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So last night my beautiful computer went up in a flash of beautiful magical smoke... the power supply decided to go on the fritz, and took most of my system out with it. All I was able to salvage was the RAM and the hard drive. Everything else... proc, motherboard, video card... now dead.

I need my PC for work, as I do some programming on the side, and my backup P4 2GHz with integrated 845GM video doesn't cut it... That, and I already miss my games. v.v

So I bit the bullet, and ordered a brand new system, now focused around Intel. I hate to leave AMD, but Intel has just been dominating, and in a price per performance ratio, Intel's got it..

So I picked myself up:

Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 2.53GHz, 3MB L2 (Wolfdale 45nm processor. Good overclocker)

Gigabyte GA-EP43-DSL3, Intel P43 Chipset

2x1GB Mushkin DDR2 800 RAM

Seasonic S12 Energy Plus SS-550HT 550W PSU, 4 12V+ Rails, 18W apiece

Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB Card

I heard Seasonic was an excellent brand of power supply, and the reviews on Newegg showed that. Plus, it was $50 off. I couldn't help it. That, and I'll never order an Antec PSU again... at least not a NeoPower HE.

I hope I made the right choice, going Intel... sure, I could have gotten a Phenom at the same price, but... meh.

All in all, $500 wasn't bad for it. We'll see when it comes in.

Actually, I believe that you have the best bang for the buck OCing rig. Most of what you picked are items that I've been suggesting.

Gratz Pugs! I finally crawled my self out of the dino-cave yesterday. I still have my EPOX 8RDA+ and it still works, going to turn it into a back up gaming rig. But now I have a Q6600 running w/4GB of Ram and an 8800GT, so massive upgrades. Now I have to see if OCing is really worth it.

eGo

For right now, I haven't picked up any special third party coolers yet. I was kind of on a budget. So I don't plan on OCing for the moment, not until I can set aside some extra cash for some proper cooling. But this rig stock will blow my previous overclocked rig right out of the water. So I don't have a huge problem with waiting..

I chose the parts because eventually, I plan on going quad core, and with this motherboard, I can in the future. And it's even DDR3 1066 compatible, so whenever I feel I want to go that route, I will. And honestly, I never really think I'll go Crossfire with any of my systems, unless I become rich, so I see this motherboard being great for me. And all the USB ports... I always run out of USB ports, so 8 stock on the back will be nice. Plus another two on the front of my case, and maybe an extra two on the back. XD

Ugh... I can't wait until the parts come in... Monday or tuesday. Did I mention how much I hate the Netburst architecture on my crappy Northwood 2.0 processor? lease:

Nice system. Honestly I wouldn't worry about going quad core unless you have a specific app that would benefit from it like if you have a video encoder that's multi-threaded.

I have two Intel Core Duo systems that are identical down to the CPU and bus speed, except that on is a quad core (E6600 and a Q6600). I never see any real benefit from the quad core except when I'm using VMWare, then there's a big difference. The E6600 system is pretty much maxed while a VM is booting, but I can be doing anything I want on the quad core system while one or two VMs are booting and not really notice any performance hit.

Agreed on the quad core thing. Hardly anything currently uses dual cores, better yet quad. I don't think it's worth the extra heat & power usage yet. Maybe in 2-4 years, but by then, we'll all have upgraded again.

Now, if you play Supreme Commander, that's different. That game will kill whatever CPU you give it if you get enough units going. Have a client that gets up to 8000 units on one map with a Q6600 OCed to 3ghz & it still hangs a bit at times.

Would be nice for the OS to be better implemented. So in case you are running a program that utilizes just a single core, the OS would then use the other core only to allow the program to get full use of the only one it can operate on.

The problem is that if the app doesn't support multi-threading, there's just no way to assign more than one core to it. I think that games in the coming years will specifically make use of multicore technology. Right now Crysis and HL2 Ep2 supposedly do.

The OS does spread separate background apps across multiple cores, so I do see some benefit from that, but on a modern system that's not much of performance benefit unless you have a major resource hog running in the background like a Norton AV Suite.

However I am a power user, and often have multiple apps and several tabs open in Firefox all running at the same time, and I must admit I do see a difference in performance between the dual and quad core systems when I have several performance hog apps running. There's little of that pausing while some other app frees up some CPU cycles - especially under WinXP x64.

I don't regret the quad core, because I got the system for a song (it was when Dell discontinued the Dimension 9200 in September last year, and they were giving them away nicely loaded with a Q6600 for $600. Couldn't resist.

Yeah, what I am meaning is having the OS and background apps operate alone on separate core(s) that are not being used by the game, since it isn't able to do so. That way, the only core the game or app sees, can be fully utilized.

Gyah... Stuck here at work for another three hours, and a 13 pound package of goodies has arrived at my house. I can't wait to get home...

I picked up a Cooler Master Vortex 752 heatsink from Best Buy this weekend, along with some arctic silver. I can't wait till I get home to mess with my new stuff... >.>

cratch

Lol, like a kid in a candy store! Im the same way everytime I visit Fry's.

Totally know the feeling. It's like Christmas to me. Oddly, it's the case that usually gets me excited. I think it's because I can start mounting anything that comes next.

Well, I started putting it together, only to find out the thing doesn't post. It ended up being the video card's fault. Remove the video card, system posts, plug it in, system turns on for a second, then shuts off. Tried another video card, and the system works fine. Tried the new video card in another system, same no post problem...

I'm sending it in for RMA today... until then, I stuck a spare X800 PCI-E card into it... >.> But everything else works fine, it seems. I haven't finished putting everything together, since I was so tired after work yesterday, but it'll be done by tonight

normalicy wrote: I think it's because I can start mounting anything that comes next.

Lmao!

May have been the power connector. Sometimes, the adapter that they include is actually wrong (unless you're using the power straight from the power supply, in which case, you may consider using the included one). Though, I would hope they cleared that up by now, it seems that there are different standards on the PCI Express power adapters (I've encountered a few where the ground wire went into one of the 12+ slots. You should try booting it without the power adapter plugged in at all. Would hate if you did an RMA & found out that it was something else.