Building A Gaming PC - Help Please!

[Zoom7000]

I've got a £1300 budget to build a gaming rig for my brothers. Has to include a monitor too. I've been looking at Core 2 Quad 9550 specs, however, on other forums everyone seems to think i7 is the only way to go albeit the prices are a bit steep. I was looking for a nice Asus motherboard but the Rampage II Extreme for i7 is over £300.

This is the original Specs I had:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 LGA775 'Yorkfield' 2.83GHz 12MB-cache (1333FSB) Processor - OEM
Price = £218.49
Asus Maximus II Formula P45 Socket 775 8 Channel Audio ATX Motherboard - Ebuyer
Price = £156.51
OCZ 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-8500C5 1066MHz Dual Channel Platinum Series DDR2 (OCZ2P10664GK)
Price = £126.48
BFG GeForce GTX 260 OC MAXCORE 896MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail
Price = £247.24
Corsair 650W TX Series PSU - 120mm Fan, 80+% Efficiency, Single +12V Rail - Ebuyer
Price = £69.99
Antec P182 Gunmetal Grey Super Mid Tower Case - No PSU - Ebuyer
Price = £92.44
Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB Hard Drive SATAII *32MB Cache* - OEM - Ebuyer
Price = £147.96
Samsung SH-S223F 22X DVD±RW/RAM/DL Serial ATA Black Bare Drive - OEM - Ebuyer
Price = £15.35
Samsung SM2233BW 22" TFT Monitor 1680x1050 20,000:1 300cd/m2 5ms VGA/DVI-D Glossy Black 3 Years Warranty - Ebuyer
Price = 166.36
Tuniq Tower 120-LFB CPU Cooler (Socket 478/754/939/940/AM2/LGA775)
Price = £28.74

Total (Including Shipping) = £1279.32

Should I stick to this system, or go for an i7 system? If so, can someone please spec me a system upto a maximum of £1300. The HDD can come down to 1Tb for starters.

[DrPerceptron]

Hmm, I just bought my new gaming rig, although mine was 1/3rd of the cost!

I too was looking at the i7 chips, but after reading a couple of articles, a lot of them seemed to imply that for gaming, there was no ultimate performance difference, just in the other tasks it trumped them.

Where are you looking for your parts out of interest? I got all mine from OCUK and their price for the OCZ RAM is nearly half what you have there.


Have you looked at ATI's offering for a top end card? I looked at the 4870 X2, too expensive, but seems to be the best card on the market...

[Zoom7000]

The main reason for looking at an i7 system for me is to future proof really.

[tech_guy]

Save yourself the build hassle: Alienware?

[Zoom7000]

Save yourself the build hassle: Alienware?

Have you seen those prices?

[dhicks]

Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB Hard Drive £147.96

Seems a bit much for a mere 1TB of storage and one harddisk spindle. You might as well at least get two 500GB disks and use the on-board RAID to set them up as a mirrored set, probably saving you money, giving you the same storage space and increasing read speed a bit.

--
David Hicks

[Zoom7000]

Seems a bit much for a mere 1TB of storage and one harddisk spindle. You might as well at least get two 500GB disks and use the on-board RAID to set them up as a mirrored set, probably saving you money, giving you the same storage space and increasing read speed a bit.

--
David Hicks

Sorry, I forgot to mention that price is (x2) so, that's 2Tb of Hard Drive Space.

[contink]

Having recently bought a new workstation / (some) gaming machine the one thing that sticks out from your spec is that you're going with DDR2 instead of DDR3 on the mainboard ROM and DDR3 instead of DDR5 on the graphics.

