My Gaming Rig (soon to be)

I

Iceman {Ky}

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Hey everyone, I am looking at building another gaming computer for myself. The one I am currently using is pieced together over a span of time, so the CPU and Motherboard are really outdated... The other things on it are mediocre at best. Here is what I am getting or have that I am keeping.

Already have
Acer 22in Moniter
Saitek Eclipse Keyboard
Logitech G5 Mouse
Tritton AX Pro Headset
Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty Pro Sound Card
AZZA Solano ATX Full Tower Case

About to have
XFX HD-585A-ZNBC Radeon HD 5850 Graphics Card
OCZ Gold 12GB DDR3 Memory
ASUS P6T6 Revolution X58 ATX Intel Motherboard
CORSAIR TX 950W ATX12V Power Supply
Intel Core i7-920 2.66GHz 130W Quad-Core Processor
Western Digital RE3 1TB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
PLEXTOR 24X DVD/CD Drive
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Operating System

On the things I am "about to have" I plan on finishing this purchase shortly after Christmas. Please comments on what I have listed and maybe some possible changes.
 
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Looks like a solid build. Only thing I would change would be the power supply. I would probably get a Corsair HX850, or if you really plan to use 950W in the future, a Corsair TX950

More expensive, but the build quality, better ripple suppression, better voltage regulation, better efficiency, and higher operating temps are more than worth it.
 
I looked over the Power Supply, I decided to go with the 950w you recommended.
 
Iceman {Ky} said:
I looked over the Power Supply, I decided to go with the 950w you recommended.
Click to expand...

Good move.

Getting a PSU of that power means you're going to Crossfire in the future, correct? Maybe look at an X58 board that supports tri-fire(that board only supports x16/x16/x4, the x4 slot will bottleneck a 5850). There are several X58 boards that support x16/x16 and x16/x8/x8. 8 PCIe 2.0 lanes would not bottleneck anything except a 5970 or a GTX 295. If you would ever consider running three way crossfire, I would get a board that will support it now. The ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 would be good for that. If you wouldn't consider three way, then the board you're getting now will be perfect.

Either way, extremely solid build. I'm sure you'll have fun with that baby!:thumbup:
 
### Hard drives:

Instead of one 1TB drive you should get 2x 500GB drives and put them in RAID 0.

RAID 0 basically does two things:

1. combines both drives into one drive (2x 500GB turns into 1TB)
2. reads/writes to both physical drives simultaneously cutting hardware read/write times in half

To match the price of the 1TB I recommend getting two of these:

Western Digital RE3 WD5002ABYS-01B1B0 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive



### CPU:

I have the i7 920 Nehalem @ 2.67ghz (est) and according to CPU-Z I am getting 2.8ghz(2806.4 - 2806.7mhz) at stock voltage.

The i7 is notorious for running hot, using the stock heatsink/fan is a NO NO.

Get a nice big one like the Noctua NH-D14

If you want to overclock it you will probably need to use water cooling, or just run hot all the time.. I recommend this block for water cooling: Watercool HEATKILLER? CPU Rev3.0 1366 LT as it has one of the highest flow rates of current socket 1366 blocks.



### PSU

For around the same price you can get this:

SILVERSTONE ST1000-P 1000W ATX 12V v2.3 & EPS 12V 80 PLUS SILVER Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply

80+ Silver is better than the Bronze one you listed, plus this is modular so you won't have unneeded cables in your case.

I am a fan of Silverstone PSU's, it's all I buy. My old build had the ST1000 and my current build has the ST1200. Have never had a failure of any kind.



### MoBo

Like FreakingHell said, if you want more than one gpu in the future you should think about getting another board.

I have the Asus P6T6 Workstation Revolution. It ONLY has PCIe 2.0 x16 slots, but you get:

* True @ x16 3-Way SLI™ in slots 1, 3 and 5 when slots 2 and 4 are not occupied
Click to expand...

However, you will not be able to use most sound cards unless they use the PCIe 2.0 x16 slot..

ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution with NF200 3xPCIe true x16 LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard
 
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3vlNomad said:
### Hard drives:

Instead of one 1TB drive you should get 2x 500GB drives and put them in RAID 0.

