And so it begins

We may earn a small commission from affiliate links and paid advertisements. Terms

Why wouldn't you overclock? If you buy the E6850, you're just paying intel to overclock it for you. I have an E6400 OC'd to 3.0ghz on Air since the day it came to me and it's been orthos 24hr stable since I've had it (P5b-Deluxe mobo). I see max temps of about 60C. If you're not going to overclock, don't buy an expensive motherboard, it's a waste of money.

Unless you use multithreaded applications (3d Software, engineering software, video/audio encoding) you don't need the Q. You also probably don't need 4gb of Ram if you're just going to be playing games. However, with ram as cheap as it is, you might as well. Those seagate drives are good, I've always had good luck with their hardware. If you want to spend less, you could spring for a Xeon X3210 G0 stepping, only 2.13gHz, but they overclock to 3 pretty easily. They also have a higher max temp (85C) and a lower wattage rating. The chips selected for the Xeon line are the best of the batch so it's almost a guaranteed overclocker.

Don't skimp on a PSU, espcially w/ 2 8800's. I have a corsair HX-520, but you should probably spring for the bigger version. It's like $150, but well worth not frying your computer. Other companies to look for are Seasonic and Enermax, both make very good PSUs.

Edit, or you can wait for the new Penyrn chips to be realeased on Jan 8th and get the new 45nm architecture. A lot of the engineering samples are hitting around 4Ghz on air.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top