I'm speccing up a new system to build. One thing I always get lost on is mainboards and graphics cards. Overall budget is about £500 for the case and all the stuff going inside barring the DVD drives.

Not into gaming (grew out of it), so nothing on par with a military flight sim is needed

Anyhoo, what I need:

LGA 775 socket
Support for 4 IDE devices (ATA133)
Built in LAN and Audio
SATA II support

I'm intending to use a Pentium D 945 (3.4gig) 800fsb processor

What RAM speed do I need with this setup? I've speced up for 2 gig of PC5400 (667mhz), but I'm not sure if the CPU and m/board would actually make use of it?

As for the gfx, well, nothing special as long as it copes with DVDs and Mpegs, I might go to dual screens at some point, so as long the board can support 2 cards or has a built in one, it would be great.

Thanks in advance

 

Maybe my gratitude was premature

 

Ali, why the old fashioned processor ?

Why not use the Intel Conroe Core 2 Duo E6600 2x 2.40 4Mb cache 1066 MHz LGA775 , read the reviews online £246 inc vat

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My choice of Motherboard would be :
Asus P5LD2/C i945P
Socket 775 PCI-E / Gb LAN / DUAL CH DDR2 / SATA(II) RAID / CONROE, CORE 2 DUO READY / ATX MOTHERBOARD
£73.99 inc vat

Graphics:
Albatron GeForce 7600GS 256MB PCI-E 128bit DDR2 DVI TV-Out Mfr# 7600GS
£83 inc vat


Memory:

High Perf. 1GB DDR2 667 Life time warranty
£62 each x 2

 

or how about a pentium D 805. These are only 2.66 dual core, but they overclock to 4.1ghz on air. Teamed up with a gig or 2 or corsair xms ddr2 5400 and you will have a cheap very fast system for not much money.

 

3.89ghz on air, 4.1 is liquid cooled, but it is still an ancient design in processor chronology

 

this months pc format has it running on air!!, Ive had 4ghz on mine in the week that Ive owned it, not 100% stable but I expect i havent really tweaked timings and voltages and such until the cpu and memory are burned in. Quality stuff. Just a shame my mobo doesnt support nvidia sli even though it was advertised as such (got some tweaked drivers that will apparently work but not got round to it yet)

 

Cheers guys.

I've heard alot about the 805. It does well considering its intial ratings. But running it at such speed above it's intial rating, accompanied by a hefty jump up in core voltage does concern me over keeping the thing stable. "They" (the mags) may say its reliable, but I do worry about the long term longevity despite its built in temeprature control throttling features, and I don't "do" system crashes

I basically chose the 945 as it is quite cheap now (£110) and suits the budget, it does lack VT, but I'm not sure if it would be of any real use anyway.

L, your swaying me to a core 2, but the e6600 pushes the budget beyond £600, unless I buy less RAM instead.

Couple of questions then:

How does the E6400 fair? Is it worth the extra over the 945 (allocatable cache vs. fixed, higher fsb vs. higher internal clock speed, is one more clockable that the other? etc.). Am I really going to see much difference? As I may just go cheap now and wait until the X6900 becomes affordable.

I can't find the P5DL2 motherboard with a "/C" suffix on Asus's website- they never make it easy do they? : I presume it has 4DIMM slots, which could allow me to cut the budget on the RAM instead and still have dual channel.

Finally, also noticed Albatron seem to have limited retailers. But at least knowing to look for a 7600GS should narrow options considerably (unless you care to give a blatant plug, L ).

Thanks

 

www.aria.co.uk is the source of the prices

 

Ahh, never used aria before. First time for everything

 

go for an athlon!

 

I was waiting for an AMD lover to pop up LOL

Go on then, spec me up - I've given up trying to keep up to speed with what ever XP3200SPZ DC processor AMD have in fashion. Bearing in mind the £500(inc VAT) budget which includes everything that goes inside the case - HD drives, memory, PSU etc minus the DVD and floppy. It's bad enough speccing just the intel....I've been out the game for far too long (current home setup is a 5yr old PIII 1 gig )