How to get the most of my DH Chrsitmas gift?

Tinkerhell

I won one of the MoBo's in the DH ECS slogan competition so I thought it might be cool to see what all the DH'ers would do with the MoBo if they had been in my shoes.

Here is what I'm looking for from any/all of you. The below is the board I recieved today from Zardon (thanks A, it came in great shape & with no problems at all!!)

ECS PAGE

OCworkbench board review

What I want from you guys is everything else - give me your suggestion for everything from CPU, RAM, HD, GPU. box... everything. And tell me what route you would take if it was your board - something sticking with the MoDT theme - quiet & cool, or cheapest thing you could get away with, or badass as in OC it from hell parts with watercooling & all the other bells & whistles.

Why do you ask - cause I'm probably going to pick one of your suggests & flesh the whole thing out, dress up the box & slap DH logo's or something all over it & finally post pics & benches for the end result.

So lets see what ya got folks!

Dyre Straits

First, let me wipe this drool off my face.

If I had that mobo to start off with, I'd definitely get the fastest Core 2 Duo I could afford.

Then, since I'm not into water cooling, I'd go with a great CPU cooler like the one I have now: Titan .....http://www.titan-cd.com/eng/heatpipe/nk3234tz.html

I'd then go with at least 2 GB of Corsair or OCZ RAM in the extreme gamers category with the lowest latency available.

You'll likely want to get an nVidia 8800 series video card as there's nothing else right now to beat it. But, if you have to wait at all, get the upcoming R600 cards coming out soon.

As for a case, I'm really partial to my own selection: XION II with plenty of room and adequate cooling. However, the PSU that comes with the case isn't a good choice. You need a 550-600W that provides no less that 20A on the 12V rails.

Then, wouldn't you want to go with some Raptor HDDs?

Tinkerhell

That's a start. I hope that since this sub forum is a bit down the list it doesn't get missed. Can't wait to see some more ideas. But give me specifics - not the "fastest I could afford" lets pretend you don't have to worry about that. Tell me exactly what you would get. If I like the total system you come up with it may end up being what I post about later on...

Dyre Straits

Well, I'll be looking over some specifics then. Might be a little while in the making.

ChaosMinionX

Not much experience with this board, I know alot of the midrange to topend boards and have owned them however, I would probably say go Core2Duo E6400 or E6600 (6400 for the price of course, on another note it may run a 6600 pretty good). Can further elaborate on it although that board has a very limited bios in the ideas of overclocking and whatnot.

Says it supports DDR2 667, but you can probably sneak some good DDR2 800 on there possibly, although without seeing the bios further I really couldnt tell you what it would be capable of. But Corsair, Teamgroup, Gskill, OCZ, or Geil they all make good sticks can give suggestions on that too.

As far as Harddrives go, Western Digital or Seagate. If you want high performance drives, WD Raptors with 16mb cache come in 36/74/150gb variants. Caviars which are their mainstream storage drives for WD are also quite nice. Seagate Barracudas I hear good things of, though I have never owned them.

Power Supply - OCZ makes solid PSUs, CoolerMaster has a good one too, silverstone possibly.

GPU- Nvidia or ATI - Would need a price range your working with.

Cases - CoolerMaster, Antec, LianLi, Thermaltake all great cases.

Again price range and generally what you want to accomplish with this system would be a great help in making suggestions. Can also make suggestions on all the stuff you want based on how loud or quiet you intend to be running this machine, as well as any overclocking you want to do with it. But if your going to dump a ton of money into components, then the Intel 945GT chipset coupled with what I can see from preliminary SS from OCW on the bios, is going to be a major limiting factor on exactly how much performance your going to get out of a topend card like 8800 like dyre recommended, and any other topend part you buy.

Usually when building a topend system you wanna look specifically at what you wanna do OC stable, benchmark whatever. And then choose from Intel P965, 975X chipsets, Nvidia 680i chipsets, or the new ATI RD600 (Good luck getting this one). These are all high performance chipsets and can take full advantage of the current hightech hardware, just a little side note on going all out using that specific chipset.

Cheers,

Chaos