The Time Is Nigh

Jun 08, 2008 00:03

So, this is it, THE tech post ( Read more... )

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Comments 11

jay646464 June 8 2008, 00:16:16 UTC
"Arctic Silver 5 Heatsink compound professionally hand installed by our technicians"

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAA!!

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leto_the_tyrant June 8 2008, 10:11:35 UTC
right.....useful.

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jay646464 June 8 2008, 11:01:57 UTC
Apolgies for the post midnight outburst but that made me laugh, they basically smear some silver stuff onto your processor die and then make a big deal about it...

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craigbaldwin June 8 2008, 10:30:00 UTC
Well the bundle thing is pretty good looking, nothing much wrong with the 8800 GT, admittedly mine is twice overclocked, but you could do that and it runs most things pretty darn well. There isn't really meant to be a huge leap in gaming tech anytime too soon since Crysis is pretty much the highest going and will be until....well Crysis Warhead comes out probably, or FarCry 2.

The GTS is slightly better than the GT (don't underestimate the advantage of a one slot card as well), the 9 series still wasn't much better than the 8 series so be the judge if you think it's worth the extra money.

Just a quick thing, I've had 5.1 in the past and really unless you have so much room on your desk you can't possibly ever fill it they ain't worth it. Might as well just get a better set of 2.1 speakers, 5 just get in the way and games aren't always great at doing surround sound. And with only a 320 gig hard drive you obviously ain't intending to have a large collection of filsm...unless you buy them or something ( ... )

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jay646464 June 8 2008, 11:04:34 UTC
Good stuff from Craig there but mate didn't the software screw up the mouse only because you have these nightmarish Xbox 360 wireless drivers installed?

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craigbaldwin June 8 2008, 12:05:41 UTC
Well I don't really know but it still stands that the mouse works fine without yet more drivers and another start up program.

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craigbaldwin June 8 2008, 12:04:59 UTC
Oh also forgot to add.

Avoid Creative soundcards! They work sure but you don't get anything other than that. Creative are still yet to make drivers for their products that make them run under Vista as well as they do on XP. Get something else/just use the MoBo sound.

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leto_the_tyrant June 8 2008, 15:14:47 UTC
right, well, methinks, unless someone can really give a good reason otherwise I'll go with the cheaper MoBo ( ... )

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jay646464 June 8 2008, 23:04:08 UTC
I've echoed advice a million times to you but I will say this, do some serious, and I mean serious research on any motherboard you buy, particularly the Chipset. Look on the manufacturer support site for problems or incompatibilities people have been having.

Trust me, when you're building top end computers, if you get the motherboard wrong, you're fucked.

In general I think Nvidia chipsets are still having trouble supporting high amounts of RAM when used with Intel processors in alot of scenarios so unless you're specifically planning to SLi some GFX cards, I strongly advise going for an Intel chipset.
Having said that, I haven't researched the 7series of chipset much, so I don't know on that one.

The Chipset makes a huge difference to so many things, so the 780 would be no doubt preferable over the 750, don't screw up a fast machine by putting it into a board that doesn't have the FSB and onboard processing power to manage it all

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leto_the_tyrant June 9 2008, 12:46:50 UTC
Ok, taken advice, I've gone for a slightly more expensive Asus MoBo, based on the Intel P45 chipset. I've done quite a bit of reading on both. As a whole the P45 is just an evolution of the P35, and while not revolutionary, it is still a decent chip, most obvious thing is it's additional support for PCI-E 2.0 Again, reviews for the Asus seem good, looks like a pretty solid MoBo, very reliable and with everything I need ( ... )

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leto_the_tyrant June 10 2008, 13:42:14 UTC
Done it, as planed, all ordered. The Asus MoBo, they put in the news as having arrived today, it was still listed as pre-order. Annoyingly all the graphics cards (well all the GTS's and the GTX I would actually buy) were out of stock, but I was allowed to buy them, so hopefully shouldn't be too long. And that's probabaly the part I can survive without the longest.

As for which graphics card? Well, the GTS, looked a bit closer. It's got a higher clock speed, and a high shader clock speed than even that rather quite overclocked GTX, with only the memory speed being behind. And that's not by too much either. So I saved myself £25 or so, for a smaller card and no real lose in performance. Turned out I had more money than I thought, so I was gonna get the GTX still I realised that the GTS was actually better (in all benchmarks I found it was basically back and forth couple of frames per second between the two, and that was with an overclocked GTX).

Now, just gotta wait til when me and it are both home at the same time!

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