Shopping spree (need help)

Hmmm, I found one earlier that wasn't as enthusiastic but those make it sound fairly decent. How many SATA cables does it have tho?

Have mailed Prophecy to get a quote for the whole spiel (with Odin PSU, that 4870, 1066 DDR2 ram). Seems the sales dept is closed till Wed though.
 
Still waiting on the quote from Prophecy. One thing I'll say about PCInt is that they're quick on the draw when it comes to getting quotes to you.
 
Yeah I haven't bought anything from prophecy. PCint has good prices as well.
 
You'd think they'd be quite keen to mail back someone looking to plonk down 11k. Will mail again tomorrow if I haven't heard back in the morning.

HTC reckons the 4 GB of 800 RAM is going to be counter productive. Do you agree that I shouldn't skimp on that?
 
2GB DDR800 ram on a Quad Core = fail
Click to expand...

I took it that he meant only 2gb of ram was a fail.... DDR2800 shouldn't be a problem unless you want to do some serious overclocking I guess. But you'll need a minimum of 4gb. Maybe ask him what he meant though... he might know something i don't.
 
Ah, right you are. Well that's not a problem then as I've always had 4gb in all of the quotes.
 
I think he thought it was an i7 build where it's tri channel.
 
Ok, just waiting for some money to come in. The final setup will be:

I got a 2nd hand Coolermaster Cosmos case already, which was a good deal.

From Prophecy I'm going to get:

GIGABYTE ODIN 585W 24-Pin Power Supply
Force3D HD4870 256bit GDDR5 512MB

From PCInt I'm going to get:

ASUS P5Q MB
CORE 2 QUAD Q9550 2.8Ghz (1333FSB 12MB)
2GB DDRII-800 (Kingston - KVR800D2N5/2G) x2 = 4GB
500GB SEAGATE SATA
23" WIDE SAMSUNG LCD
DVDRW SATA DRIVE

I have someone who I can pay to put it together for me at R200 an hour. The Coolermaster case is so nicely laid out that I'm tempted to give it a try myself but I'm just so worried that I'll screw up with the MOBO-CPU-FAN installations, which I've never even seen done before let alone tried myself. So I'll probably play it safe in the end. Rather R200 than having to replace one of those very expensive components.

So, does everything look okay with that setup?
 
Looks like a winner...final price?

I would really recommend self-installation though :p. There is nothing to it, really. Just monitor the cpu temps after it turns on, if it's too high it might mean the fan is loose at one of the points.
 
A fraction over 11.5k

And I would monitor the CPU temps in the BIOS? What should they be? Speaking of BIOS, do I have to do anything in there or do I just leave as is until such time as I upgrade it or overclock?
 
You can monitor in bios, or use Everest/CPU-Z/any number of system monitoring tools in Windows. I'd say 40c is max at stock for your processor, probably even less. If things aren't seated properly you'll see it rise to 70c+...it can take that heat, but not for too long. Be careful when attaching the board to the backplate, too much pressure on the wrong areas can crack it. Try to make your wiring as tidy as possible, especially around the cpu fan. You shouldn't have to touch the bios in the beginning unless you have trouble booting up or something isn't installed correctly. But those things are pretty foolproof these days...if you screw something up it'll just reset.
 
Yeah, I've used CPU-Z but thought that I should check on the temps before getting to the installation of windows. If I can see that in BIOS then great.

I'll probably make the decision when I have all the components in front of me. I'm a bit of a chicken but I'm also a cheapskate...so it could go either way.
 
yes you should check before installing windows if it's a fresh install, definitely. Really the only difficult part for me is getting the fan to seat properly. Everything else is a breeze. Also be careful applying thermal paste, use very sparingly.
 
I'll probably give it a go :-)

I noticed on the Prophecy's page for the 4870, they say that, "Please note that this card does not come with a PCI-E 6 pin cable".

Errr...probably a moronic comment but won't I be needing two of those suckers to install the thing?

Sidestepping slightly, anyone know an Esquire dealer? They have the 4870 at R1699 :-)
 
1: Your psu will have a 6-pin.

2: I think you'll need to go into their branches. But I'm kind of set against buying from them on principle.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X