Graphics card question

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dano4163

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I'm doing my first build. So far I have A AeroCool mid tower case(with a 120 mm & a180mm intake fans, and a 120mm exhaust fan). I have an AMD Phenom X4 9950 125 watt Quad core BE CPU, Asus M3a78-t motherboard, and a 850 watt power supply. Now it time to start looking at video cards. I want to use 2 cards as I'm trying to build a monster gaming comp. What I'm asking is which cards would be good on a crossfire setup? Also should I get a bigger cpu cooler or go with the stock one that came with the cpu? Any help would be great.
 
In what you could get with two video cards you can save money and buy one. I think the 4350 HD Card is what everyone is drooling over these days, If you don't 'want' ATi you can try the 9800 GT or the 2** Nvidia cards. Building a monster PC will need a lot more than a quad core processor and a huge wattage supply. I'd slim out a few hundred watts to be safe, say, 700?(I know I shouldn't talk, but the rosewill 950w was on sale).

What are you looking as far as ram?
You seem to have enough cooling as far as your case goes, what about your hard drives? Raid configuration?

I will be the first to tell you, the triple sli setup is a waste of time. Scratch that - MONEY.

The stock fan supplied with your quad core will keep it as cool as it needs to be. Do you want to overclock your processor? Then look into another cooler with a copper bottom i believe(stay away from ceramic, i believe steel or aluminum is a good one too).

The CPU cooler, I wouldn't know, start out by looking for the CPU chipset, read the reviews and compare with which one is the easiest to setup and the best temperatures.
 
Crossfire and SLI seem to be a waste of time... and concerning the post above I think he was referring to the 4850, not 4350.

You're best bet would be to get an hd 4870 or a gtx 280 if you want the best possible card. They will eat up anything you throw at it.
 
To the OP, what resoultion are you playing your games at? Because if it's 1920 x 1200 and above, then go for Crossfire. If anything lower than that, Crossfire isn't worth it.
 
I'm looking at using 8 gigs of ram, corsair, kingston, or pny. As far as hard drives would it be better to use multiple drives or one big one like say a 500 gig? Is a raid configuration is used when you use multiple hard drives? I got the larger psu to make sure that I have enough juice to run everything. I'm new at this so please bear with me. Thanks for the help.
 
I'm looking at using 8 gigs of ram, corsair, kingston, or pny. As far as hard drives would it be better to use multiple drives or one big one like say a 500 gig? Is a raid configuration is used when you use multiple hard drives? I got the larger psu to make sure that I have enough juice to run everything. I'm new at this so please bear with me. Thanks for the help.

Wow, your really looking to max out your build? Are you running a 64bit system? Autocad? Anyway, RAID on SATA drives isn't going to increase performance, you can run several hard drives in 0 or 1, all the raid job does is run all the disc as one large drive.

Larger PSU? How many watts?
 
The psu is 850 watts, I bought the AMD Phenom X4 9950 2.6 125 watt Quad core BE, the motherboard is a ASUS M3a78-T. I want to max this build out as much as I can so that I wont have to upgrade for a while. If I can set it up as a 64 bit system I want to.
 
64 Bit system is my only suggestion to take advantage of all the ram your putting into your machine.

The power supply looks good, run a 4850, do you have an hdmi monitor? Or are you not concerned with the onboard hdmi port on your motherboard? so far, everything looks good.

Have you made a decision on running a raid? how many hard drives are you looking to purchase?
 
Have not got a monitor yet. My next question was going to be about hard drives. Would it be better to run multiple hard drives with a raid card or just one big hard drive? Also which would be the better brand of ram, kingston, corsair, or pny? I'm setting this up for gaming.
 
i dont think you will need a RAID card with that mobo. you can get multiple HDDs, but you dont have to RAID 0 them. i wouldnt unless you use 2 small ones (in RAID 0) for your OS and swap only, then have a large one or two for storage. or use RAID 5. which ram is better? seems to be of late OCZ or G.skill.
 
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