NEW PC BUILD (some help needed on a few components)

[Squilliam]

tmbh said:

Squilliam said:
Have you considered the Zalman xxxHP series? They are really quiet and they would fit quite well with your build.

Yes but availability and price make the Corsair more appealing.  I am considering the 520w version now though!

520w is cool, I think you should have enough for everything. Just be careful if you want to add a monster card that you have at least one 8 pin connector along with another 6 pin. That should do you for the biggest and the baddest.

As for the ram, I would pick the faster ram personally since you're going to have to ramp up your FSB speeds you need ram that can handle it.

2x2gb of good quality ram would go really well I would say.

Can you recommend anything specific?

Sorry, its been a while since I bought ram. Its been a whilse since I've overclocked so im not the best source of info sorry. There are some good brands that are DDR 1066, so you could look there. Just work out what your ram speeds need to be if you reach a 3.6ghz overclock and work from there.

As for the graphics card, why not pick up an ATI 38xx or 48xx series, that way you can scale your graphics output up to 3 cards as your need arises.

For lower resolution I would suggest the 4850 or if you intend to use a 27+ monitor in the future the 4870 with 1gb of GDDR5 ram will have plenty of bandwidth to run at a high resolution.

When I upgrade to Vista I will need something that supports V.High resolutions on 24" Widescreen or bigger.  But budget video cards are everywhere and there is a lot to choose from!!

Well since the new cards are due to come out in a few weeks perhaps you should wait and see on the price and performance of them. High resolution memory bandwidth would be good and since you can scale your setup with Xfire on your motherboard you can buy half now and half later if you need to.