Need An Appropriate Motherboard And Possibly Other Recommendations For First Pc Build.

Building a New Computer, Parts List and Recommendation Needed?

Hi everyone. What I want to do is I want to compare some of the best cpu's and motherboards out there. I want to build two new computers, and the only difference will be the motherboard, cpu and memory. Right now, money is not a limitation, although I would like to keep the cost down to $1500 or less per computer.

I would like for you to recommend to me your best recommendations on the individual components needed. I would like you to recommend the following parts for two computers, one an Intel computer based on the new Sandy Bridge CPU's and the second one an AMD based computer based on either the AMD II X4 975 cpu or an AMD X6 1100T. So I want a motherboard and cpu combo for each and at least 8 Gigs of Low CAS Latency RAM, up to 12 Gigs of Low CAS Latency. I want the rest of the gear the same. Figure in your estimate, an OEM copy of Windows 7 Ultimate Edition.

List one or two compatible motherboards for each CPU type and explain why you chose that motherboard. This is a very important component, and I want the top motherboard component for each cpu...I prefer you limit it to ASUS, Gigabyte or MSI. Don't recommend other manufacturers please.

The rest of the gear will consist of:

1). One video Card, either nVidia or ATI, please explain which card and why you chose it. Which model? I do not want to Crossfire or SLI the computer.
2). At least a 2T hard disk for each computer, which brand and model
3). A DVD Read/Writer, give me your recommendation on which brand and model
4). An excellent power supply, preferably 850 Watts or above (yes, please, 850 or above)
5). An excellent case with known excellent air cooling, keep the cost under $150
6). A good air cooling cpu/heatsink unit. No, I do not want water cooling.

I also want your recommendation on a good antivirus security suite. Which one do you recommend? I will be using the same suite on both computers to make them as equal as possible.

If I left anything out, please let me know. Please use Newegg as your cost reference and page URL references. Do not use any other source for parts, as I use Newegg exclusively.

Thank you for the help

Custom Build Desktop Gaming Rig Recommendations/Comments/Revie... AMD?

Couple things that jump out at me. I would go with 1333 speed ram. It will be recognized by the motherboard with out overclocking. Unless you have plans on overclocking. I like to keep things as simple as possible. Second I used a AMD 965 in a recent build. The thermal paste was already applied to the CPU. Might be the same with the 6 core. The motherboard is expensive and it is cool that you can run dual cards at the x16. Not all can. There are no PCI Express x 1 slots. These slots were a must for me for a TV tuner. If you do not need them then it does not matter. I am thinking if you have no intention of running 2 cards you can shave about $80 off with another motherboard. Maybe one similar to the Gigabyte motherboard I use in my build. Hope this helps. Good Luck.

Additional Comment: I tried to get the Supported Memory list off the Asus site. They are a pain when it comes to this. You have to put in one of those capthca things and then it tells you to try again later. I wanted to see if there is a voltage recomendation for the motherboard. With the Gigabyte motherboard I used the CSR rep I talked to advised me to use 1.5 volt ram. The Cas Latency Numbers always seem to be higher with lower voltage ram and from what I understand you want a lower Cas Latency number. I wanted my rig to work with minimum fuss. So I went with the 1.5 volt with a Cas Latency of 9. My point to this rambling is that I can not see a voltage recomendation. I really do not know how much this matters. If at all. I am thinking that ram will work but my advice is to contact Asus to be sure. I know a thing or two but the last thing I want to do is mislead you into thinking I know more then I do.

Any recommendations for this PC build?

I'm designing a high end PC for under $3000 NZ. so far I've got the following for $2850:

Motherboard
Rampage II Gene

CPU
i7920

case
Coolermaster HAF 922

HDD
1TB Western digital caviar black

RAM
6GB kingston value RAM DDR3 1333

GPU
Sapphire 5870 VaporX

PSU
PC Power & Cooling Silencer S75CF 750W

OS
7 home premium 64bit

Sound Card
creative X-Fi supreme (built into motherboard)

CPU cooler
Cooler master V8

Optical Drive
Lite-On iHAS324

Notes:
this is going to be used for video editing (1080p footage), 3D modeling/rendering and gaming.
I'm going to do a small over clock to the CPU (to about 3.2GHz).
I want something fairly quiet.
I want it to be upgradable. (probably only RAM, GPU and HDD will ever be upgraded, although the CPU may be if the mobo can take i9 processors).

any recommendations on things to add/change?

My first PC build. Any thoughts or recommendations?

each and every thing is super, even nevertheless i'm going to supply some innovations. You extremely will ought to decide for a i5 2500k processor instead, it will grant a critically extra helpful performance. you will have the potential to locate a mobo in the equivalent value type because of the fact the single you on the instant have on the thank you to help it. The HDD is additionally basically somewhat small for a gaming rig, i might recommend a 500GB, extremely isn't that high priced of an improve. Finlay, in the journey that your budget helps, you're able to might desire to hunt for the 7870 or 7850 in stead of the 6870 for a so plenty extra helpful overall performance.

