your thoughts on my new rig please

[Vesper8]

Hi all. Well it's been almost 3 years since I built my current PC and I figure I'm due for an upgrade. Also I could use a 2nd PC and with my income return coming in.. this is what I'm going for.

Your thoughts are always welcome.. maybe I missed something.

A few notes before I post my small list. I haven't included any video card, I'm going to keep my x1900xtx for now and will wait for the next generation before upgrading my GPU.

I picked a slow 1TB hard drive, that's because I will also be keeping my 74GB Raptor for my OS partition.

I intend to use Vista 64, hence why I am going with 8GB of ram. I do a lot of graphic design and use Adobe CS3 almost daily so after a bit of reading, it seems obvious that 8GB in Vista 64 using CS3 is extremely useful.

Lastly, I picked this particular motherboard because a) I absolutely needed 6xSata (2xeSata), and b) I want to have the possibility of using 2x ATI cards in Crossfire. I like that this mobo is PCI-E 2.0 compliant too. Otherwise.. I've never owned an Abit before.. I hope they're good.

Here are my specs :

Motherboard : Abit IX38 QuadGT
Ram : 2 X Mushkin EM PC2-6400 4GB 2X2GB DDR2-800
Case : Coolermaster CM 690
PSU : Silverstone Strider ST60F 600W
HD : Western Digital Caviar GP 1TB
CPU : Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
CPU HSF : Noctua NH-U12P

Please let me know if you see anything wrong with this.

I'm getting the above for ~1150$ CDN shipped and tax included.

Thanks!!

 

[okstatefan69]

you might as well get a Q6600 instead of the E8400 if your into graphic and Adobe it'll make use of the 2 extra cores, because those are multi threaded apps

 

[Winterpool]

Q6600 ++. If you can afford it, you might look at the Penryn quadcores as well. Others know far better than I what cooling would be sufficient for overclocking.

For what it's worth, there are varying reports amongst Newegg customer reviews about out-of-box IX38 support for Penryns and quadcores. Abit seems in one of its good phases these days, however, especially when it comes to P35 boards. I'm a bit sceptical of the value of SLI / Crossfire solutions. Would you consider something like the Abit IP35 Pro and putting the savings towards your next-generation (RV700 or GT200?) video card? Both of these are rumoured to be dualcore gpus.

 

[Vesper8]

I looked at the Q6600, and even the Q9450 for a long time before deciding and I just didn't think they were worth it for now. Yes it would help when doing a lot of multitasking but too few applications use the 2 extra cores (2 is more than enough). I'd rather get 2 much faster cores and my next purchase, in 2 years when the octo-cores are mainstream.. might be a quad and by then they'll be dirt cheap.

Anyway I modified the board I'm getting after several hours of research. I needed a board that would offer eSata OTB and also I read countless reports of the x38 boards not being compatible with 45nm cpus without a bios flash. And flashing the bios with no other 775 cpu on hand seemed a hard task indeed. So I decided to go for a x48 board which comes compatible with the new CPUs otb.

This board also comes with a eSata bracket and supports hotplug. And it sports the pci-e 2.0 slots which was another requirement since I want it to be future proof for the next-gen GPUs.

And I also went for a slightly more powerful PSU which is supposed to be ultra quiet too.

So my new build is this :

Motherboard : Gigabyte X48-DQ6
Ram : 2 X Mushkin EM PC2-6400 4GB 2X2GB DDR2-800
Case : Coolermaster CM 690
PSU : Corsair TX750W 750W
HD : Western Digital Caviar GP 1TB
CPU : Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
CPU HSF : Noctua NH-U12P