Wanted - hardware for complete system upgrade

[Aldersan]

I'm running an AX850 myself and it's one helluva nice power supply! Super quiet, the modularity is awesome, and I haven't had any issues with it in the year I've had it, seems rock solid! The sleeved cables are nice too

[Munty]

Indeed, very nice. Sadly my antiquated case and CPU fans are meaning the quietness of it is unnoticeable for the mostpart but it's still a noted improvement even now!

Still no sign of the new baby yet (3 days late now!) but I got a windfall this morning by the way of a tax rebate. Bearing in mind I already have the PSU, Her Majesty has seen it fit to provide me with an additional £650 towards the project! Considering the motherboard and RAM will cost me less than £200 that means I have some nice free reign on CPU and GPU now. Though I can only really splash out on one of them to be fair.

So here's the question, GPU or CPU? I'm tempted to stick with a new i5 rather than go all out on an i7 as the extra features will go almost entirely unused and it'll eat up an extra £100 while CPUs are probably the quickest desktop component to become dated... So maybe I should get a better GPU? I know they date just as fast but I'd rather have a nice 2GB card than go xfire on my 1gb ones for the next year.

Any thoughts? Going to the shops now to pay in my cheque and do some window shopping!

[Munty]

I'm all of a sudden having trouble comparing motherboards. I thought I'd made a final decision already but it seems there are a lot more choices out there than I originally thought! With this in mind a little more advice would be much appreciated...

First off I'm going i5 or i7, that means I need a 1155 socket right?

Good chipsets out there are the P67 and Z68 I think. Is that right? Are there better ones and are there any major differences aside from the prices?

I'm looking at getting a Gigabyte board but I don't understand their naming conventions. I know the first part is fairly simple. Most start GA followed by the chipset (GA-P67/GA-Z6 Then it has a suffix that I don't understand though along the lines of UDx where x is a number from 3-7. This is sometimes followed by additional letters such as the GA-Z68XP-UD3P (I don't know what the XP means either but these letters are often different as well) I'm ready to buy the motherboard and RAM come next week and obviously the RAM I choose will depend on the mobo so is there any advice to be had? I don't want to spend too much on the mobo, between £100-200 but preferably the lower end of that...

Any advice on the mobo issue (as well as the CPU/GPU issue!) would be much appreciated so thanks in advance

[TheMainMan]

As long as your i5 or i7 has the model number 2xxx then you're correct that it is socket 1155. I've built on the Z68 platform and highly recommend it, especially if you're gaming for the Lucidlogicx Virtu. Plus lots of USB 3.0 and SATA3. I can't help you with Gigabyte's naming conventions as I'm still an Asus die-hard.

As far as more money on CPU or GPU, I would personally say GPU. You can spend less than the jump to the next CPU and see a huge difference in what you can buy GPU-wise. With so many things allowing for GPU hardware acceleration it can make more of a difference than you would expect outside of gaming.

[Munty]

Thanks MM, been doing some more online window shopping today and I think I've reached a likely conclusion. I think based on the current prices, what I'm going to be using this computer for, and how briefly something in this world is 'the best there is' I'm going to stick with my earlier thoughts.

A Z68 motherboard is going to do me just fine as I'll NEVER make use of everything it has to offer. I also can't imagine any need to upgrade it in the near future as the only things I frequently upgrade are PSUs (because my cheapo no-name grey boxes always explode) and GPUs. Given that I now have a spanker of a PSU with a 7 year warrantly and I'm about to spend a fortune on a new GPU, I can't see any further upgrades to this system for at least 3 years in reality. My current setup has actually lasted me over 5 years if you can believe it with only ONE new graphics card!

Anyway, Z68 mobo and I'm thinking to stick with a top of the line i5 CPU rather than go into the more expensive i7 territory just so I can not use it's numerous hardcore features. Is the 'best' i5 still the 2500k? I think I understand naming conventions of the new intel chips but help is always good!

As for the card I've been looking at ATI's offerings tonight, the 6900 family. I figure 6950 is the baby of the family but not significantly cheaper than the 6970 and the 6990 are almost exclusively 4GB £500+ products which I'm neither willing nor able to invest in a GPU. That gives me the HD 6970 as a nice middleground and I can actually pick one up for just over £200 with a 2 year warranty which isn't half bad.

I think before I shut the lid on this I'll spend tomorrow looking over nvidia's latest creations, 570s and such isn't it? I'm not a staunch supporter of either camp so I don't particularly mind which one I go with. Chances are it'll be the one that looks best because I'll be damned if I'm going to spend this much cash on a component and not show it off!

Note to self : must redesign desk design to put new gizmos on show...

EDIT : Just to clarify... Why is it nvidia seem to only make cards in 1-1.28GB? I've seen a few 2GB ones but the majority of what I see all look rather low in power. The 570, 580 and 590 are all much more expensive than the 2GB HD6970 I'm looking at but none seem to match them in memory. I'd always thought that was pretty important in a GPU so is it as wierd as it seems or do the 500family cards compensate for it in some funny techy way that I don't understand?

[TheMainMan]

The 2500k is still the best i5 chip as it has a slightly better integrated graphics core and unlocked multipliers which the Z68 chipset can take advantage of for overclocking (there are modes that allow for an auto-OC with that setup when needed).

