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thedom
30-12-2007, 03:49 AM
Hey guys, been reading through these forums for a while now and notice that there are quite a few well informed ppl here.

I've got until friday the 4th of january to decide what components to buy to build a new system, I can stretch to about £750 at the most.

The list goes as such

8800GT 512 meg (suggestions on which make/model are appreciated)
Western Digital Caviar SE16 500Gb
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7
OEM Q6600 G0 Stepping
Thermaltake Toughpower 750W
Thermaltake Tsunami Dreams Case (Black with window)
2 gig ram (DDR2 800 suggestions as to best brand to use appreciated)


and the part I could use some advice for, the motherboard,

I've been looking at the ASUS P5N32-E due to the 680 chipset and SLI, SLI is kinda a must as the next pay after I pay for this will get me a second 8800GT (Never had SLI before but will take reccomendations as to whether its worth it or not)

was also looking at the striker, but what im not clear on is, Is the P5N32-E plagued by the same problems as the striker? If the striker is stable these days, Is it worth me dropping the case and using my antec P180 to house the new stuff in and put the saved money into getting the striker?

I was looking to overclock the processor up to about 3.2 and would like to see games like cod4 running at my lcd's max rez (which is 1680x1050)
and being able to set the gfx above the LOW settings that I have been stuck with for ages now.

Should I bother with an SLI board at all, is the performance gain with SLI worth the money? Or should I just go for something completely different suggested by you guys?

I want to finally run CSS smoothly, be able to run cod 4 at settings other than LOW, in fact, run any recent games and upcoming games at settings other than LOW ! ! !

My pc at the mo is an athlon 64 3700, 2 gig ram, 250 gig IDE HD, AGP 7800GS
and man this thing really struggles with gaming these days.

Please Please Please help out and give me some ideas

All components will be bought from Novatech hopefully (Novatech Staff are welcome to offer me some kind of discount for buying all my stuff here if they wish ;) ! ! )

beej
30-12-2007, 04:32 AM
i used to have 2 XFX 7900gtx's in SLi and after taking one out i didnt see much difference. as for the 8800GT that should be more than enough on its own to play CSS and others. one thing i would do is upgrade the CPU though

thedom
30-12-2007, 04:39 AM
upgrade the cpu? from a quad core 6600 to a ?

beej
30-12-2007, 06:58 AM
i didnt read it correctly.. sorry my bad but as your on a tight budget, with the 8800GT here is a nice all-rounder in my opinion

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/spec ... ?NOV-88GT5 (http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?NOV-88GT5)

Novatech NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB PCI Express Graphics Card - Retail

its the cheapest and looks good as well, and the reviews are good, but its personal preference at the end of the day when it comes to choosing what parts you want

djgandy
30-12-2007, 11:34 AM
1650x1050 = No point in SLI. There is no point in SLI anyway.

When you next get paid wait till the new nvidia cards come out and splash out on one of those.

Personally I'd scratch the Tsunami case (owning the soprano myself) and get the antec p180/p182.
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prod ... p1s0n0m218 (http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/products/a887x1y0z1p1s0n0m218)

Thats your personal choice though.