). i would go for a samsung 500gb. as a matter of fact, thats what i am replacing my 7200.10 with
RAM: you can NEVER go wrong with crucial ballistix, and ddr2800 is $55 after rebate

everything else looks good

 

[JuanT]

I'll look deeper into the Q6600 guys, thanks for that head's up. I am looking to keep this for quite a while. For the HD I'm not too keen on Samsung, it's what I have now and I've had some failures. Probably less than others though, and it is fairly quiet. Probably going to go WD.

If I go for 4 gb of ram I'd have to get Vista X64 don't I? Any gaming issues with that? Also, any specific 4gb recommendations?

Thanks a lot guys, this helps out greatly.