New system help

[krigl]

Hi, I am planning to upgrade and was just wondering what you thought about this. I'm not rich and the choice is limited where I live...


Core 2 Duo - either 6300 or 6600 depending on the money situation.
GeForce 7900 card
DDR2 800 ram (is it okay to buy A-Data 2x1024? I really don't have the cash to buy the best)
Asus P5W DH Deluxe - or MSI P965 Platinum  -  probably the Asus motherboard
X-Fi sound card
100 gb and 250 gb HDs

I have an Enermax 500 watt supply. Will it be enough? Will this system be balanced? Will it need extra cooling?

I'm not planning to get Vista or an 8xxx series and might get another of the same in SLi when the price of cards comes down. I want to play FSX with reasonable hope of getting it looking okay with tweaks etc.

Suggestions gratefully received!

Krigl

[congo]

Intel released an E4300 that''s worth a look Krigl, it's got a 9x cpu multi that makes it look like a E6600 to a system and they are cheap, but it has only 2mb L2 cache so you need to determine if that will affect performance compared to a more expensive CPU.

The E4300 is more suited to overclockers though, the E6300 is slow unless overclocked, what about the E6400? Again, that is best suited to a clocker. If you are going to run stock CPU, get the fastest one you can buy, and if you don't need all the features on the p5W DH then a cheaper board will do nicely on another chipset like the I965, unless you want the crossfire support of the I975 chipset found on the Asus you specced.

SLI must be obtained on an NVidia chipset, there is no SLI support on the intel chipsets. There is no Crossfire support on the Nvidia chipsets. The mainboard you choose will deternine the possible graphics upgrade path if two video cards are desired.

I think their motto is "Divide and Conquer" or something, business is

[DizZa]

If I were you I'd wait till the second half of this year.

Then you could get a MUCH faster video card for the same price as well as a shiny new Core 2 duo revision (Penryn) or even one of the new AMD Dual cores (Kuma) coming out later this year.

As for SLI, don't do it. It doubles video card price while it NEVER doubles performance. SLI also does NOTHING in fsX, the second card will be idleing. If you want to play fsX with reasonable performance, Vista, and Direct X 10 are the way to go. Direct X 10 will greatly improve performance using technology such as:

Direct3D 10 Texture arrays
Instancing 2.0
Paging VRAM
Rapid occlusion culling

Quote from Phil Taylor over at  ***i*

The first 2 DX10 features will definitely be used. They are critical to getting another performance increase beyond what SP1 gets us.

[krigl]

Intel released an E4300 that''s worth a look Krigl, it's got a 9x cpu multi that makes it look like a E6600 to a system and they are cheap, but it has only 2mb L2 cache so you need to determine if that will affect performance compared to a more expensive CPU.

Thanks Congo. How about this one: MSI G965MDH-FI

With that I might be able to scrape enough together for a 6600...


Aarnage: thanks for the tip, but I won't be upgrading my graphics card for several years now, they are very expensive in my country. I love FS9, so it isn't such a problem. As for waiting - I can't - I want my comp to work properly now, not in 6 months : ) I've got wife, kids, a car, a flat etc... can't keep spending on the comp...

[DizZa]

Re-read my post, I edited it.

Direct X 10 will be a massive improvement graphics AND performance over Direct X 9.

Google search a game called Crysis. I have a video of that game rendered in Direct X 10 at 2560x1920 at over 100 frames per second. I saw another video of dual Geforce 7900GTX's doing it. The 7900's ran the game like garbage.

[krigl]

Thanks Aarnage for the extra info.... I don't want Vista, though, really.... expensive, will need still more memory, I'll have to upgrade my card again, and MS being even more big brotherish....

[DizZa]

I am no expert on power supplies, but, I THINK that 500 watt power supply should easily be enough for that system.

[congo]

Thanks Congo. How about this one: MSI G965MDH-FI

No, I don't like red.




























But seriously, research it first and see what issues it's having, log into the MSI support site for instance. All such sites are filled with people having problems, but it gives you an idea of what to expect before you buy, you could read unbiased reviews alternatively and make sure it has all the features you want with no hidden traps, as there are usually traps, anything from a dodgy cooling fan to horrid bios support.

When you choose a board, download it's manual and go through it's feature set and the bios section and make sure it has everything you need.

Direct X 10 will be a massive improvement graphics AND performance over Direct X 9.

DX10 has to be faster so Vista can watch you too  :-?

[krigl]

Thanks Congo  ;D lol  - a bit foolish of me to suppose that you'd know about every card that happens to be on the market - and good advice. Problem is, will I actually understand what I read... Can you or anyone recommend a GOOD cheap mobo for socket 775?

