My New Rig.. Sorta.. need some advice

[Ðeceased]

Hey everyone,

Got some rather shweet news yesterday :) I've been given a £1000 home computer budget from work ^^ I'm allowed to spend over that, but I have to cover the rest, which isn't too bad tbh ^^ So I've spent the last few hours drooling over what could be mine :P
Unfortunately it HAS to be just one rig.. otherwise I would go for a few small ones I would make myself :P

Anyways, I've been thinking of building it myself, and I sorta have an idea of what I want to go for:

Coolermaster Cosmos
Hiper Power 880W Low Noise/SLI Ready
Asus Striker II Extreme
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450
Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme
2x Corsair Twin3x 2GB DDR3 (2x1024MB) - 1333MHz
2x BFG nVidia GeForce 8800GT OC
Creative X-FI Xtreme Music 7.1 (If i don't get the Striker - It comes with it's own sound card :))
Asus DVDÅ+-RW (DRW-2014L1T)
2x 22" Aoc Monitors
Vista Home Premium SP1 64-BIT
Creative Labs Inspire T7900 7.1 Speakers Sys

Now I've managed to get the cost down to around £1050 so I'll only be paying £50 for it ^^ (need to check up on the reliability of some of these websites first tho :P

So... just before I'd fully decided to buy these I started looking up compatibility issues for the Fan I was going to use ( IT IS HUGE - Was going to go for the IFX-14 :P )
And although it seems fine to use that fan.. I started hearing all these horror stories about the 790i nVidia chipsets and the quadcore CPUs. and of course Intel and SLI... GRRR :cursing:

Anyways I'm stuck as to what to go for and am considering switching to AMD and ATI-crossfire

I dunno... any advise/experience with those would be really appreciated

D

[Knytestorme]

Only thing I'd suggest (and can look at my comming thread to see what I'm looking at) would be to drop the X-Fi and speakers.

The onboard soundcards are good enough now, and use less cpu cycles than they used to, that you don't need any outside hardware. I also beleive from reading Larry Osterman's blog (and maybe Vyndree or Suvega can add something here, never sure what depts they work in) that all sound under Vista now uses an abstraction layer to do all mixing and effects in software before pumping it out to the hardware..if this is the case then the X-Fi will be essentially doing nothing anyway.

As for the speakers, headphones are good enough :p....though if you do want to get full effect from movies and don't currently have a home theatre then it could be useful but just for games and music I nearly always use my headphones.

[leukos]

At the risk of oversimplifying 3D sound in Vista; the vendor extensions that allowed the Creative hardware to accelerate 3D sound calculations was removed from the DirectX libraries. If the program uses the 3D audio routines from DirectX it will be calculated on the host CPU even if something like the Creative X-Fi is present. Programs based on OpenAL are not effected by this, and will happily use the Creative hardware.

Creative has written a program to reintroduce hardware acceleration of 3D sound into specific DirectX programs called ALchemy (see http://www.soundblaster.com/alchemy/). World of Warcraft is listed.

[Ðeceased]

eeek *brain just melted* :P

thanks for the feedback guys. If I were to get the Striker II Extreme I probably wouldn't go for a sound card anyways (comes with it's own dealy). and I've been reading up on some problems whilst activating SLI on this chipset and using X-Fi soundcards.. evidently they use the same IRQ at times which can seriously mess up yer system ( crashes non stop for some ppl) I think It may also be why the Stiker II Extreme comes with a separate card rather than just onboard sound as it seems it (onboard) was also having similar issues :S on earlier models.

I'm tempted to steer clear of the Striker II as the list of reported problems is now longer then my arm :S (it may just be ASUS being muppets tho

Cooling block leaking
SLI problems
Sound card problems
overheating
cooling paste applied (some ghastly super glue like stuff)
BIOS problems
SATA issues
stability issues when overclocking

and every time i think I found out something that's causing it, I find another problem :cursing:

oh well :P might save me a £100 or so by not getting it anyway :P

gawd who knew thing's had got so complicated :S thought me to stay up to date with all the new developments :S

[Havelcek]

I think choosing a motherboard is the hardest part of the whole process. I went back and forth between Intel versus nVidia and decided to stick with Intel and DDR2 for the time being...the Asus Rampage Formula. So far everything is happy under Vista 64-bit.

[leukos]

For some reason I keep ogling the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H and an AMD Athlon X2 4850e for my next build out - it was probably the silentpcreview.com review a while back. Then again, I'm also trying to figure out if I want to drill some holes in the wall to install a large radiator and fan outside for watercooling six of them. I lost my common sense a long time ago so take my recommendation with a grain of salt.

If it makes you feel any better, someone has had a problem with every single motherboard manufacturer out there. Just try to make sure you aren't that someone.

[Ðeceased]

I think choosing a motherboard is the hardest part of the whole process. I went back and forth between Intel versus nVidia and decided to stick with Intel and DDR2 for the time being...the Asus Rampage Formula. So far everything is happy under Vista 64-bit.

I'm having such a hard time deciding atm :S my big concern is for games other than WoW.. SLI seems to be more and more important :S not having it may prove more expensive in future :S


For some reason I keep ogling the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H and an AMD Athlon X2 4850e for my next build out - it was probably the silentpcreview.com review a while back. Then again, I'm also trying to figure out if I want to drill some holes in the wall to install a large radiator and fan outside for watercooling six of them. I lost my common sense a long time ago so take my recommendation with a grain of salt.

If it makes you feel any better, someone has had a problem with every single motherboard manufacturer out there. Just try to make sure you aren't that someone.

Hehe you aim too low!!.. I plan on building a house (eventually) and having a ventilation shaft in the wall in which I can have numerous PCs completely hidden in (all liquid cooled, the vent dehumidified, coolded and also-no noise). So all you will see is a desk with a couple of monitors.. Wireless keyboard and mouse. Flat-panel Speakers spread around the room. CDs and DvDs would go in through a specially designed feed system directly from a tiny split in the wall into my main PC.

Also, each second Gfx Card output would feed through to an extended port away from the Hub (I know it sounds painful extending monitor cables :P ) So If there were to be a LAN party all ppl would need to bring is a monitor of their choosing and plug it in in one of the sockets distributed around the room:P (or make due with the spare monitors around the house) :P

All that's left is an intercom system to call through orders for "Moah Hotpockets!!" or....


Anyways! back to my problem :P

I'm rly stuck atm.. I kinda want an Nvidia chipset for the SLI, but am rly tiered of all these blasted problems :P and knowing my luck at least one of them is going to happen to me :P