Intel price drop

[Blitterswitch]

I sent my dad out to Scan this morning to get one! haha

I have been to Aria as well to get some of my other bits and then to MicroDirect later to get the rest.

For pretty much exactly £800 I have specced:

Intel q6600 2.4ghz core 2 quad
8gb ddr2 800mhz Patriot memory (4x2gb)
2x 250gb Samsung SP2504x (for use in raid)
Abit IP-35 motherboard
Corsair 620w HXV2 Power supply
Thermaltake Soprano Piano black case
Arctic Cooling freezer 7 pro cpu fan

I can't wait to get it built tonight!!! It should fly!

I am considering getting an nVidia 8800 gts to go in it as well but I am unsure which one to get. I have a budget of about £200.
Any ideas guys?

[werticus]

or perhaps a x2900xt

http://www.dailytech.com/ati+radeon+...rticle7043.htm

[tom182]

Ok thx.
Do any mobos support dual q6600s, or is that just being greedy?

not that I am aware of, if you want the dual cpu setup you threfore need the xeon series and you will be looking for 2 chips like the following Intel BX80562X3220 Intel Quad-Core Xeon Processor X3220 2.4GHZ
note the X in the name.

best (US) online prices can be found at http://www.pricewatch.com/cpu/

Tom

[werticus]

keep in mind the over clockability of the q6600 when comparing to the xeons

[Blitterswitch]

Any ideas in terms whether to get the 320mb or 640mb 8800gts?

There is about a £50 difference and I would really be stretching, is it really worth it?

[werticus]

for what we do, yes... for games... no.

[tom182]

http://www.komplett.co.uk/k/ki.aspx?sku=327407

[Blitterswitch]

Well I put everything together and everthing seemed to be fine but long story short the motherboard is a complete pile of rubbish. It is an Asus p5k.

IDE controller didn't work
SATA Raid only worked with an external drive
Ethernet adapter wasn't detectable in windows xp 64
Board died after flashing latest firmware.

Very disapointed with it. So many hours wasted over faulty goods.

Can anyone recommend a better board? I was thinking of binning off the new p35 chipset and going with a premium nforce 680 chipset. Has anyone got any thoughts? Thanks.

[DaForce]

Asus P5B Deluxe, both myself and a mate use one. Works flawlessly.

I wouldnt waste your money on the 680i... just a waste. Nothing you cant do on a P5B or P5K (well maybe not your alst P5K)

I guess you just got a bung board, all those features yo uhad problems with should work just fine.

[tom182]

sounds like a dodgy board, had and have no issues with mine,was is a bundled kit you got?

[Blitterswitch]

No I bought it separately. My dad has been saying don't go back a generation with the motherboard but the tech dept at aria was recommending having a look into the 680i chipsets simply because they are proven reliable.

UPDATE: I have decided to go for the Abit IP35 Pro Snake motherboard, its a bit more expensive but the reviews are awesome and it has full raid support and 2x gigbit ethernetand besides, its just cool having a mb called snake!

[Blitterswitch]

Well I have had the weekend from PC building hell.

In short... it now works brilliantly.

But the motherboard clearly has some issues with auto configering ddr2. When I had all 4 2gb modules installed I could not install any version of windows (xp, xp64, vista, vista64) It would start the installation and then after a few minutes drop out to a BSOD.

After the trouble and time wasted on the last motherboard I was about ready to drop kick the whole thing.

I found that if I took two of the modules out and ran it in single channel mode then the machine worked like a dream. But obviously this is not a good solution because the whole point of building that machine was to have the whole 8gb available.

I flash the board with the beta b04 bios from the Abt forums and this didn't help at all.

It was only when I noticed that the ram was running at a strange speed on the bios post screen did things start to twig. THe mother board was setting the memory to run at 816 rather than the max 800 it was meant to run at.

I must admit that I am a compete newbie to this whole intel 775 stuff and have been dealing with AMD X2's for the last 2 years. So I have no real understanding yet of how things are clocked.

Anyway, I dropped the memory cpu ratio from 1.5 (default set by bios) to 1.25 (which was 725 or summin) and then attempted to reinstall XP64... it worked brilliantly! I guess because the memory was being run outside of it s intended spec it was hanging - very similar to how the machine might react if it were being overclocked past its limit.

Is this a regular occurance with these kinds of setups? Have I done the correct thing? Any tips for over clocking this q6600 now?