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Building a new PC


Tinker

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Time for an overhaul. Have been pricing up for a week now and think I am about good to go. But in no hurry to buy anything yet, maybe someone has some suggestions? I have some DVD drives already.

Case

Coolermaster HAF 912 Plus, Black Chassis

Price £57.95 << Arrived

MoBo / CPU

P6X58D-E Motherboard & Core i7-930 2.8GHz Processor

Price £369.99 << Arrived

RAM

Patriot Memory Viper II 12GB Series Sector 7 (3 x 4GB)

Price £139.99 << Arrived

Graphics

Gainward GeForce GTX 460 700MHz 2GB GDDR5 DualDVI HDMI

Price £173.60 << Arrived

PSU

OCZ OCZ700MXSP-UK / ModXStream Pro / 700W / Power Supply Unit / PSU

Price £55.73 << Arrived

Hard Drive

Western Digital 500GB Caviar Blue SATA-300 7200rpm 16MB

Price £31.99 << Arrived

DVD Drive

LiteOn 24x Int. DVDRW Black SATA + S/W

Price £11.98 << Arrived

OS

Microsoft Windows 7 Professional OEM 64-bit English DVD

Price £110.21 << Arrived

Total = £953.48

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Congrats on the upcoming new system! My thoughts are interspersed below. Do you have a certain budget for your new build?

If you are laying out that much for the CPU and are not in a rush, have you thought of waiting a little longer for the new Intel Sandy Bridge chips? They appear to have pretty impressive performance. Are you planning to overclock?

Graphics

Asus GeForce GTX 460 TOP 768MB

Price £113.35

From what I've read the GeForce 5xx series is what the GF 4xx series was "supposed to be". I.e. lots of power but running at a decent temp and noise level. Have you looked at the 5xx series equivalent to the GF 460? AMD/Radeon cards are pretty competitive too vs. GF 4xx cards and may now be cheaper to compete with nVidia's refresh.

These days I'd definitely recommend a 1TB to 1.5TB HD as you get more GB per pound/dollar spent. And they generally come with a larger 32MB cache.

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I am with CR6 on the graphics card. If you are going to get a 460 at least get the 1GB version -- should just be a few dollars/pounds more for at least 5-10% boost in performance. It seems that the 570 is probably at a good price/performance point and will certainly last a good bit longer than a 400 series card.

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The Sandy! :drool: Nice, but i am sure in 6 months will be more reasonable priced, and probably there will be something new that is far better will be again available.

As for the graphics. Happy with the 4 range, taking on advice and going to grab a 1GB card instead.

Hard drives. Well this will be my 3rd PC I have here now, other`s all have large space (300 & 500), plus I do have 2 x 500GB external HD`s. None have even reached 50% capacity. I have no real need for anything larger.

W7 Pro for XP mode.

All looking good so far, thnx for posts.

:)

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Hi Tinker,

I'm guessing you want that XP compatibility because of 3d Max 5 right???? becuase honestly XP mode sucks in W7

you don't need W7 pro...just go for W7 Home Premium and download vmware player for free, their xp legacy support is much much better

and btw is the only one that does limited D3D support

Edited by Sgt. Atoa
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No I`ll not be running Max5 on this. Hopefully in the Summer will get my new license for the latest version of Max though. :rocky:

I am considering swapping the 750 PSU for THIS 650W version. Is not a modular unit but is more than enough for me and save around £45.

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Pretty sure it will be fine, in fact, it should run an SLI solution, if I end up with 2 cards. But if there any issues with it, I do have an 850W already here in this duel core machine I can swap over.

Case arrived today, lovely looking thing.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Having issues with the RAM. Only seems to be recognizing 8GB out of 12GB.

Couple of topic I found that seem to indicate it is an error with the X58 board:

Bios not recognising all of my RAM

Asus X58 + 6/12GB memory overclocking - detecting less memory than installed

Although I am struggling to understand what is going on and how to fix it.

:hmm:

Will do a basic test tomorrow, and insert 1 at a time, and see if all sticks work.

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mb_ram_slots.jpg

Using just 2 sticks, I placed them into the correct positions above in #1 and #2

Only 4GB shows up!

Placed the 2 sticks into #1 and #3 now 8GB show.

So maybe the #2 slot is faulty?

Right now not really in any trouble with this. 8GB is running fine. Have installed many programs and games. Played several games, having no issues at all.

I will probably go and try to contact the motherboard manufacturers support first and see if that gives anything new. Pretty much spent a days holiday on this today, going to give up for now.

I can grab another 3 sticks I guess, maybe then it will read 20GB instead of 24?

:popcorn:

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  • 1 month later...

Never solved this issue. Still running 8GB of RAM. Checked both the RAM and MB sites, tried every solution available, no joy.

Problem is, about to build a new modding PC similar to this. Now I need to look at different parts, to ensure this issue does not appear. Maybe a different brand of RAM this time?

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  • 3 months later...
  • 2 months later...

I sent the MB and CPU bundle back last month, They confirmed the MB was defective. :rolleyes: Had a refund as the store had no more stock.

Bought a X58 Sabertooth and the i7 960, all up and running, all 12GB of RAM is there. At last.

SLI solution would not work because I had 2 cards that where the exact same model and brand, however 1 has 2GB memory, and the other has only 1GB.

However there is a hack over on the Nvidia site that can fix this. It basically sets both cards to run at the lowest factor. So both cards are now fully running in SLI mode, they both run at 1GB of memory each. Details of this can be found here:

Use the following steps to enable Coolbits

So finally fully functioning. Now time to start building a second to replace my much outdated modding machine.

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