System Upgrade Advice

[Jazzatola]

Hi! I'm overhauling my current system and would like some advice on my choices. I use the machine for gaming and like to get the best gfx I can but at the moment I'm only really playing World of Warcraft.

System build questionnaire:

1. General gaming, mostly WoW.
2. More concerned with getting the most appropriate equipment.
3. UK
4. I like Intel and nVidia
5. Yes, see below.
6. Yes.
7. Default speeds, no overclocking.
8. 1920 x 1200
9. ASAP

I built my current machine in 2006 and upgraded the gfx card a couple of years later. Components I intend to carry over:

Antec P180 case.
EVGA GTX 260.
LG DVD-ROM Drive (IDE).
Western Digital 74Gb Raptor.
Creative Labs X-Fi sound card.

Components I intend to buy:

Asus P8H67 R3 Socket 1155 motherboard.
Intel Core i5 2500 cpu.
Be Quiet Dark Rock Advanced cooler.
Crucial DDR3-1333 (2x4Gb kit).
Antec TruePower 650W psu.

The new motherboard has a single IDE socket which should allow me to use my existing optical drive. I'm assuming the gfx card will work in the PCI-e slot and I intend to upgrade it in the next month or so anyway. One other concern is that maybe the 650W psu is too much but I am planning to add an SSD and maybe more RAM in the future.

Any comments? Any glaring compatibility errors or things I've overlooked?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Zap]

With no overclocking you will not need the aftermarket cooler. The stock cooler keeps the CPU cool enough, and can even be reasonably quiet as long as you enable a fan profile in BIOS.

Man up and just buy a new SATA optical drive so you don't have to worry about needing an IDE port. Don't know what they run in the UK but in the USA you'd be hard pressed to find one over $25, and they have been on sale as cheap as $16. Also, the IDE port is not native to the Intel chipset.

With a GTX 260 graphics card (or any other card using only two PCIe power plugs) you only need around 450-500W as long as it comes with the two plugs and is decent quality.

Get an SSD and toss out that Raptor. An SSD makes the WoW experience so much better. WoW is one of the few games that seriously benefits from an SSD, due to textures loading dynamically as you wander through the environment (less "hitching" of graphics as stuff pops into viewing distance) plus all those loading bars as you traverse from one area to another will be cut to a fraction.

 

[sm625]

Why no overclocking? I am running my i5-750 at 175 fsb and it handles it with no problem. Not overclocking is like driving a car at 70 mph down the highway. I dont even have adequate cooling to support 4 threads for any length of time, but I still OC. I jsut never run my cpu at 100%. I set my encoder to run with 3 cores.

 

[mfenn]

With no overclocking you will not need the aftermarket cooler. The stock cooler keeps the CPU cool enough, and can even be reasonably quiet as long as you enable a fan profile in BIOS.

Man up and just buy a new SATA optical drive so you don't have to worry about needing an IDE port. Don't know what they run in the UK but in the USA you'd be hard pressed to find one over $25, and they have been on sale as cheap as $16. Also, the IDE port is not native to the Intel chipset.

With a GTX 260 graphics card (or any other card using only two PCIe power plugs) you only need around 450-500W as long as it comes with the two plugs and is decent quality.

Get an SSD and toss out that Raptor. An SSD makes the WoW experience so much better. WoW is one of the few games that seriously benefits from an SSD, due to textures loading dynamically as you wander through the environment (less "hitching" of graphics as stuff pops into viewing distance) plus all those loading bars as you traverse from one area to another will be cut to a fraction.

:thumbsup: My thoughts exactly.