First build - Advice appreciated

[Neo7891]

Hey there,

I'm planning on building my first o/c system for gaming. After many hours

of reading reviews and searchin forums this is my first setup.

Since I'm still fairly new to overclocking I'd appreciate your advice.

My setup so far:

Motherboard: ASUS Maximus II Formula (P45) (or maybe P5QDeluxe instead?)

CPU: Core 2 Duo E8500 (E0 Stepping)

Case: Antec 1200

PSU: Corsair TX650W

Graphics Card: XFX GTX 260 666M Black Edition 896MB

DDR2: 2x Corsair XMS2 Dominator DIMM Kit 4GB PC2-8500U (DDR2-1066)

HDD: 2x WD Cavier Black WD6401AALS (Raid0)

CPU-Fan: Scythe Ultra Kaze 2000RPM

Heatsink: Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme True Black

BR-Drive: LG GGC H20L

Thanks for your help!

 

[SwaleSmith]

seems fine to me but might I suggets a rampage m/board and DDR3 MEMORY

I know it costs a little more but what about i7 I can't tell you enough as to how good it is, I would certainly go i7 even if it ment waiting longer to rake in extra cash it's worth it see my spec below O'm running i7920 wich is 2.66 and I have reached 3.8 ghz with just 1.2500vcore the rampage is so conveneint and stable, I can even agjust volts on the fly whils runnning windows & stress testing, makes it alot quicker to find the right volts.

I highly highly recommend this setup it absoloutly kills my last qx9770 setup @4ghz!!!!!

 

[Neo7891]

Your setup looks great, I think that's just lil bit over my budget.

I read that the xtra perfomance you get from DDR3 is not yet worth

the much higher price, so i chose DDR2. If i should upgrade my cpu

in the future i thought i could go with a Core 2 Extreme once their price

dropped. That would not require me to get a new Motherboard.

 

[SwaleSmith]

I understand, I guess you could pick up a qx9650 for around 300/360 right now they are better overclockers than the 9770 have tried both and was suprised, they are cooler and need less volts

 

[painejake]

Id say great but get 6GB of the XMS2 ram i got some and its sweet. Plus id say get the 800MHz its a fair bit cheaper and OC's to 1066MHz easy as pie

 

[SwaleSmith]

yes pressuming the original poster realises that he will need 64bit O.S I have had 3gb 4gb and 6gb I7 and the difference in 4gb to 6gb is nill its not used and if you run un 32bit the 3gb is enough

 

[Neo7891]

I was planning on running vista 64bit. Just after readin ur posts I did some research on how much ram would be usefull for vista64. I found that 8GB Dual Channel might actually be the best choice for me. So I changed my setup to 4xCorsair XMS2 Dominator.

Why not overclock the 1066 version to 1200 instead of the 800 version to 1066 ?

Other than that I switched from the 2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 320GB to

2x WD Cavier Black WD6401AALS for Raid0 after reading some reviews and testings.

Changed those things in the list up on top as well.