Gaming Spec

[Madz]

Hey I asked a few months ago on here for help building my PC, and got lots of great help which was really appreciated, but now I'm struggling with something else.

My brother is building a gaming pc, think the budget is £500, so far we've got cpu, psu and drives sorted, but he wants a motherboard with SLI, i think he said crossfire, but im sure if it has crossfire it will have SLI, does anybody have any recommendations? also as he is waiting for new graphics cards to come out, it will need to have some vga on it for now, or we can buy a cheap graphics card, so i guess thats not too much of an issue.

Also he needs Ram, ive seen Geil recommended elsewhere, but it could only be purchased from that particular site, so dont really know whether to go by that review. I currently use crucial ballistix in mine, but I dont game, or have it overclocked, so not sure how capable it is.
Ideally going to sort him with 4 gig of the stuff, so again, the motherboard needs 4ram slots, which is pretty standard I guess.

Err I think thats all he wanted anyway, he said he doesnt want to overclock, but hes 15, and probably wanting to outdo his mates computers in a month or so, so i reckon he will try and overclock...so a good overclocking motherboard and ram would be ideal, but not massively important.

I think the budget for the motherboard is going to be about £80, and then for the 4gig ram £70

anyway hope somebody can help, sorry if this message is a bit mumbo jumbo but he's decided to bugger off and leave me to sort it out, and I vaguely know what he wants.

 

[Grimley]

Sli & Xfire are similar (2 graphics cards joined for better performance) but that's it.
Sli = Nvidia
Xfire = Ati

The 2 are incompatible so don't try to SLi nvidia Graphics cards on a Xfire board
(it wont work) or vice versa.

TBH I'd spend no more than £200 on the Card at the moment (8800GT) Ati & Nvidia are trying to outdo each other at the moment (Nvidia clearly winning) new models are coming out every couple of months or so but all the PC mags are raving about the 8800GT.

Motherboard - any P35 chipset should to the trick.

 

[Madz]

The thing is, ive been searching for a good p35board that features crossfire - I think my brother wants an ATI card at end of february.
But Ive looked and cant find Asus or Abit crossfire for under £100
Ive looked at other brands too but the night has been too long and i cant remember,

 

[Uridium]

Crossfire and SLI are both pretty much a waste of time with the speed of current GPUs.

The performance of a high end single GPU is very close to that of a dual GPU system.


Tell your brother to just buy a single 8800 series card, a P35 board, 2Gb of DDR800 (4Gb if he's instaling a 64-bit OS) and as faster Core2 or Core2quad CPU as he can. Throw in a hard disk and he has an excellent gaming rig.

 

[booyaka]

I think the budget for the motherboard is going to be about £80, and then for the 4gig ram £70

Motherboard - Gigabyte P35C-DSR (supports DDR2 ram and will also support DDR3 ram) and also will support all current cpu's and the next gen of 45nm cpus - should get it for around £70 delivered from scan/dabs etc. (also some bragging rights with future support!!)

Ram wise - got ballistix myself and would recommend. Otherwise if 4gb is needed (and remember you need a 64bit operating system to get all 4gb recognised by the o/s) then best bet is the geil ram

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-058-GL

£25 for 2gb is stupidly cheap and you would be mental not to purchase - it clocks well if he needed to start overclocking.

All in budget hopefully.

 

[Madz]

agh thats the thing, i think he's planning on 32bit vista. how much is recognised? I knew about that problem, but im running 64bit so ignored it, oops.

I might just get the ballistix as ive got this and everything runs smoothly, and I can get it all from one place then, I seem to remember overclockers postage being quite expensive so not much saving for the Geil, excuse me if I am wrong though. If i get the ballistix from same source as other items i think its free postage. ho hum.

Also he's getting the q6600 quadcore, is this going to be beneficial to him for future gaming, i know new processors are around the corner, but more will be around the corner from then, and then eventualy these corners just turn into roundabouts.

thanks for the advice on the motherboards, are the gigabytes a good brand in terms of reliability?, ive never used one.

 

[Madz]

ok he's getting vista 64bit, so i guess that sorts one thing out, not quite sure what it sorts out, but i feel less confussed.

 

[Uridium]

I'm sure Booyaka will concur that the DS3R is one of the best P35 boards (make sure you get the Rev2.0 version though)

I've used Gigabyte boards for years myself as well as ASUS and MSI but have always found both the quality and stability of the Gigabyte boards better.

in terms of gaming the Q6600 will take anything you can throw at it with out breaking into a sweat.

 

[Uridium]

If you buy the kit from Scan you can get free postage via the link on here.

There CS is very good as well.