Your opinions please!

[TMHill]

I finally managed to put together a system for the budget I wanted - i'd love to hear any opinions on this:

CPU: i7 920
Mobo: Asus P6T SE X58
RAM: Corsair XMS3 6GB PC3-12800
Gfx: Sapphire HD5770
HD: Western Digital 2TB Caviar Green
PSU: Seasonic S12D 850W
Case: Antec 900 II
DVD: Liteon 24x
OS: Win7 Home Premium

Cost: around £1000

Thanks in advance for taking the time to give this some thought!


Tom

 

[farinha]

Here are a few thoughts:
The WD Green are no good to store the OS, they use less power but don't perform well. You should buy a smaller WD Black, very good performance, to store the OS and main applications and a larger one to store your data.
I 650W PSU is enough for your build, or you can get a 750W to add a second card later.
Corsair RAM are good but overpriced. Get this one: Newegg.com - G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL9D-4GBRL

 

[Slaymate]

I agree with farinha except for the memory. He's showing you a (2x2GB) kit and you'll need a (3x2GB) kit. I would look for OCZ, G.Skill or Mushkin.

 

[farinha]

Ops... my bad. Get these ones instead Newegg.com - G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL8T-6GBRM

 

[TMHill]

Thanks for the thoughts. Why are the Green no use for the O/S?

 

[farinha]

Because the Green has less performance. You want a fast HD do run the OS because the OS is making constant HD readings and writings.

 

[Druid]

The green isn't that bad. When I built my computer, I didn't know the difference, and I have a green, but a black would be better. I've had it for a year, and I think I'm gonna be stuck with it for two more because I'm never buying another hard drive. I'm going to wait for SSD's to become reasonable, and I think that will likely take 2 more years.

And, if I were going to drop money on an i7 system (like I did) I would want a more powerful gpu than that to go with it. I would say at least a 5850 if not something more powerful.

 

[S0ULphIRE]

Agreed on the more powerful GPU part, but disagreed on the green hd part. For storage drives they're fine. But for a main OS drive or to use in an external case, they aren't that great. I mean yeah they aren't horrible, but you can definitely see the difference between a green drive and a blue, even more so a black.

 

[baron5]

I'd grab something like this, in total under 1000 pounds.

Intel Core i7 920 D0 Stepping (SLBEJ) 2.66GHz (Nehalem) (Socket LGA1366) - Retail [BX80601920] Processors Intel Core i7
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Intel X58 (Socket 1366) DDR3 Motherboard [] Motherboards Intel LGA1366 (X58 Chipset) - SATA 6Gb/s
Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5850 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card [21162-00-50R] Graphics and Video ATI HD 5850 Series
OCZ Gold 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C8 (1600MHz) Tri-Channel (OCZ3G1600LV6GK) [OCZ3G1600LV6GK] Memory DDR3 Tri-Channel - PC3-12800
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (HD103SJ) [HD103SJ] Internal Hard Drives SATA 1TB & Over
OCZ ModXStream Pro 700w Silent SLI Certified Modular Power Supply [OCZ700MXSP-UK] Power Supplies OCZ
Antec 902 Nine Hundred Two Ultimate Gaming Case - Black [0761345-08010-1] Cases Antec
Sony Optiarc AD-7240S 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM [] Optical Drives DVD-RW SATA

 

[TMHill]

Sorry - should probably have made clearer that I have already bought the stuff !

Thanks for all your comments. I took the point on the Caviar Green and I bought an extra 640Gb Caviar Blue (didn't have the black) for the o/s and progs. The 2Tb Green will serve as a home for all home video, music, photo type stuff. I think thats a sensible outcome. I did read that the black can be quite noisy, and one of the aims was for this system to be silent - the blue is better than the black on that basis.

On the GPU - its a very fair point, and I considered the 5850 long and hard and decided that if I really want to push things, I'd buy another 5770 and crossfire them.

Thanks again



Tom