And could anyone tell me if I need special cooling for a non-overclocked DC 6600 and GF7900? Don't want to melt them with my heavily modded FS9, right?  ;)

[congo]

A LOT of people are buying this board but there are lots to choose from including some cheap Foxconn boards:

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Mot ... uctID=2361

http://www.foxconnchannel.com/Product/m ... -us0000171

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/sho ... p?t=117786

If you are building a system, you will need to learn about them, so get reading

Those are all 965 chipsets, there are suitable 975 boards and Nvidia chipset boards like the 680i chipset but they are new and expensive compared to the older nvidia 500 series for example. The new nvidia 680i supports SLI, they 975 chipset supports Crossfire and they all support any PCIe single card.


http://www.hardware.info/en-UK/articles ... uo_tested/



Foxconns answer to the Asus Striker Extreme I guess:
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1058/f ... index.html

Just make sure it has everything you want on it.

Local availability may play a part in the purchase decision.

Look at gigabytes socket 775 core2duo boards and you'll see that they have a great variety of boards to choose from, so does Asus (same parent company now I believe) and a few others.

The chipset, price and features are most important but some boards are "special" , make sure you review them before buying, even I get caught out by the little traps and I research them heavily before purchase.

Above all, once you choose a board, try to fault it with any info you can find, if you can't, you'll probably have the right board for you.

Take a serious look at the foxconn 965 offerings if you want to save money and get a fully featured 965 board. The 965 boards have various southbridge chips that support different features.

The second link I posted offer an ICH8 southbridge, not the ICH8R for example, in other words, no RAID support.

The subject gets more complex the more you learn, so in a few days, you'll need to post back with a short list once you have some idea of what you are looking for.

I like the P5W DH, but you might be able to save considerable $$$ if you don't need all of it's features. Cameron likes the 680i boards based no doubt on a reported slight performance advantage, but there's not a lot of performance difference between most Conroe boards on the chipsets mentioned here.

Beware older chipsets found on CHEAP conroe boards, they are conversions from older stuff and they do not fully support conroe features.

[freedomhays]

Core 2 Duos like a single 12 volt rail with at least 28 amps. The more amps the better,

[congo]

I mentioned traps before and I'll give you a real example that could be relevant.

Say you have your eye on a cheap Asus P5B which is at first glance a pretty fair board.

It has some pretty cool features and touts a RAID controller and ESATA. (an external SATA connector so you can have a portable HDD on the outside of the case which you have so cleverly locked up so you can't get in there, or an sata DVD rom or something)

So you go and buy 2 x 320gb SATA2 HDDS so you can set up the RAID for that little bit of extra disk i/o that might help cure pauses with texture loads in FSX, or whatever....

You go to set the drives up and..... hey..... where is the SATA connector for the RAID? Well, one is on the outside of the back panel, yes, it uses the external connector and the other one is in some odd position on the mainboard. The external SATA cable connector is exposed to the world and you have a critical RAID drive running off it! It's an aweful design and the esata connector was put there because market research showed Asus that every trendy dude out there thought an external connector would be cool. So rather than come up with a solution for the raid connectors, they just threw one on the outside. You can't have raid AND a useful external drive on this board and the raid array will always be in danger of getting knocked loose or the connector snapped off!

So make sure if you really want to use a specific feature, that you read the manual before you buy and understand what it is you are getting into.

[krigl]

Thanks, Congo, FreedomHays, I will be looking into this stuff, though a new power supply is out of the question, I've just been informed... I'll probably end up with a 6300 for the meantime, as it should run FS9 very well indeed... if I get a decent mobo which is relatively future proof, and 2GB memory, I should be able to upgrade later... so the mobo is very important.

What about the memory? If I buy A-Data - which is about the cheapest, would I regret it? Is it 'bad memory'? This could be my last question...!!  :D

[congo]

Adata make cheap 800mhz ram which is polished up and loosely timed DDR667 as far as I'm concerned, but apparently timings aren't that critical on core2duos. (I don't think E6300 is a conroe, it has less cache)

In my opinion you'd be better off with an E4300 and run it at the Conroe's bus speed of 266mhz rather than it's Celeron'ish 200mhz. With the 9x CPU multi on the e4300, it will think it's an E6600 Conroe lol.

Some boards simply detect it as one, probably because they need a BIOS update to recognise the E4300 for what it is. The E4300 is pretty cheap, but don't listen to me on this, do some research and see for yourself.