I'm an nvidia guy so I can't help much with the ATI side of things (though I do like the 6770s for a bang for buck card when I'm building for others). The nvidia memory amounts will be odd compared to the ATI as they don't always use standard memory multiples. For a quick comparison of GPUs, I like to use this list. Updated monthly, it gives you a comparison of reference designs.

[Munty]

Ok after a brief holiday from forum posting and the birth of my little boy (finally!) I'm back for some quick fire advice...

Dabs.com where I bought my PSU is having a sale on this http://www.gigabyte.com/products/pro...px?pid=3850#ov but I've been thinking about going with this one up till now http://www.gigabyte.com/products/pro...px?pid=3853#ov

Personally I'm all for saving £50 so it seems like an excellent deal to me but I can see there are a few differences between the two options that don't make much sense to me. As far as I can tell, the UD3P has 'Hardware OverVoltage Control IC' where the UD3H doesn't but the UD3H has a fair few features over the cheaper option. They include 'Dynamic Energy Saver™ 2', 'HDMI™-The Next Generation Multimedia Interface', 'DVI Support' and 'Display Port Support'. All of these are listed in the above links but none mean a great deal to me. In addition there are a few more things that the cheaper UD3P has that the other choice does not but there seems to be a lot more in the way of onboard graphics capabilities in the UD3H. Personally I don't think that matters squat for me as I won't be using the onboard card. Ever...

So where do I stand? Does the UD3H actually have anything significant over the UD3P? Because I can't see any real reason to be spending an extra £50 on something that seems almost identical with a superfluous onboard GPU in tow.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated as the deal won't be on for long! As soon as I'm decided on this I'll be ordering the mobo, RAM and CPU (still looking at the 2500k but there seem to be a fair few options out there even so! Is sandybridge the best right now or have I missed something? I know ivybridge is coming but I'm not waiting that long...)

Also going to be needing a cooler for the CPU so if there are any thoughts for that I'd love to hear them too. I've already been told that the CPU itself just plugs in (is it really that simple???) but I've never fitted an aftermarket cooler either so what do I need to know about that? Presumably they'll come with paste won't they? How much as I've heard people slammed on here before for using massive amounts of the stuff :p

Thanks as always for any advice, T

[xr4man]

yes it really is that simple. the cpu will just drop in the socket and then you fold over the retaining tray and bar. the heatsink will be almost as easy too. it will either come with a thermal pad already installed or come with paste. if paste, then you just put it on in your favorite way and then attached the heat sink and plug in the fan.

personally i would go with the cheaper of the two mobos. since both are probably high quality.

[Munty]

Thanks for the reply. I went ahead and got the cheaper one, hell £50 is no small saving and I can't see any major differences save for onboard graphics! Haven't ordered RAM or CPU yet so will wait for the board to arrive next week before I do. Still looking for advice on AM cooling for the CPU if anyone has any ideas.

[Munty]

Ok back on track again as my motherboard arrived today! Sadly I currently have no processor, RAM, heatsink or graphics card to put it to use right now so it'll stay packed away for a little longer. I really want to get my new system set up though so I'm now looking for some finite advice on the last few aspects of this build!

I was waiting for the board to arrive before ordering my RAM but now I'm ready to do it I'm confused. The only good 4GB options I can find are G.Skill products, one of which is green and the other red... Now it may be only asthetic but I have some nice black components going into this build and I think it would look a lot nicer if the ram followed suit.

The gigabyte website has a list for RAM compatibility for the board I'm using which can be found here > http://download.gigabyte.eu/FileList...8x-ud3p-b3.pdf but nothing really jumps out aside from the G.Skill sticks.

I'm looking to go with 4x4GB right away as it's really surprisingly cheap these day but I was always hoping to put some Corsair memory into this build. I decided a while ago that I couldn't do it as they weren't listed in the chart but apparently there is a lot of information missing on that chart and there are others who seem to be using a combination of my board and Corsair Vengeance RAM.

That seems perfect for me as I do like the Vengeance sticks and can get 4x4GBs of it fairly cheaply. Of course I don't want to do this without being certain it'll work for me though so how do I make absolutely certain before I put in an order? The Corsair blurb says something like 'suitable for all dual channel motherboards' and the same for triple channel. Quite frankly it means very little to me though so I'd really appreciate someone who's able to tell me if I can get a 16GB kit of Vengeance that will be compatible with my board.

Anybody?

Still looking for thoughts on a decent heatsink for the i5 too (which is similarly awaiting order!) but I think I'll go with the 6970 for a graphics card. One last question though. My mobo says it's 'nvidia SLI ready' but is there a major difference between that and ATI's crossfire? I'd like to double up at some point so if I'm not able to do it with the Radeon then maybe I should reconsider a Geforce card. I'm hoping (and assuming) that it'll work fine either way but a confirmation either way would be nice please!

EDIT : Am I being a bit simple? Does dual, triple and quad just mean 2, 3 or 4 slots? Because I obviously have 4 :p

EDIT AGAIN : Provided someone can confirm that the Vengeance RAM is compatible with my board it seems I can get both that and the CPU from Amazon for a pretty good price. Here are the links with technical info so please feel free to check them out for me! Spending money makes me very nervous...

4x4GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 memory - http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...A3P5ROKL5A1OLE
Sandybridge 2500k i5 CPU - http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...A3P5ROKL5A1OLE