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Upgrades!
I'm trying to breathe some new life into my computer system ... and the wife allowed me to go on a little shopping spree at Newegg.com.
Here's what I ordered:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...=BROWSE&depa=1
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...=BROWSE&depa=1
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...=BROWSE&depa=1
I opted for the Intel Prescott 2.4A CPU because it has been reported to reliably overclock by up to 900 mhz on my board with stock cooling. I should be able to get 3.0 gHz out of it with no problems. And it was only $125.
Based on reports about the Arctic Cooling system, I opted on it to cool my Radeon 9700 Pro. I think my 9700 Pro has a lot of life left in it with overclocking.
And on the hard drive ... I wanted SATA but could not afford the Raptor. So I opted on the $99 120mb 7200 RPM SATA Western Digital Caviar with an 8mb cache. It will be a lot faster than my current drive, which is an 80mb Western Digital with 2 mb cache.
All of this is due to arrive on June 3, so I'll probably be out of the game for a couple of days. :-)
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All good choices Ab.
I love my Raptor with all my heart, but damn that was an expensive purchase. You still got yourself a great SATA drive. Plus you got 120gb of space where I only have 74gb. You done good boy :)
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Nice!
I would have gone with the Northwood 2.4C instead of the 2.4A Prescott (Actually, I already did. ;) ). Everything I've read has the 2.4C running cooler and it's a 800FSB instead of 533FSB - not to mention no HyperThreading.
I have the 2.4C myself and am overclocking to 3.0 with stock cooling and voltage without a problem. It's been just under a year with no problems. With proper cooling, you can get some real nice FSB numbers and o/c numbers.
Regardless, nice setup. :D
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Thanks guys. I wanted that Raptor bad ... but this will probably work just as well for me.
Hylander, I opted for the Prescott 2.4A because I have data that it will overclock well with my specific motherboard (MSI NEO-FISR with VIA PT880 chipset). According to HardOCP, they achieved a stable overclock of 3.3 ghz with stock cooling, and 3.7 ghz with water cooling.
Here's a link to their review.
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjAzLDE=
Check out the heatsink that comes with this CPU (second page of HardOCP review). It looks pretty stout.
I plan to be a bit more conservative than that with my overclock. I don't want the motherboard to catch fire or anything. :-)
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Yeah, I read that review :D No doubt, you'll be happy with that setup! Most of the benchmarks I've seen show the 2.4C has higher "benchmarks" in Sandra and 3DMark due to the FSB - but I'm not a benchmark 'whore' like some of the overclocking crowd are. ;) HT shouldn't make much of a difference in gaming anyways. Although it is interesting to watch HT in SiMeter when just doing normal computing, 3D renders, etc.
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Hijack
Ok, now that I've got a steady income flow once again I'm getting ready to do a complete overhaul on my system.. been about 2 years now since any major upgrades. Only thing I'll really be keeping from my current rig is the sound card and nic.
I figure I'll just get everything from newegg this time around so I won't have to worry about digging up where I bought what if the situation arises.
First 3 things I'll be getting are the mobo/cpu and ram. then a few weeks (ala, paychecks) later getting dual HD's for RAID config and vid card.
thinking of this for cpu: http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProduc...ion=19-116-171
for my mobo I'm not really sure, it's the one point I'm the weakest in, knowledge wise.. all 4 seem similar. Suggestions?
SUPERMICRO
ASUS
ABIT
SUPERMICRO #2
and this for ram (2 sticks, one when I first get my cpu/mobo, then the second after I get a new vid card and HDD's.): Option 1
or just bite the bullet and get the combo pack right off, and save a few $$.. Option 2
or Option 3 which doesn't have the ecc.. guess I'll have to read up on what that helps with.
So, anyone see any glaringly obvious faults that I haven't noticed, or alternatives that I should look at? Any help/tips would be appreciated.
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