First build in years...

Star Lord

Hey guys, doing my first system build in years, just wanted to check what you guys thought or if I should change any of this:

Cooler Master Gladiator 600 Midi Tower
Cooler Master Real Power M 520W
Intel Core™ i5 Quad Processor i5-750
Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3, P55, Socket-1156
Crucial DDR3 BallistiX 1333MHz 4GB CL7 (2x 2GB)
Seagate Barracuda® 7200.12 1TB
MSI Radeon HD 5770 1GB GDDR5 "HAWK"
Sony NEC Optiarc DVD±RW burner AD-5240S
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate EN (OEM, 64bit)

Any thoughts?

Hornd

You could go with the Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3 instead. Its only 5 or 10 quid more and has USB 3.0 and SATA 3 support. (I just got one!)

Quite a lot of people are fans of the samsung F3 series but I wouldn't particlarly mind.

Star Lord

The card I listed does have USB3 though according to Kompletts website... (It's even part of the name of the board!) and has 16 USB ports as opposed to the 14 listed for the P55A-UD3.

Just curious if there's something that I am overlooking that makes the P55A-UD3 a better card than the P55-USB3?

Komplett-Tech: Ryan

Yup i would certainly go with the F3's They are by far the most reliable drives on the market. We actually see a fair ammount of WD Hdd's back as failed at the moment. Seagate, well... they have never been that great. You could go for a P55A, but unless you plan to use usb 3.0 and sata3 at some point in the future its a bit of a waste.

cherryghost

Komplett-Tech (Ryan) wrote: »

Yup i would certainly go with the F3's They are by far the most reliable drives on the market. We actually see a fair ammount of WD Hdd's back as failed at the moment. Seagate, well... they have never been that great. You could go for a P55A, but unless you plan to use usb 3.0 and sata3 at some point in the future its a bit of a waste.

+1

other than that, it looks like a great build

Star Lord

I had gone with that HDD as it was SATA 3, but have swapped it for the F3 as you guys suggested.

Think I'll go ahead and put the order through now then

cherryghost

dont forget to post pics when its up and running

Star Lord

Will do!

(Damn, now I gotta make sure it all looks as tidy as possible...)

Star Lord

Grabbed a couple of screenshots of BB:BC2 running on the new system on Saturday using FRAPS:
(Although they look darker here than on my monitor at home...)



Had it running at 1600x900, everything on high, 4xAA, 16xAnistropic filtering and it was running consistently well, although it did dip quite a lot at certain times (Building blowing up around me!) so I scaled the AA and AF down a bit, and brought the res down to 1280x720 and found it ran much better with less dropping.
(Awesome game too!)

L31mr0d

Komplett-Tech (Ryan) wrote: »

Yup i would certainly go with the F3's They are by far the most reliable drives on the market.

Ordered a few 1TB F3's from Komplett today before reading this. Cheers for the heads up though, they will be going into my parents PC so it's good to know they are reliable. I'm emigrating away so it's good to know they should be stable for at least the next few years.

Also, in regards to the WD drives having issues? Any drives in particular?

Oh, and DamoElDiablo, you going to bother running Vantage on that PC?

Also, for BF:BC2 this utility is pretty good for giving you more options for configuring the graphics:

http://www.moddb.com/games/battlefield-bad-company-2/downloads/gossamers-bad-company-2-launcher-v11

Star Lord

L31mr0d wrote: »

Oh, and DamoElDiablo, you going to bother running Vantage on that PC?

Also, for BF:BC2 this utility is pretty good for giving you more options for configuring the graphics:

http://www.moddb.com/games/battlefield-bad-company-2/downloads/gossamers-bad-company-2-launcher-v11

Thanks for the link mate!

Vantage? Is that one of the Futuremark tests? If so, I downloaded it, and it ran through the GPU tests, but crashes out of the tests when it gets to the third test (CPU I think...)

L31mr0d

DamoElDiablo wrote: »

but crashes out of the tests when it gets to the third test (CPU I think...)

Not good... I'd troubleshoot that, it shouldn't be crashing at all. Make sure none of the voltages in your BIOS are set to auto.

Get yourself OCCT or Prime95 and run an 8 hour stress test.

Star Lord

It's an error about putting it in fullscreen, I'll get the text of it again tonight.

Oh, and just to clarify, it was 3Dmark Vantage I was running.

Inquitus

DamoElDiablo wrote: »

It's an error about putting it in fullscreen, I'll get the text of it again tonight.

Oh, and just to clarify, it was 3Dmark Vantage I was running.

I hope you bought a Micro Atx case, hate for you to have to use a ladder to reach the on switch

Inquitus

Nice rig btw, that bastad Cowan and his sidekick Lenihan have my new build money

Star Lord

Inquitus wrote: »

I hope you bought a Micro Atx case, hate for you to have to use a ladder to reach the on switch

Getting all Micro parts was a difficulty Tool-less case has slots for sliding in drives which doubles as a handy ladder