FWIW I went with this spec:

Item: Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 iX48 Socket 775 DDR3 8 channel audio ATX Motherboard
Qty: 1Cost: 161.67

Item: Corsair 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz/PC3-12800 XMS3 DHX Memory Kit
Qty: 1Cost: 115.70

Item: Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 2.33GHz Socket 775 1333FSB 4MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor
Qty: 1Cost: 128.98

Item: PowerColor HD 4850 PCS+ Edition 1GB GDDR3 OC Dual DVI HDTV Out PCI-E Graphics Card
Qty: 1Cost: 119.36

Item: Samsung HD502IJ SpinPoint F1 500GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 16MB Cache - OEM
Qty: 1Cost: 35.99

Item: Antec Sonata III Piano Black Quiet Mid Tower Case - With 500W EarthWatts PSU
Qty: 1Cost: 68.07

Item: Creative Fatal1ty Gaming Headset - Noise Cancellation Microphone with Gold Plated 3.5mm Jack
Qty: 1Cost: 19.39


All in for around £775...

Now, granted the case isn't much cop for a overclocked system but I've left space for the CPU to be upgraded, it's a DDR3, X48 chipset motherboard so I can upgrade later albeit not hugely and the graphics card is more than ok for what I play... It's handling COD WaW with no trouble at all.

My advice on the graphics card is buy a little lower and save your money so you can buy the one you want in a year when it's cheaper again.. The case you spec'd would be good but I can't fault my choice for silence. The only down side was the lack of active cooling over the drive bays but it's a nice case.

As for screen, well look around, but my LG L225WT is doing fine...

[tech_guy]

Have you seen those prices?

Yeah, but think of the bragging rights!

[flyinghaggis]

Alienware are massively over-priced IMO. You're basically paying for the name and the fancy case which other than looking cool probably isn't very thermally efficient with all that plastic around it!

At any rate £1300 including monitor isn't enough to buy what I'd consider to be a good spec'd gaming PC from Alienware!

Regarding spec I'd definitely say go for a Core2Quad i7 spec PC. The benchmarks are well ahead of the previous gen

[dhicks]

Sorry, I forgot to mention that price is (x2) so, that's 2Tb of Hard Drive Space.

Okay, four 7500GB harddrives - one for the OS and three in a RAID-5 array. Maybe even make the OS drive a 10,000 RPM VelociRaptor drive.

--
David Hicks

[SYNACK]

I HATE Alienware, their sales and support are horrific as is their build quality - at least in the laptop line.

The m5550 laptops that we got both have a known manufacturing fault where the GPU cooks itself due to inadiquate cooling and destroys the GFX memory. Despite cooking two during warrenty they refuse to admit the fault or do anything about it.

For supposedly fast gear it should be quicker than it is and their site is so bad that you can't even get a hold of an updated bios from their customized intel board so that it will not bomb out in WDS.

If I had to pick one company to take legal action against it would be these incomtetant imbosilic clowns, unfourtunatly you can't sue in NZ otherwise I may have persued it.

[RabbieBurns]

I HATE Alienware, their sales and support are horrific as is their build quality - at least in the laptop line.

The m5550 laptops that we got both have a known manufacturing fault where the GPU cooks itself due to inadiquate cooling and destroys the GFX memory. Despite cooking two during warrenty they refuse to admit the fault or do anything about it.

For supposedly fast gear it should be quicker than it is and their site is so bad that you can't even get a hold of an updated bios from their customized intel board so that it will not bomb out in WDS.

If I had to pick one company to take legal action against it would be these incomtetant imbosilic clowns, unfourtunatly you can't sue in NZ otherwise I may have persued it.

I have a £1600 alienware laptop sitting as a doorstop. Got about 1 year use out of it. Biggest mistake in my life.

[ICT_GUY]

A quad core CPU, 9800 cheap VGA card and 2 gigs of ram is enough for the moment. The PC games market is being squeezed by the console markets higher profits. High spec games are few and far between.

[ZeroHour]

Funnily I am about to build a new i7 based gaming rig. I would recommend:
Antec 1200 Twelve Hundred Full Tower Case - No PSU - Ebuyer
As a case as it gets brilliant reviews for cooling design and its not much more.