RAID 0 basically does two things:

1. combines both drives into one drive (2x 500GB turns into 1TB)
2. reads/writes to both physical drives simultaneously cutting hardware read/write times in half

To match the price of the 1TB I recommend getting two of these:

Western Digital RE3 WD5002ABYS-01B1B0 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive



### CPU:

I have the i7 920 Nehalem @ 2.67ghz (est) and according to CPU-Z I am getting 2.8ghz(2806.4 - 2806.7mhz) at stock speeds.

The i7 is notorious for running hot, using the stock heatsink/fan is a NO NO.

Get a nice big one like the Noctua NH-D14

If you want to overclock it you will probably need to use water cooling, or just run hot all the time.. I recommend this block for water cooling: Watercool HEATKILLER? CPU Rev3.0 1366 LT as it has one of the highest flow rates of current socket 1366 blocks.



### PSU

For around the same price you can get this:

SILVERSTONE ST1000-P 1000W ATX 12V v2.3 & EPS 12V 80 PLUS SILVER Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply

80+ Silver is better than the Bronze one you listed, plus this is modular so you won't have unneeded cables in your case.

I am a fan of Silverstone PSU's, it's all I buy. My old build had the ST1000 and my current build has the ST1200. Have never had a failure of any kind.



### MoBo

Like FreakingHell said, if you want more than one gpu in the future you should think about getting another board.

I have the Asus P6T6 Workstation Revolution. It ONLY has PCIe 2.0 x16 slots, but you get:



However, you will not be able to use most sound cards unless they use the PCIe 2.0 x16 slot..

ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution with NF200 3xPCIe true x16 LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard
Click to expand...

RAID 0

Depends on what he wants. If he just wants speed it's a great idea. If he wants security and isn't worried about read/write too much, then not so much.

CPU COOLER

Not necessary if he's not going to overclock. +1 on the Noctua NH-D14, best air cooler around. Wouldn't be necessary to have water cooling to overclock either. That Noctua can run an i7 920 at 4.0 at a pretty comfortable temp(depending on the chip and ambient temps).

PSU

Looks like a good PSU for the price, but I would wait until a good review site(one that load tests ripple, voltage, and opens it up to take a look at build quality) to review it before I bought it. In the past Silverstone has been pretty good in terms of ripple suppression and voltage regulation though, so I'm not too worried about it.

MOBO

A PCI x1 sound card can be placed in a x16 slot, so that is irrelevant. That's a good board, if he is willing to spend that much.
 
Ok, as far as the heat sink... I am not sure this is necassary... My case has 5 rather large fans and I dont plan on OCing it. I think temps should be fine on either CPU. I am going to look into getting the CPU you suggested. Gotta run the figures again. Water cooling will be overkill honestly. Its expensive and mostly for bragging rights looks or a Take over the world computer. For the most part, the parts that are created today run realtivly cool. The case I picked out should help the cooling quite a bit.

I am going to stick with a 1tb Harddrive for the security reasons I have previously heard about, and I am going to use a 275gb backup for well, backup.

Do you all think that heatsink is really a needed thing for either of those CPUs. I am kinda maxing out what I wanted to spend already. The thing is computers go outdated REALLY fast. There is always something new and better coming out.

I may consider changing boards, Motherboard and processors I had are good, the ones you have picked are great. So its just a matter of money honestly. I will do more research on em when I get home later.
 
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Iceman {Ky} said:
Crossfire is always an option later on down the road. For now I am going to stick with just what I have on there. From what I see that board works good with the GPU right? As long as youre running a single 5850. I could be wrong, I hadnt heard anything about bottlenecking them.
Click to expand...

Nope. The board you have will be able to run as many as 2 of any card on the market today and not bottleneck them at all.
 
That looks like a sweet rig, but i agree that an after market hsf is a must, its the one think i really wish i had in my pc (stupid stock heatsink:facewall:)

i also have that exact monitor, and it is a beast. There is a reason that it has customers choice award
 
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Ok, I will get a heatsink... the one that was suggested is outta stock... I will wait around for it as long as I can, but I will get a heatsink.

