TR Forums

Hi all, I am new here and am looking for advice and pointers on a new gaming system i plan to build.

I am planning to put this all together in Australia an have a budget of roughly $1500.

CPU: Intel Core i7 2600

MOBO: Asus P8Z68 - Deluxe
I am really looking for some advice on this as it does seem like a fantastic Motherboard but I'm just a little unsure there would be something more suitable.

GPU: Gigabyte Radeon HD6970 2GB OC

RAM: Corsair Vengeance 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3
Good choice?

SCREEN: ASUS 23in IPS Widescreen LED monitor

CASE: Using my previous case which is a Coolermaster CM 690

HDD: Using previous HDD's

PSU: Planed to use my previous PSU which is a Corsair professional series HX 620, I couldn't find a listing for this product on their website anymore.
Mainly curious whether or not it would be sufficient for the entire rig.

I do already have a copy of windows 7 64bit to go

All in all the parts i require will cost $1385 so it does give me plenty of room in my budget.

Any suggestions and advice would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers

That's a good motherboard, but you may not need the extra "features" it offers. Is there something the PRO version is missing that you need? It's $50 cheaper and the only things the Deluxe seems to offer are an extra LAN port (2 vs 1), an extra eSATA port (2 vs 1), a clear CMOS button, and 4 extra power phases (which are really only going to help in extreme overclocking/competition type stuff). They both offer Crossfire/SLI if you were planning on doing that in the future (and if not you could probably step down to an even cheaper board without SLI/CF).

2600K and 2500K are both great gaming CPUs (almost identical performance), but the 2600K will be faster in other areas and may be slightly more "future proof". One thing I do recommend is getting an aftermarket heatsink for it. The stock Intel heatsink is small, slightly loud, and not very effective. The Cooler Master Hyper 212+ is generally considered the best "bang-for-buck" cooler you can buy right now. These CPUs are incredible easy to overclock too. They ALL go well over 4ghz, and some even reach 5ghz.

Your PSU should be plenty good, even if you overclock. 2600K with a 6970 will probably only use about 400W.

I have 8GB of that exact memory, and my little brother does too. It's working great for us. 3

The Radeon HD6970 is a great choice too IMO. It's very fast, and single-GPU so you won't have to worry about driver/scaling/microstuttering issues that dual-GPU can bring. The GTX580 is the only single-GPU that's faster, but it's overpriced IMO ($100+ more and only about 10% faster)

The issue with the motherboard was only because my knowledge of them and features are extremely poor. In response to what the Deluxe offers i would most likely have no need to have the extra features that you have pointed out.
The main reason that I included that board was due to wanting something of high quality but as previously stated I have pretty poor knowledge when it comes to Mobo's.
The P8Z68-pro is also $80 cheaper in my region.

The other Mobo that I had been looking at was a Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD5-B3, would the Asus pro be the smarter option still? I had seen it mentioned a lot in the System guides featured on the forums.I have no preference over Manufacturers all I'm after is good quality.

Any more suggestions would be very welcome.

I have the gigabyte p67ud4,no problems whatsoever but i do wish it had the new UEFI graphic bios over the old school bios,If i was to do it over again i would get the asus pro board.Dont get me wrong My board overclocks just as good,but the new graphic bios are very cool and i trust asus products to.I would have liked a reset button on the MB too:)
Bottom line make sure you have 8x8 crossfire capability so you can get a buddy for your current 6970 when you need more graphics power.

The Asus P8Z68-V would probably serve for your purposes. It lacks firewire and is slightly less expensive than the Pro. If you dropped down further to the LE or LX, you'd give up some of the Crossfire/SLI capability.

Gigabyte also makes quality motherboards. At the moment, Asus has a better UEFI implementation.

Do you already have a SATA optical drive? If not, pick up a BD-ROM/DVD-RW combo drive like the Samsung SH-B123L.

Would you consider an SSD or a sound card?

Thanks for the help on the Mobo, I have replaced the Deluxe model and have now brought down the total to $1295.
I do already have an optical drive but if I didn't I would definitely pick up a blu-ray/dvd-rw combo.

As for the SSD & Soundcard I hadn't really considered it.
I know that SSD's are huge with putting your OS on for extreme boot times but as cool as it is I can't see the payoff in spending X amount for such a small storage device. Personally I don't mind sticking with the Regular HDD's.
With Soundcards I have never ever considered a dedicated card, I always thought that the integrated one for sufficient enough and hadn't given it much more thought.
What would be the benefits of having either of these devices?

I think anyone that owns an SSD can tell you the payoffs of having an SSD are worth the extra cost. You dont need to go super big, a couple hundo on a 120-128 GB SSD should be enough for your major items. I've heard of people upgrading to the next generation of processors and not see any user-experience improvement until they switched to an SSD. I would go with Crucial M4 128GB as sandforce-based ssd's are causing people headaches right now and Intel drives are much more expensive at the same capacity point. A SATAIII sandforce drive will quote 550MB/s and 500MB/s reads and writes (thats the easiest way to tell them apart from the marvell-based and Intel drives)

I would go with an i5 2500k, that saves you $100 toward an SSD without much cpu performance sacrifice.

Sound cards are cheap (ASUS Xonar DG is like $20) so its hard to go wrong. I would say that your speakers should cost at least $100-150 to even consider buying a sound card. My speakers were $80 and I can't really tell any difference. My brother has some nice studio headphones and the difference for him was night and day (I witnessed it too).

I do like the idea of a SSD but I honestly think it can wait until my current boot drive drops dead.
Thanks for all of the help!

If there is anything else I should know or any more advice that could be offered before i commit to this build would be greatly appreciated.

Update on the SSD. I now am a proud owner of a Vertex 3 120GB Max IOPS (so far no BSOD's) Got it for $180 on NCIX a few days after OCZ released their 2.15 firmware that is purportedly supposed to banish the BSOD bug on sandforce drives once and for all. So I can now comment on SSD's based on my own personal experience, albeit limited.

A couple of things before I begin. I have a Core 2 Duo E8400 (LGA 775), DDR2 800 (4GB), AMD 6850 system so I only have SATA 2 (3Gbps) connectivity. This is obviously a well aged system. (A system upgrade is in my near future, yes) The SATA 2 essentially castrates my SSD by almost half of its true thoroughput potential as far as random reads and writes are concerned. Sequential reads and writes are probably also being limited according to the specs, however not as much as randoms. That being said, everything I've experienced so far with my SSD is twice as fast as my HDD or better. (I'm not sitting around with a stopwatch, this is a rough estimate) While I was getting everything set up (installing programs and such) I was amazed at the fact that I actually couldn't keep up with my computer. I was running a full virus scan, and installing 2-3 programs at a time and it was all I could do to keep up with the installs, it was madness. This was something that would have slowed my system down to a crawl with my HDD.

Now, SSD's dont do much to increase frame rates in games, but they do speed up level load times. But I would say that my general user-experience-rating (yeah, I just invented that term) has gone up noticeably. The speed of SSD's are easy to get used to because its what you feel like you should be experiencing from a modern computer, aka near instant load times, etc. Something that you dont get with HDD's. Adios days of HDD's (for OS), I wont miss you one bit!!