Well the holidays are here and I'm up for some PC gaming. I posted some of this in CHUBs thread but I decided to make a new thread. At the moment the games I wanna play are Warhammer online and TF2/L4D, for future games I'd like to also be playing D3/SC2 all on the same machine with little to no upgrading.

So the budget is ~$1200, heres the break down at what I'm looking at with some questions:

Mobo: Asus P5Q-SE - $155
Is it worth spending an extra 10 bux and getting R version? Also whats the difference between this mobo and the more expensive Asus P5Q?

CPU: E7300 - $185
Is it worth getting the E7400 for an extra $40?

Vid Card: 512m gigabyte 4850 - $244
worth getting the 1gig model for an extra $35?

Ram: 2gb Kingston - $46
HDD: 640gb Samsung - $115
Case: CoolMaster case/PSU - $105

Monitor: ?????
No idea whats a good monitor but I hear samsung is good? what do you suggest?

Total: $850 (without monitor)

So what do you guys think?

motherboard: R version adds RAID, no point if you don't use RAID. P5Q is possibly worth it, has fancy power circuitry and much better motherboard cooling. I'd consider it if you wish to overclock the system at all.

cpu: probably not worth the extra. you'd get better gains spending more on the video card. you could overclock the 7300 a tiny bit and make up the diff between the two cpu's.

vidcard: nope, 1gb not worth it. only needed for very high res (ie. 24" monitor and bigger) and even then only a few games use it (eg. crysis). if you can, put the money towards a 512mb 4870. These are only just over $300 and are much much faster than the 4850.

monitor: samsungs are good yes. Go for their 22".

Rest is ok...make sure you're getting DDR800 RAM (PC6400).

What case are you getting and what is its PSU like? Shouldn't skimp on the PSU.

The 4870 is $340 at msy, will it make a noticeable difference though?

For the monitor, msy doesn't have any 22" samsung monitors but they're $265 at Umart.

Getting the the CoolerMaster RC-T05 case that comes with 460w PSU.

thanks for the help orbitor.

I reckon the e8400 would be worth getting, only an extra $100.

actually its only $83 more.

last edited by `ViPER` at 16:28:26 16/Nov/08

What's with the Samsung HDDs I keep hearing about on here, have they only just started making HDDs or is it that I've been living under a hardware rock for a couple of years?

yes, hardware rock.
i remember going wtf samsung hdds when i was a systems builder in either 04 or 05

Well that may be, but did you ever consider that your name is Mr Hardware...?

for god sake someone tell him he needs 4gb of ram before i have too pleases.

for god sake someone tell him he needs 4gb of ram before i have too pleases.

Yeah as i was reading the thread i was going to suggest this. There's really no reason not to pick up another 2GB when you can do so for less than $50. 2GB is only just sufficient in some cases now, might as well future proof it a bit more for cheap.

someone correct me if im wrong (which im pretty sure im right) but 32bit OS can only read 4gig of ram which includes your videocard. So essentially having more than more than 3-3.5gig is a waste.

Also, my questions from before still haven't been answered :).

last edited by Reduaram at 23:21:14 16/Nov/08

We had samsung drives on a batch of machines at work ... huge failure rate.

someone correct me if im wrong (which im pretty sure im right) but 32bit OS can only read 4gig of ram which includes your videocard. So essentially having more than more than 3-3.5gig is a waste.

On both XP and Vista I can only use 2.93GB max with a 256MB 7950GT and PCI sound card.

Though I bought 4GB so that I could have two matched sticks to avoid compatibility problems (I've had stability/data-integrity problems mixing and matching sticks in previous PCs). Wasting 1GB of my 4GB is acceptable since my PC is rock solid now.

We had samsung drives on a batch of machines at work ... huge failure rate.

Same went for IBM deathstar drives a while ago, these days I just buy any old brand of hard drive and treat them all like they'll fail eventually (regular backups to 2 or more different storage mediums). That said I still prefer WD and Seagate primarily.

The current series of Samsung HDD's use a higher platter density which makes them faster than the competing drives (I think its about 333GB/platter compared to 250/platter on the other brands or something like that).

I still wouldn't buy one - I don't trust Samsung. Especially on Hard Drives.

someone correct me if im wrong (which im pretty sure im right) but 32bit OS can only read 4gig of ram which includes your videocard. So essentially having more than more than 3-3.5gig is a waste.

Even if you are wasting 1 GB, it is still worth it IMO. Anyway, there is really no reason not to use a 64-bit OS anymore. I built a setup similar to yours a few months ago (E8500/4GB Ram/Radeon 4850) and have had literally 0 driver or compatibility issues using Vista 64.

This is my setup:

Mobo: Asus P5Q-SE - $169
CPU: E8400 - $268
Vid Card: 512M 4870 Asus - $354
Ram: 3gb Kingston - $62
HDD: 640gb Samsung - $95
Case: CoolMaster case/PSU - $113
Monitor: Samsung 2233BW 22 inch ($25cashback) - $265.00

Total: $1333

Gonna get it hopefully tomorrow.

Altf4, you're wasting 1 gig though. Why not pay for 3 instead of 4?

I got 32 Samsung 1Tb HDDs running in two NAS boxes. Haven't had one drop yet. I replaced all my 750Gb seagates that were running in those boxes after I lost 6 drives in 3 weeks.

Go the 4GB of RAM, Umart have PC6400 Kingston 4GB kit for $78.

Altf4, you're wasting 1 gig though. Why not pay for 3 instead of 4?

Well its basically $20 per GB of Ram, personally if i was going with a 32-bit OS i would just pay the $20 extra so it is already there if i needed to upgrade to 64-bit later. But that's just me.

All I can do it laugh at you Mass.

Cos the Samsungs we had work had a huge failure rate. It would be close to 50% over 2 years.

I got one of the new macbooks, dont think it will game well though with a craptastic 9400 ...

If not samsung then Western Digital? Seagate are expensive.