OT - New PC Help.Follow

is this a custom build?
or is this a pre-built?
what is the price for this package?

CPU:
cool...

HSF:
well, stock is fine, it comes with the CPU purchase.

MB:
firstly, this is a micro-atx board for SFF cases. this does not have enough slots for SLI and hence will not be suitable for your dual video cards.

RAM:
iirc, WinXP Pro, you only need 2 GB...

Video:
same as above... but here's the thing... you're getting 2x video cards that go for appx $200 a pop, ttl $400 ish... sli is cool and all, but i'm sure you can get a nice single card for that price. was going to suggest the 9850gx2 but that goes for bout $600 range.

wow is not that video intensive game... and no matter how much you spend on your video and such, the chars will still look somewhat cartooney...

i'd like to suggest that you go and research your build a bit better.

what's your budget? if it is a custom build?

P35 chipset boards are nice, the prices should go down due to recent release of the 780/790 chipset... and they are still very good boards... but the P35 chipset does not support SLI... crossfire yes, but not SLI...
DDR3, it's very expensive and you dont have to go there now... hence the P35 versus the P38 may be better buy for you.

you can always fall back to a old Nvidia 680 chipset that allows SLI... you can make a sweet SLI rig with the nvidia stock 680i A1 rev board, and get the 8800gts in SLI if you must have SLI...

Unless you run XP x64, you won't be able to use all of that RAM. XP x86 can only address 4GB of memory total, between all devices, including RAM and your gfx card.

The 9600GT is the +1'd version of the 8600GT, it's still a middle of a road card. It should run WoW quite well (although not at max settings) but why don't you get a new 8800GTS g92, 8800GT x2 SLI or the 9800GX2.

Make sure you look up reviews for the PSU that came with your case, more often than not, it's a crappy one. Even if it is a good one, 420w is still pretty low, you should check out 500-600w PSUs.

If you keep all of your space hogging media on an external drive, you may be fine with a 120GB, although storage is so cheap (500GB < $100), you don't want to shortchange yourself for the future.

The 9600GT is closer to the 8800GT in terms of performance, it will run wow at max without breaking a sweat. For that matter the 8600GT is able to play wow at max without AA at average resolutions.

Like said already a quality PSU is important. a 420 watt PSU will not power a single 9600GT, SLI would be out of question. While wattage should give a good idea of the power of a PSU for a single modern card you want 30A+ for SLI 40+ on the 12v rail minimum. More important than all of the above is quality! Get one from a quality manufacturer and look up reviews.

9600GT is in the same price range as the 8800GT, and is worse than the GTX.

That board doesn't support SLI. If you are going to go SLI, you need an Nvidia board currently. In the same price range, the P5n-t would be your board (still using DDR2 ram)
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=610&l4=0&model=1981&modelmenu=1

But you really want the Striker II extreme... (ddr3, etc)

As far as power supply, for that setup you need a 700 watt power supply at a minimum.

For the processor, I'd reccomend one of the new 45 nanometer processers. Faster, and yet cooler running than the older ones.

I'd go with this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115028


We have a 9600gt at work in one of the new conference room PC's we built. It seems to be workign fine so far. HAven't had a chance to benchmark it, but its basically equivelent to an 8600 gt with a slightly faster processor and newer instruction set. Could go triple SLI with 3 of them if you use the board I specced above.

You want XP professional due to the security and networking features.

For hard drive you want at least a 150gb Raptor 10,000 RPM drive.

If you go with the processor i listed, the standard heat sync will be fine. But a little water cooling never hurts! Make sure you get a case with 120mm fans!

I REALLY doubt this.

Why? because to use DX10, AFAIK you need Vista, and vista with 2 gigs becomes 1.5 gigs of ram. A single 8600 and 1.5 gigs of ram can NOT hold crysis on full settings. It just cant.

Filterspawn,

much better looking... seems you've researched your parts better here...

as for PSU, yea, you can get in excess of 1000W these days but that's silly...
get a nice reliable brand and it'll do nicely.

MB, evga had some rough start with their 680i board but they do have one of the BEST return policy... so the VGA for sure, get a eVGA...

the 680 chipset board, select the A1 revision...

Video Card, is the 9800GX2 backwards compatible with the PCIe slots that's on the 680 chipset board? just reconfirm... and it is a awful lot... with that MB, perhaps even the 8800gtx g92 in SLI may be nice and up to par with the rest...



are you SURE?

you are going to open a new can of worms in this...
furthermore, if you are going to run stock, it's not worth watercooling... it's costly and cumbersome... fun but costly...

1) Have you any experience in WC'd rigs?
2) DO NOT GET Thermaltake junk!
3) DO NOT GET pre-made pkg crap except perhaps some of Petra's Starter Kits
4) you need lots of planning, case, loop, fan and rad placement... to avoid having to mod your case... else, get some tools and roll up your sleeves...

here's some of my build logs in Water Cooling...
Lian-Li V1000B build...
CM Stacker 832 Dual Loop build...

also that's a great site to get info and help in water cooling and computers.

I'm going to chime in and go against the grain ...

I would say up your processor to the E6750 2.67 GHz for the extra $50 (?). It's a significant clockspeed upgrade, and better value for your money.

Other than that, the system looks good ... Upgrade the CPU and it will be identical to mine, except that I'm running my old n7950GT 512meg in XP. Nevertheless, I run WoW at steady 60 FPS (45 in very busy areas) and I can run Crysis without Dx10 at medium-high settings at 35 FPS. I'm very happy w/ the performance for the money I've spent.

Oh and LOL at the person who thinks their laptop can display 80 FPS (I've never heard of a laptop with anything higher than a 60 Hz refresh rate, but I'm sure he doesn't know what that means ...)

Perhaps if you're using a 1280x1024 display, a 9600GT will run WoW on max settings. My 8800GTX chocks up running WoW at max settings at 1920x1200.

If you get that sort of performance in WoW on the 8800GTX then you've got a bottleneck somewhere else in your system.

For CPU cooling, I'd recommend air cooling with the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro. It's dirt cheap and very effective. The Intel reference HSF is adequate but can be a little whiny at times.

The CPU itself, the E6550 is a mid-range processor and there's little to recommend it. You'd be better off going with the base-spec E4500 and overclocking it. You should be able to achieve around 3Ghz with this and the cooler above.

On Windows XP, 2Gb is ample RAM. If you've got 4Gb, you're wasting money because 32-bit Windows will not be able to reference it all.

Graphics cards... a single Nvidia 9800 GX2 will blow WoW out of the water. It's the single most powerful (and expensive) card available (for home use) right now. There's no need (other than Crysis at high resolution) for it.

Sound card. You've said that the mobo has on-board sound but this is never as good as a decent sound card. If you're saving money on the single gfx card, less RAM and cheaper CPU, you can afford a decent sound card. Something like the X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty. (You don't have to like Jonathan Wendel to buy the card).

Case. I don't know what you're upgrading from or building into but since the Nvidia 8800 series came out, graphics cards have been extending lengthwise to fit all the processing power in. You might want to check you've got enough physical space to accomodate them.

I have no business in this thread. Just got caught reading another filterspawn topic.

Q6600 @ 3.0ghz, 3GB 800mhz ram, drops to 40fps in Shatt and some places in the Outlands.