New Machine

Thanks to a very impressive tax rebate, I`m building a new machine based around the very popular i5 2500k cpu, I`m just trying to sort out a motherboard that I like. Gigabyte seem to be the favourite for these chips but most people I`ve spoken to say keep away from them. I`ve looked at Asus and quite like the look of them but all the sensible priced ones only support Crossfire and I`m an Nvidia user, I`ll probably never use SLi but it would be nice to have the option if needed. So at the moment I`ve sort of hit a dead end. Any input from you guys would be appreciated.

What do you have at the moment? I have a GTX570 and it's done very well for me, there are 670's now but they are near £400. 570's are still in the £200, on Overclockers Asus aren't selling 570's though they are selling other Nvidia cards, 560's are pretty cheap £120 or so. I'm nearly 2 years out of date on hardware. When I was looking though I was told to wait until the new stuff comes out because older stuff drops in price, which was at christmas, I don't know if they usually release at about the same time every year. You may want to wait, though I don't think the price difference was that bloody much, meh doubt it's worth waiting.

I`m actually asking about motherboards Fen

Sorry Stony I'm not up on Motherboards, though mines a Gigabyte and that pairs up very nicely with my i3, and definitely keep Sli as an option I regret not having it.

And fen the 670 is more like £300... I should know

You bought a 670 Vis? I was going by the Asus price on Overclockers which is £379.99.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-278-AS&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=2294

Ah... Well I didn't really know much about motherboards when I bought my PC, I know less about them now.

Dabs have the best prices for the new gtx 6 series, I heard a 660 was coming out next month.

Ok I’ll own up, I’ve been running a 670 for a couple of months, the standard reference model suited me as I needed to exhaust the heat out the back and I didn’t need to up the psu, it’s been a good upgrade Crysis 2 with all the bells & whistles is something to behold.
Now I just need to find the guts to clock the i3.

How much of an improvement is it over the 460?

After a crap load of reading reviews etc, I think this is my final parts list .. maybe

CPU

RAM

Motherboard

GFX

PSU

Extra Hard Drive

SATA DVD Drive

Case


£738.26

Stony wait on the Graphics card, seriously the GTX 660ti is just around the corner and at the same price point, it’s likely to blow the socks of that.

http://videocardz.com/33859/nvidia-geforce-gtx-660-ti-to-be-released-on-august-16th

http://videocardz.com/nvidia/geforce-600/geforce-gtx-660ti

Everything else looks good and @ a nice price.

@fen

I wont lie Skyrim isn’t much different it’s smoother I can play with ambient occlusion on full and I now have had head room to apply more mods, something I’ll do once the new content/patch comes out.
New games with dx11 like Batman AC & Crysis 2 are definitely a step up, Crysis 2 was lumpy with the 460 and looked bland, but now I run it at full everything with the high rez pack & Dx11. Batman was playable but with any sort of eye candy switched on the fps would dip, but now gameplay is fluid and smooth. But I still cant run Batmans PhysX at full settings I can only do that on the lower setting but that’s down to my cpu bottlenecking.
It wasn’t like I had to have it there wasn’t anything I couldn’t play before that I can now , it’s just made things prettier and smother, and the next gen of consoles are still a year or two away, and frankly I’ve given up waiting.

Thanks for that Vis, I`m going to hold off and see how this pans out price wise. The 2GB of memory is pretty important for me so depending on what the 660 retails for I may have to revise my list .. again.

I've turned down the AA when I play Batman, it runs but it's usually like 20fps, that was with vsync on as well, I might try again without it.

The 660`s have arrived in store, damn good price too for what they can do, time for a rethink

Any news?

Nearly decided, just trying to pick a case now, the one I wanted is out of stock.

I know that pain, made my sellection of parts 6 months before I bought the PC and some of the bits I wanted stopped being sold on that site.

Still sorting out the final details for my pc. I`m hoping to be able to stretch to getting a Haf X case which is huge I`ve also changed the gpu to a MSI GTX 660 Ti Power Edition and added an SSD.

*Drools* HAF X.

I went ahead and ordered the GTX 660 Ti which arrived this morning, it`s a beast of a card. Very well constructed with large radiators and heatpipes going to all the right places. The dual fans spin in the wrong direction on start up for 30 secs to suck up any dust that may be lying on the radiators, then reverse and go the right way.... and it`s heavy .... very heavy

I`m at work till Sunday so I`m going to wait till then to install it,... and it came with a copy of Borderlands 2

Darkstone wrote:... and it came with a copy of Borderlands 2

Worh it just for that.

Okay, I`ll rewrite my post ...

Just bought Borderlands 2, it cost £238 but it came with a free GTX 660 Ti

You’d think they’d give you a game that would show off the card a bit.

Visage wrote:You’d think they’d give you a game that would show off the card a bit.

I`m sure I`ll be pushing it to it`s limits