Full PC build on a budget < £670

Haha it might take a while Crysis shall be the first.

 

Whoah just took a look of these and they really seem pretty good... Hmm might have to order two of those...

edit: although those things are HUGE. I wonder if the motherboard has room for two of those?

 

With 2 PCI slots in between the top and bottom PCIe slots why not? Probably not going to be able to fit PCI cards though.

 

i have an I7 ( 920 C0 at 3.9) and an X4 (X2 550BE unlocked at 3.6) my AMD system cost around a 5th of my I7 system, i rarely notice the difference. For a budget build really really good value

 

I searched this issue a bit and it seems SLI is not very practical with two Acceleros. Some have tried, but not much success. Also the Accelero Extreme provides inadequate cooling to the VRN chip, making it run much hotter than what the stock cooler does, that is totally unacceptable.

I made some additional purchases though. I got two intel 80GB gen2 X25-M SSD's and I'm planning to use them as RAID-0 for the OS and applications drive. I might also put two regular HDD's to RAID-0 for games and other stuff.

 

Heh I hope it's ok that I highjacked this thread, but I don't know any other place to post these

I got my PC today and I'm just installing the SSD's. Heh I've spent my budget for a LONG time, but the machine is SWEET! I like the case and all the components fit really nicely there and it feels really solid and high quality. Can't wait to try Crysis and some other games as well.

 

What CPU cooler did you buy?
I ask 'coz I've read that some tower ones like the TR Ultra120 Extreme can't fit in P193 because of the big side panel fan.


@Dr Evil: thanks

 

This one (Noctua NH-U12P SE1366) It is pretty tight in there and not too much extra room, but it does fit in nicely and the performance and noise levels are pretty good.

 

If they want to show the difference in FPS between processors, reviewers run the game benchmarks at low res (1024 x 768), with all the extra graphical features disabled. Because, if they crank them all up to the max, you get boring graphs with all the bars about the same length.

Photoshop and video encoding are about the only things where Intel gives you more bang for your buck, and unless you do that most of the time, AMD and a fast GPU is money better spend. With AMD you only spend two-thirds or less for the same bang.

Overclocking is a mixed bag: if you buy a cheap motherboard that can enable the extra cores and overclocks well, and have the fortune to buy a Phenom II x2 550 that has 4 fully functional cores (the odds are pretty good for that at the moment), you can turn it into a Phenom II x4 920, running at 3.5 Ghz+ by only fitting a bigger cooler.

And if you want to win the overclocking contest, buy a motherboard that supports 4 top-of-the-line Xeons, 4 Radeon 5870's and immerse everything in liquid helium.