First time PC Build Help needed?

if you live in the US then your lucky and go visit newegg.com for your stuff if in the UK i recommend scan.co.uk

anyway the pwerson above said combo deals, yes you can do this but it normally leaves you with a good processor but cheap ram and motherboard.

your doing hd editing etc so you will want a intel prcoessor since they have hyperthreading so they get through tasks such as these alot quicker than amd processors.

you do have a budget so id recommend a i5 quad core. the i7 is deigned to blitz through these tasks but i5 will do it well too:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Intel-Cor...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...

next your motherboard. for i5 you want a p55 chipset id suggest this:



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...

next your RAM. id suggest 6gb's and a 64 bit version of windows 7 for you because your editing HD etc:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148254&cm_re=ballistix-_-20-148-254-_-Product


next a hard drive. with hd movies especially you will find you fill it up quick so find yourself a 1TB sata 2 one.

find a blu ray dive again sata 2.

next case, many dont think of this as a big thing but with high end equipment this is basically the reason your computer parts work because it keeps them cool:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Coolermaster-Centurion-590-Black-up-to-eight-120-mm-fan-Removable-HDD-rack

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129066

next your PSU:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139005&Tpk=tx650w

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/650W-Corsair-CMPSU-650TX-single-12V-rail-energy-efficient-quiet-and-cool-fully-compatible

lastly a very important part if editing in HD your graphics card:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150438&cm_re=4890-_-14-150-438-_-Product

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/1GB-XFX-HD-4890-OC-PCI-E-20-3900MHz-GDDR5-GPU-870MHz-800-Cores-2x-DVI-HDTV-HDCP-plus-Stormrise

thats about it really not sure what this comes too if its to much you can downgrade your grpahics card to a 5770hd or something. but if your wanting to edit hd movies etc you cant afford to budge on much else of the hardware you may be able to get by with 4gbs of ram or 6gbs of 1333mhz ram but thats about it

Trying to build gaming pc for first time need help ?

If you are building a PC manly for gaming the the Intel i5's are the better choice, reason being the i7's have hyper-threading which is great for video editing/rendering, 3D rendering, and graphic designing but in gaming it has almost zero impact on games as almost no PC game on the market to date utilizes hyper-threading.

With some of the i5's and i7's, you will notice that there will be a "K" after the numbers, example (3570k) the K series Intel i5's and i7's have an unlocked multiplier which allows you to be able to overclock the CPU past it's intended stock clock speed's. If you do not plan to overclock or have any desire to do so, then a K series CPU really is just a waste of money that you could save and put towards something else in your PC.

Also no game on the market today, utilizes close to 16GB of memory, most games only need a minimum requirement of 2GB of memory in order to run the game and most games today only need 4GB of memory to run at the recommend settings. 8GB of memory is plenty for gaming today.

You might also want to look at this http://www.intelgamingpromo.com/intel13b... Intel has a great promotional deal going on right at the moment on Haswell CPU's

Hope this helped you,


ericlee30


~Member Of the Intel response Squad~

Want to build a gaming PC. What would be the best motherboard for this CPU?

Well that's an excellent procesor for a gaming PC, but you're going at things slightly backwards. The first and most important component of a gaming PC is the video card, you really build around that.

A great CPU like the E8600 paired with a video card like the Geforce 9600GT, Radeon 3870 or Geforce 9800GT won't perform nearly as well for gaming as the combination of a slightly cheaper CPU like the E8400 and better video card, like the Radeon 4850 or Geforce 9800GTX. While $50 usually means a small increase/decrease in CPU power, it's often enough to jump an entire tier of performance in video cards.

Your motherboard choice doesn't directly affect performance as much as your GPU/CPU choice. It's really there to hold the components, and you're primarily making sure compatible with your CPU and RAM speeds.

Motherboard choice is usually driven by factors such as:

a) How many slots for RAM you need- is 2 enough?

b) Are you going with a single video card, or SLI/Crossfire?

c) Will the video card you're interested in, FIT into a small case (Micro-ATX board) or do you need a full-size ATX? The mini-ITX boards for shuttle cases are even smaller.

d) Reliability: Some brands like Asus and Gigabyte are known for being rock-solid, while ECS and other bargain brands aren't.

e) How many PCI expansion slots do you need? Are you planning to use onboard sound, or a standlone card like Creative Audigy or X-Fi?

Siince you're planning something portable(?) that realistically disqualifies SLI and Crossfire builds.

For the E8600 I'd recommend at least a Radeon 4850 or Geforce 9800GTX. You'd see a significant performance increase by spending $75 more and moving up to the Radeon 4870/GTX 260 level video cards- but a small case might not provide sufficient airflow/cooling for those cards.

For a gaming PC I'd normally recommend the Gigabyte EP45-DS3L. For a reliable Micro-ATX board, the Asus P5KPL-CM. But even that might be too big for a shuttle case.

Here's a list of the mini-ITX boards currently available from NewEgg (3rd link). I'm not personally familiar with any of them, but I'd start by reading the user reviews to weed out any turkeys...

Here's my first gaming PC build... Any thoughts or recommendations?

Looks pretty good. If you asked 1000 builders about your specs then you would probably get 1000 ways that everyone would do it better. price is always a factor understandably. I would really, really spend a little bit more and put in a Solid State Drive. I had various SATA drives and now I use them simply for slow storage. Boot time from the Windows 7 ultimate splash screen to desktop (useable) is now like 12-16 seconds for me. I can restart from desktop and return to desktop in 43 seconds with my SSD. Even if you cant run SATA III, it should still run SATA II speeds. IM running SATA II with a SATA III Drive right now as I type.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227706
It is a bit of a pain gaming with only a 120GB drive, but I dont need more than 2-5 games at a time on my main drive anyways. If you fill up a 500GB or larger drive with tons of crap, then you performance will drop anyways. With my 2 drive bays on my tower, I just have a stack of 1TB drives that I hot swap when ever I want to change out some storage options, games, whatever.

AMD Phenom II X4 2.6 Ghz Quad core
16 GB DDR 3 PC3-12800 MB/sec
120GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD
500GB VelociRaptor SATA Drive
1TB WD Green SATA drive
XFX Radeon HD 6950 XXX Graphics
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit Genuine
26" ASUS LCD Monitor
Thermaltake V9 BlacX Edition with Docking Station