New Gaming Rig

[Jeyk]

Well...I decided, after quite a bit of initial reluctance, to finally do a decent PC upgrade.  I really didn't want to spend the dough, but I think I made off with a reasonable deal, and I should be content with this setup for a couple of years:

AMD X2 5000+ Black Edition
2GB DDR 800 (1GB x 2)
Asus MSN-SLI nForce 560 SLI AM2 Motherboard
Nvidia 9600GT 512MB
Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro 92mm Heatsink/Fan
Rosewill Stallion 500W PSU

Total: $482

I'm going to use my old case (Thermaltake Xaser III Supertower), and old hard drives/DVD burners (IDE/PATA, which the board supports, up to 4 devices).

Chances are that I'm going to need to ask for help on setting some of this up.

EDIT:  Had to add a new PSU, turns out my old one was only 430W, not enough "voltage on the rail" or some shit.

[Lithium]

I did almost the same thing. I just got my new desktop running. Except I needed to get a speedy hard drive and a new PSU

I went for:

AMD 4800+
2GB DDR 800
Gigabyte SLI Motherboard
XFX Nvidia 8600GT Card
70gig 10K SATA Raptor HDD
Thermaltake 420W

Total is almost exactly $500 after rebates. The hard drive pretty much was the most expensive thing! I might buy another XFX 8600 card and SLI it. (any opinions on that?) The one I bought was $70 after rebate, really good deal I think to just get another!

[NoCry]

nice gentlemen! very very nice! can not beleive the cost of those parts!! so so much cheaper than in blightly.

[Anamodiel]

I've actually been thinking of getting a new desktop for college, and I was thinking of beginning to build my own computer at the start of the summer. Seeing the costs of this makes me all the more happy for my prospects of getting a computer for a pretty cheap cost.

My dad, however, has always been a Dell fan and has never wanted to build computers on his own because they don't have warranties or 24 hour support that you could just call. Any ideas on how to convince him to let me build my own computer instead of buying from Dell?

[Pirus]

well if youre paying for it yourself that should be enough to convince him... its your money do with it what you want.  But you do have support... FA FTW! lol we can help ya with whatever arises.  And btw Jeyk im here if ya need me I'll give you my cell number if you need me to walk ya through it.

[Heironymus]

I've actually been thinking of getting a new desktop for college, and I was thinking of beginning to build my own computer at the start of the summer. Seeing the costs of this makes me all the more happy for my prospects of getting a computer for a pretty cheap cost.

My dad, however, has always been a Dell fan and has never wanted to build computers on his own because they don't have warranties or 24 hour support that you could just call. Any ideas on how to convince him to let me build my own computer instead of buying from Dell?

newegg.com... to buy
and a few people on here know a good bit about computers.. ask for there numbers for "wingman" support...

[Pirus]

If youre going to sli the 8600 Im not sure the 420 watt PSU will be enough I would definately check into that.  It may squeek in there there is a nice calculator for such things here.....

http://extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine

If it does work then yeah I would say go for it.. I have actually toyed with the idea of getting another 8800 ultra.

[Lithium]

LOL yeah it says I'd need like 228W. I'm telling you all these PSUs now a days with 800+W is just bullshit marketing. I think even high performance machines could run with 650watters.

The new rebate on the 8600GT on newegg said for purchases as MWAVE, I emailed them about that early early this morning and come today then went and removed it, never did email me back... lol, so I'll wait until it goes on sale again or I get it from MWAVE. But I think it'll be a smart buy.

[Jeyk]

OK, this power supply stuff is confusing the hell out of me.

Apparently the 9600GT needs 22A (amperage) on the +12V rail to power efficiently.

Take a look at this and tell me if the amperage on this PSU is sufficient enough:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ShowImage.aspx?CurImage=17-182-076-03.jpg&Image=17-182-076-09.jpg%2c17-182-076-08.jpg%2c17-182-076-03.jpg%2c17-182-076-04.jpg%2c17-182-076-05.jpg%2c17-182-076-06.jpg%2c17-182-076-07.jpg&S7ImageFlag=0&WaterMark=1&Depa=1&Description=Rosewill+Stallion+Series+RD500-2SB+500W+Power+Supply

I've heard that you can't simply add up the +12V1 and +12V2 rails to get the amperage - supposedly, you take the total wattage of the 12V rails and divide that number by 12.

Which way is the right way to calculate amperage on the PSU linked above, and would someone be kind enough to tell me what the amperage on this particular PSU is?  I don't trust the answer I came up with until I get another opinion (480W total minus the 130W for the 3.3V and 5V rails and 22W for the -12V and +5V rails = 320W divided by 12 = 27A).

[Pirus]

yep your fine jeyk.. its not saying the card needs 22amps its saying your power supply has to have atleast 22 amps on it.. and it does.  so you have nothing to worry about.

[Jeyk]

Thanks, was going mad for a moment there.

[Da6onet]

it can't be 22amps, that's insane. a corded circular saw only draws like 9-12 amps

sure it's not 2.2 amps? which is still high considering most electronics run just fine betweem 300mA and 500mA

[Pirus]

welll all this is saying is that it recommends a PSU that can sustain 22 amps not 22 amps to the video card but 22 amps to the whole system.  I seriously doubt he is using that much as you were saying but, always good to have enough  Its like it said it needed a 400 watt power supply.  The card itself doesn't need that much but added with all of your possible peripherals the whole system might.

[Jeyk]

Just got done building/overclocking/testing it over the past few hours at a friend's.

Runs stable at 40-45C OC'd to 3.0.  Crysis runs smoothly at 1024 w/ most settings running on High.  I'm in love with this thing.

Reinstalling XP and games at the moment; see you folks tomorrow!

[Lithium]

Wow that is a pretty good overclock on that processor. I have very little experience with overcloking but I did manage to bump up my CPU 100mhz. I really need a better than stock cooler to push it any further and my RAM is cheap shit that if pushed too far will blow up! But the little increase I gave it actually did very very little in the CoH benchmark, gained maybe a frame a second.

On the other hand I overclocked the crap out of the XFX 8600FT card, went from 620mhz to 710mhz and uped the GPU RAM over a 100mhz too. Now that gave me nearly a 10FPS increase on the average in the CoH benchmark.

Goes to show that the graphics card is really the bottleneck in games.