Advice needed on this hardware

[Britbuild]

I dont know if this is the correct forum as my question spans different forum topics.

As a personal project I intend to build myself a decent spec (can't afford top spec) gaming machine. Below I am listing the components that I am thinking of installing, and the price I can get the parts at. I would be interested in your responses regarding the suitability of these components and whether you think alternatives might be better. Obviously I am being cost concious so if there are any parts that might be considered OTT, or conversely, any that could be bettered (without spending a fortune) then please say.

Case
Antec nine hundred two ultimate gamer case. £83.00

PSU
Corsair TX 650 watt ATX. £70.00

M/board
ASUS Crosshair IV Formula - AMD 890FX - Socket AM3 - PCI-E 2.0 - DDR3 1600/1800/1866 - SATA 6Gb/s RAID - SupremeFX X-Fi Audio - CrossFire - ATX £158.00

or (cheaper alternative)
Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD3P Motherboard Phenom II X4 Socket AM3 AMD 790X ATX RAID Gigabit Ethernet £85.00

CPU
AMD Phenom 11 X4 Quad 955 core 3-2 GHz £120.00

CPU cooler
Coolit Eco ALC water cooler £55.00

or (cheaper alternative)
Zalman CNPS9900-NT £37.00

Memory
Corsair Dominator 1600MHz CL9DDR3 (4x2 gig 8 gig total) £170.00

Graphics
Saphire HD5770 Vapor X 1gig £125.00 (Would 2 of these make a significant difference in the crosshair Mboard)

I have 3 x 750 Gb sata HDDs in my existing machine that I intend to transfer to the new machine.

Total cost
£781.00 or £690.00 for the cheaper config.

Your comments/advice would be appreciated.

[kes166]

Are you buying the parts seperatly and assembling it? I personnaly haven't bought a case for a PC I assembled myself in quite awhile. I have been given enough PC's in my time to just reuse cases and cut holes in them if I need more fan space.

If you need to buy a case, you can ebay one, or buy one from a local PC shop probably at a cheaper price than buying one brand new. It's not what it looks like, it's how it works :)

[Xlphos]

Hello,

Your going to use your old optical drive(s) too?
Will you be overclocking your system?
Will you be using RAID to speed up your system?
You seem to have enough power; have a look at Antec Power Supply Calculator.

- Let us know how it goes.

[Britbuild]

Are you buying the parts seperatly and assembling it? I personnaly haven't bought a case for a PC I assembled myself in quite awhile. I have been given enough PC's in my time to just reuse cases and cut holes in them if I need more fan space.

If you need to buy a case, you can ebay one, or buy one from a local PC shop probably at a cheaper price than buying one brand new. It's not what it looks like, it's how it works :)

Hi, I'm buying a new case because I want plenty of cooling, and I want to keep the dust out. This case has dust filters on all of the fans and plenty of fans (one of which will be used in conjunction with the water cooler for the CPU). Also I didn't mention that I live in Spain and in the 40+ heat in summer my current machine is working overtime trying to keep cool so good air flow is important.

I could probably find a cheaper case but if I'm building a nice rig I want it to be as good as I can afford right now, and to look nice too.

Thanks for your comments BTW.

[Britbuild]

Hello,

Your going to use your old optical drive(s) too?
Will you be overclocking your system?
Will you be using RAID to speed up your system?
You seem to have enough power; have a look at Antec Power Supply Calculator.

- Let us know how it goes.

Optical drive will be a Sony AD-7241S-0B 24x Internal DVDRWRAM SATA Black LightScribe at fifteen quid. I am also considering putting a blue ray drive in as well but at the mo cannot justify it as I dont own any blue ray discs.

I will not be overclocking anything as I do not agree with it. My thoughts are that if a component is designed to work at a particular speed and give a particular performance, then making it work harder is going to shorten its life and make it less reliable.

Unfortunately my knowledge of raid setups is insufficient to understand how to use it to increase performance. I use my 3 drives (all identical) as follows: 2 drives each have an operating system on them so I can boot to whichever drive I want to use. One I call "workstation", and this is used for all of my business and work related stuff. The second I call "playstation", and this one is setup purely for gaming, with all irrelevant services turned off to free up resources. The third drive is used for storage and backups. I do it this way as opposed to partitioning because I once had a drive fail on me, but because I had an operating system on a different drive it allowed me to boot up and recover a lot of data from the failed drive.

If using the drives differently would improve things I would be interested to find out how.

Thanks for the reply.

[crunchie]

You may have problems running the 8Gb of RAM on that processor. Have you thought of getting the 1055T or the 1090T?
A cheaper alternative to the Asus board would also be the GA-890FXA-UD5 board.
Should have no problem running the 8Gbthen, but may be restricted to 1066Mhz on them without lowering the multiplier and raising the FSB.
That Corsair will eat that system for breakfast. I have the HX620 running a 1090T @ 4Ghz+ with a 5850 + 9800GT gfx and water cooling, 4 HD's, 2 optical drives, 6 fans etc., so the 650 is more than enough for your needs.
Make sure the RAM heatsinks will not interfere with the cpu cooler too :).