Another new system advice thread...

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Vonnii

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I didn't want to hijack someone else's thread but would like to get some advice from the community on my Sandy Bridge system that I will be purchasing in the next week or so.

What will I be using it for?
I do a lot of web development, so I run the usual suspects: Visual Studio 2010, MS SQL server, Adobe Photoshop ... etc.

I also do some casual gaming, mostly just World of Warcraft... and when I have time some of the new releases.

Now what i'm looking at: (Budget: R10000)


Total: R9902.00

I'm a bit confused which way to go with the RAM, due to my development i'm thinking of going for slower DDR 1333 but getting 2 x 4GB chips or would it be better to go for faster 2 x 2GB RAM?

Something missing is a SSD, I'll be sure to get it a little later on.

I'm hoping to get everything in the end from Wootware since they're close by and their prices look good.

Thanks for your input!
 
Good build imo, does your apps support Cuda? If not the 6850 is also a good option and the slower DDR3 1333 ram @ 8gig sounds like a good plan :)

Edit: Forgot to say, if you are not into overclocking the vanilla 2500 and a H67 mainboard could save you plenty
 
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Looks good.

Have a look at your power supply and see if you want the modular cable management. If you decide it is not that much of a problem and you can go without it you can cut your price on the PSU to R501 by getting the Cooler Master eXtreme Power Plus RS-500

The extra money can then be added to a decent set of Corsair Dominator GT RAM.

The graphics card you listed is not bad at all but try to go for the MSI or Asus variant of the 460 as I have heard a couple of bad things about the Club 3D cards when it comes to clock speeds and stability.

Do yourself a favour and take a look at Zaps Online.

Their prices is very good and competative.
 
www.Landmarkpc.co.za seems to have keener prices on most things. If you're going for a 460GTX, get one with 1gig memory and check out the overclocked or superclocked editions.
 
The Elite 310 is a fairly small case. You should be able to get the slightly bigger (and better w.r.t. cooling) Elite 430 case for around R460. Besides the cooling and size of the case, I also have an issue with its front panel audio being too tight.
I have the Elite 310 case for my office PC, so it's not like you HAVE to get a bigger/better one though.

I'd advise you to rather stick with that power supply than to skimp on it like AcidT suggested. There are a few other options that you can consider, like the Seasonic 500W / Antec HCG 520W PSU's, but they aren't modular.

More RAM is better than faster RAM 99% of the time. Like I recently had to upgrade to 8GB of RAM since 4GB simply didn't cut it for running Ubuntu 10.04 x64 and 2 Virtual Machines...

It is worth looking out for specials on the graphics cards, seeing that Nivo recently sold the MSI GTX 460 Cyclone 1GB OC for R1950 instead of the normal R2500.
Seeing that you're more of a casual gamer, any graphics card from the GTX 460 768MB / HD 6850 and up will do just fine. It is recommended to go for the 1GB models when you're playing the games at 1920x1080 though.
 
I'm finding the memory choices quite bewildering. I settled on a pair of corsair dominators 1600 2x2gig then found it tricky to select the one I needed.
 
Thanks everyone for your advice.

@Terumo: My first idea was to leave the graphics card out and rather spend the money on proper system parts, get a SSD in there. But then I found out that the H67 doesn't support overclocking and that puts me off it. So I'll opt for a P67 rather and get a nice SSD later :)

@AcidT: Thanks a lot for your input, I'm gonna have a look at the other card manufacturers, thanks to Pada i saw on Nivo quite a few good deals on some other cards, priced less than the Club GTX 460 cards. I've been trying to get on Zaps site but it's unreachable from home and from the office?

@Lounger: I'm gonna go read up on the Seasonic, I just remember reading a review on the CM Silent Pro PSU's on Tomshardware and it scored very well... although i think it was the 700/800W ones. I took a quick browse through landmark and my components are pretty similiarly priced on Wootware, maybe a few rands off here or there. But I'll do a proper comparison before I buy.

@Pada: I had a look and will definitely go for the Elite 430 then, for only R60 more it looks like a better casing. I'll definitely also be going with the 8gb then, would overclocking the RAM have any significant performance boosts (if i wanted to try that?) Thanks a lot for reminding me of Nivo, there GPU's look pretty well priced! I'd definitely want to get a card that would work well with Diablo 3 + future WoW and SC2 expansions (also cant forget Project: Titan that's in the works.) One thing I considered was going SLI and just purchasing a larger power supply down the line?
 
If you're considering to get a SLI setup within the next year, it would be a good idea to rather spend a few hundred more now on a 600-700W PSU.
The whole CM Silent Pro series of power supplies are excellent, but they're also quite expensive.

AFAIK, running the RAM at higher speeds than 1333MHz will only give you a slight performance increase. I'm not sure if you're going all out for like DDR3 2400 if that would give way more of a performance increase? I haven't looked for benchmarks like that yet, but I have seen a Sandy Bridge rig with a setup like that and the memory scores was through the roof!
 
If you will be running all those apps on this pc, I would suggest getting 2x 500GB/2x 1Tb drives, so that you can sure your databases and files on the second drive...

My 2c.
 
@Pada: I think that's definitely the way to go... at least it increases the life of the system a little bit longer, at some point in the future I'll just pop in another GTX 460. The CM Silent Pro 700w is only about R1300 but I can pickup the CoolerMaster RS750 750w for R 1,029.00 and there is also the Seasonic ones. I'm not too concerned about the RAM speed, I just never want to end up in the position where I am in currently with running my development tools and it using 90+% system resources.

@Dan C: I'm chewing heavily on the idea of putting some more money in for SSD... but 60GB is very little space... enough maybe for windows and a few tools... but it'll be a tight squeeze. I'd have to get the 120GB to feel really comfortable... would there be some size/price adjustments to SSD's in the near future?

@SharkBait: Thanks a lot of the suggestion, I'm a bit of a data hoarder, so i'm planning of putting in a the max number of HD's... my only real problem is that it's too expensive to go into RAID configuration to actually back it all up.

Thanks again for everyones input!
 
Vonnii said:
@Dan C: I'm chewing heavily on the idea of putting some more money in for SSD... but 60GB is very little space... enough maybe for windows and a few tools... but it'll be a tight squeeze. I'd have to get the 120GB to feel really comfortable... would there be some size/price adjustments to SSD's in the near future?
Click to expand...

Rumour has it that prices will drop around June when the smaller manufacturing process gets used. Theoretically it will halve the price per GB of SSDs
 
The other series PSU's that Coolermaster offer are crap, except for the GX series which are fairly good as well.
 
Vonnii said:
@SharkBait: Thanks a lot of the suggestion, I'm a bit of a data hoarder, so i'm planning of putting in a the max number of HD's... my only real problem is that it's too expensive to go into RAID configuration to actually back it all up.

Thanks again for everyones input!
Click to expand...

Cool, just a FYI, I didn't suggest RAID, merely to use the 2 drives as a C: and D: I know it will be faster to access your SQL DB from the D: drive than from your C: drive, which is also doing the page file, program files etc...
 
There's no substitution for proper reviews.

The review site that I like the most in terms of PSU reviews is HardwareSecrets
 
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