I updated to the motherboard that Nomad suggested. I reviewed some processors some more, the one I have is 5x customer award winner and has over 1800 feedback with 5stars. The other one I was considering is $200 more and would get me 4x 3.06ghz but I think my friend said it best when at this point the computer is out developing the software. That would stirctly be just braggin rights and look what I have type of deal instead of actually worrying about the game. So everything is updated that I want updated for what has been mentioned so far. Please anymore suggestions would be appreciated. Would someone also double check me on compatiblilty, I went over it 3 times and everything looks good.... but Its been a long day and I could have easily missed something...

This is going to hurt my wallet badly :P
 
Don't waste your money on anything but the 920. They are all the same thing at different frequencies. The 920 can easily be overclocked to the speed of any other CPU if you ever need the speed.
 
Iceman {Ky} said:
Hey everyone, I am looking at building another gaming computer for myself. The one I am currently using is pieced together over a span of time, so the CPU and Motherboard are really outdated... The other things on it are mediocre at best. Here is what I am getting or have that I am keeping.

Already have
Acer 22in Moniter
Saitek Eclipse Keyboard
Logitech G5 Mouse
Tritton AX Pro Headset
Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty Pro Sound Card
AZZA Solano ATX Full Tower Case

About to have
XFX HD-585A-ZNBC Radeon HD 5850 Graphics Card
OCZ Gold 12GB DDR3 Memory
ASUS P6T6 Revolution X58 ATX Intel Motherboard
CORSAIR TX 950W ATX12V Power Supply
Intel Core i7-920 2.66GHz 130W Quad-Core Processor
Western Digital RE3 1TB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
PLEXTOR 24X DVD/CD Drive
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Operating System

On the things I am "about to have" I plan on finishing this purchase shortly after Christmas. Please comments on what I have listed and maybe some possible changes.
Click to expand...

Holy crap, nice!
 
Yeah you can OC the 920 well past 4.0ghz, I recommend NEVER OC'ing past 1ghz of stock without watercooling thought.. But since you won't be doing that let me talk more about what you could do!

RAID 0 is not as risky as people think, just make sure you read the reviews and tests to see which hard drives like to fail on raid..

If you want speed and security there is always RAID 0+1, you will need 4 hard drives for this though so that's probably out of the question lol.. In general RAID 0 is used for gaming/high performance and the rest are used mostly for servers. I think I heard about a RAID setup that uses 3 disks with RAID 0 and the 3rd is a backup of sorts but I don't remember, sounds like you aren't interested in RAID though.



You're compatibility is good, I'm not sure about the sound card but everything else will be perfectly fine.



And OC'ing isn't just for bragging rights, it may be more power than most games can handle at the moment but I guarantee that you will want the extra power if you do extensive video editing with Premiere or if you want to Fold@Home like crazy :D
 
Yeah, I will stick with the 1tb single Harddrive. My friend has several hard drives he actualy has 5 different ones that total to 2.6tb He takes alot of videos has alot of movies music pics so forth on his computer. Most of that is actually full. He has never had any problem with gaming maxes out crysis on very high settings. perfect fps so on... His system is around the same as this but maybe just slightly less... I am pretty content with everything so far on the list other than the price.. but the Windows 7 should get discounted to student edition, and I think I get a small discount for being a student.

Thanks guys for all the help.
 
hope you order that student version soon then, because the offer stops january 5th
 
Just to clarify, RAID 0 does NOT help fps (maybe a little but nothing noticeable). RAID 0 speeds up load times when games try to cache resources and whatnot.. For example, on a non-raid setup you could have long loads for games like L4D/L4D2. While on a RAID 0 setup you would probably be the first person to enter the game.

I don't have raid setup on my build yet so I can't speak with 100% accuracy but that is what I believe would happen based on the fact that I get the same horrible loads on L4D/L4D2 that I did before I upgraded my cpu/mobo/gpu and kept the same hard drive.


Just some food for thought.

Your build looks pretty good for what you need and your bank though so go for it and let us all know how it turns out :D
 
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