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View Full Version : Expert Advice Needed for Upgrade



Heofz
12-26-2006, 06:41 PM
Hi everyone, hope you've all had a merry christmas!

The joys of having a birthday on christmas eve immediately followed by christmas has resulted in me receiving a fair bit of spending money, and now I'm finally getting round to upgrade my machine :D

My Mach II Phase unit is currently away being modded by Ian Parry from these forums, so the main objective of this pc upgrade is to make the most of this cooling by getting the highest overclock possible, and thus the best performance (obviously).

The components I'm looking to purchase are:


CPU - got intel e6600's in mind, seeking a good batch week for high OC. Is there any way I can guarantee obtaining a good clocker? I don't mind paying a little bit extra if that's the case
Mobo - ASUS P5B-Deluxe/ASUS P5W-DH/Abit AW9D-MAX ? Which Should I Choose? Or would it be a good idea to wait for the new nForce chipset mobos?
RAM - Obviously I'll need DDR2. 2GB preferred, the most important thing is that it won't hold back the overclocking, but my expertise unfortunately lies with non-DDR2 memory. Which should I get?
PSU - Must be powerful enough to cope with big overclocks and whatever else I might throw at it in the future (at least 600W), must have good v-rails and also have a modular cable design as I hate redundant cabling dangling around inside my case

Now from what I've been researching so far from reading these forums and articles on the net, as long as the above listed things are ok, and the phase change performs as expected, I'm optimistically hoping for a 24/7 overclock to at least 4.2Ghz. Would you say this is realistic? It would be

I'm looking to spend about £800 - £900 (That's roughly $1700 US).

Any advice/recommendations would be greatly appreciated :)

nn_step
12-26-2006, 06:44 PM
The real question is what is your absolute first concern for this rig?
Gaming or Benchmarking?

Heofz
12-26-2006, 06:49 PM
hehe, very good question.

I think I'm 50/50 on that one :p:

I have an X1900XT-X so I'm hoping that my upgrade from my current 3700+ san diego (24/7 OC @ 2.9ghz and falling slowly) will make a huge difference on both counts

nn_step
12-26-2006, 06:55 PM
because if games are you top concern I would advise to put the majority of that money towards graphics and Ram.
such as a 8800GTX and 4GB of DDR2 D9 chips. Possibly the usage of 2GB sticks so that you can upgrade to 8GB of ram later.

Heofz
12-26-2006, 07:36 PM
Hmm, well I'll need to (and want to) upgrade my mobo anyway, as my current one is not DDR2, which means I need to upgrade cpu (and I really want a good clocking e6600 as I have already forked out for the phase change). Do you recommend the crucial anniversary ram? From what I've read, that seems to be the better d9 modules around...

I realised I'll be selling my current parts anyway, and I don't mind paying a bit more, so lets say I can spend about £1500.

I think choosing the motherboard is going to be the hardest decision. Does anyone know which one is *the* best for overclocking conroe's under phase cooling?

Edit: Got my eyes on the ASUS striker now :)

XSAlliN
12-27-2006, 02:32 AM
I have an X1900XT-X so I'm hoping that my upgrade from my current 3700+ san diego (24/7 OC @ 2.9ghz and falling slowly) will make a huge difference on both counts

Actually it won't, not with current or near future applications, your current CPU is good enough until applications get optimized for Dual Core (multicore) - wait till DX 10.1 is out if you're planing on moving to VISTA (or else DX10 cards or useless), not even a VGA isn't recommended at this time, your X1900XT is just fine until ATi R600 Cards or out - it's not like you have games to play whit a GF8800 :).

PS.Plus you'll save some £ ;)

Heofz
12-27-2006, 05:09 AM
hehe, well I ordered 4GB of crucial 10th anniversary edition ram, and the enermax liberty 620W PSU. Dispatched this morning :D

At this stage even if I decide not to upgrade the CPU & mobo etc, I'll have a better PSU than my current tagan 480W (which sometimes makes funny hissing noises on boot) and its modular! :D And the RAM isn't gonna be available for long :)

Another thing about dual core that I like is that I'm hoping it will make multitasking in windows much smoother. Before I got my 3700+ I had an Intel 3Ghz Northwood clocked @ 4ghz. I noticed that no matter how busy my PC was, the HT always made things smooth. The 3700+ is faster, but still whenever I have a greedy application running it detracts from the whole performance of the machine.

I think I'm going to go with the ASUS 680i Striker when stock arrives in stores soon, and in the meantime I'm going to hunt around to see if I can find a good batched E6600 for a high OC on phase cooling.

Besides, I've spent so much money on my Mach II unit already so I don't think I'd do it justice if I just left the 3700+ in there. Don't get me wrong, I am a bencher at heart... I was even #1 on the CPU test for 3DMark03 for 3 months running at one point. Ahh so long ago.... ;)