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Nikola
Hung Like a Flea
Joined: 22 Mar 2009
Posts: 790
Location: Edmond, OK
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Here's my $.02, don't take any of it too seriously
-XFX HD-597A-CNF9 ATI Radeon HD 5970 2.0GB-
The 5970 is a powerhouse card, I ran two of them for a couple weeks and one of them for about 1.5 months. It's easily the most powerful card, Fermi included, out there right now so unless you're rocking a 30" like me @ 2560x1600 then it's your best option.
That said, it's probably a little overkill for anything but 1920x1200 and up, so if you're not running that or better I would stick with a single 5870 to save on heat in that little box. My 5970s would idle at 72-75c by themselves, closer to 80c in CrossfireX shoved up close to each other.
-Intel Core i7-960 Bloomfield 3.2GHz-
The i7 960 is a good chip but EXTREMELY overpriced as it's going to give you no greater power in games than the 920 overclocked. They have the same cache, same core and I believe it's the same stepping as the newer 920s.
Now if you aren't planning to overclock that changes things some, and the Rampage II Gene like the Evga X58 Micro SLI has passive cooling on the chipset which can really hinder overclocking an X58 system. However I think you'll find that the benefit of less than 600mhz is greatly outweighed by saving $300 on the cpu. I just helped Maximes get his i7 920 D0 for $210 shipped, we can find you one too.
-6GB Mushkin Redline DDR3 2000-
This RAM tells me that you are planning to overclock, and the Rampage II Gene happens to be an amazing overclocker but the passive cooler on the X58 chipset really hinders what you will get in a mATX case. Real speed increases from memory come from low latency timings and not higher mhz, but this RAM has both. You could save $100 and get the same timings with a 1600mhz set and not lose ANY real world performance, and very very little benchmark performance.
-2x WD VelociRaptor 300GB (RAID 0)-
I have had a couple of these drives, still have one and while they certainly outpace the older generation Raptors they really still pale in comparison to a single mid-range SSD. Considering their price you could spend $40 more and get a pair of Intel X25-M 80gb drives and GREATLY increase the performance you'd see from the Raptors.
Other than that I have nothing bad to say about the new VelociRaptors, they are fabulous. _________________ Failure is just success rounded down.
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Sat Mar 27, 2010 3:01 am
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Petch
n00b
Joined: 11 Mar 2010
Posts: 57
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Lots of good input Nikola.
I have a 24" Samsung 2493hm that I run at 1920x1200. I think I'll be keeping that video card in my build, but its going to be the last thing that gets ordered. Im going to try and use my existing 2x ATI Radeon 4850s (if they are still working right), until after the Fermi card is released for a few weeks.. Im hoping for some kind of price drop from ATI.
I completely looked over the i7 920, and thats a good catch. Im going to do a bit more reading, but it seems like the i7 920 is going to be a better buy for the money. I've never seriously OCed my system, but that is what I had in mind for this build.
For the RAM even with the 1600MHz kit, it was only $20 cheaper than the 2000MHz kit. I was looking to stick with Muskin because they are the cheapest w/ the lowest timings.
My only worry with getting 2x 80GB drives is that between my OS drive and game drive, I have over 140GB used already, and I dont have all my games installed. After I read your suggesting I am considering going to 2x Intel X25-M 160GB, but I have to justify the cost with myself yet. Do you have any reviews where the Intel X25-M's are put against some Raptors?
Thanks again for your input it's appreciated.
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Sat Mar 27, 2010 12:42 pm
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Petch
n00b
Joined: 11 Mar 2010
Posts: 57
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Here is one of the latest reviews that I read for the i7-930.
Full Review: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2010/03/01/intel-core-i7-930-cpu-review/
Testing and Overclocking
The other reason that we decided to review the i7-930 is because one of our contacts at Intel strongly hinted that despite its use of the same D0 stepping as the i7-920, it should be a much better overclocker. This makes a lot of sense, as Intel has been making Core i7s for more than a year, and will continue to make small revisions to the manufacturing process, even if these aren't enough to justify an entirely new stepping.
We started off by slinging our old D0-stepping i7-920 into our LGA1366 test rig and testing it again, as the original review used Vista rather than Windows 7, which we now use for all our product reviews.
Even with a new BIOS for our Asus P6TD Deluxe motherboard, with the vcore boosted to 1.45V, the QPI raised to 204MHz and Turbo Boost disabled, we were only able to overclock the i7-920 from 2.66GHz to 4.08GHz. This is still a great overclock, and increased performance magnificently with all the benchmark results improving accordingly.
In contrast, the i7-930, using exactly the same voltages, but with a CPU multiplier of 21x and QPI of 205MHz, was happy to run for hours on end at 4.3GHz. This is quite frankly a fantastic overclock for a standard LGA1366 Core i7, and more in the realm of what you'd expect from a far more expensive Extreme Edition. At 4.3GHz, the i7-930 returned markably better benchmark results than the overclocked i7-920. [/quote]
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Mon Mar 29, 2010 10:35 am
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