The ageing Q6600 is ready for the chop,

Looking to spend around £500 on Board, CPU, Mem etc

Any suggestions on board I like the look of this https://www.aria.co....productId=43880

I see this is a p67 board but they now have a z68 or summat, anyone confirm this as being a better option. Do all these boards now come with the spangly new bios ??

I'm gonna go with 2500k cpu and whack the oc' on it , but considering the price of ram I'm thinking 16gb, to futre proof and just been reading about ram drives which could be cool.

Any links to write ups would be good if poss

Looks good - haven't seen a design like that before! I am a bit out of touch lately though as i haven't built a system for a couple of years (usually just buy laptops off Dell outlet now!)

8GB is more than enough to see you through a couple of years unless you a running a load of virtual machines or something.

Looks good - haven't seen a design like that before! I am a bit out of touch lately though as i haven't built a system for a couple of years (usually just buy laptops off Dell outlet now!)

8GB is more than enough to see you through a couple of years unless you a running a load of virtual machines or something.

I'm out of touch as well hence the post lol

Only really thinking 16gb as the price is very right atm

sounds nice,

I am surprised how cheap DDR3 is

I need DDR2 1066 for mine as 4gb is not enough.

Sounds like you getting ready for BF lol

I need DDR2 1066 for mine as 4gb is not enough.

Sounds like you getting ready for BF lol

I got 6 gb atm, and yes you're right about BF

That's all very well, but can it handle one point twenty one gigawatts of electricity?!?!?!

That's all very well, but can it handle one point twenty one gigawatts of electricity?!?!?!

Should pose no major problems lol

So come on, where my geeks at ?

Should pose no major problems lol

So come on, where my geeks at ?

basically your after a sandy bridge 2500k i5, 8gig of ram and Z68 mobo, (asus)

Itll cost you just over 300 quid

Then spend about 150 on a decent SSD if you havent already got one...

A bit vague lol

And wheres my touchpad ??

Agree with Col,

I ordered the 2500k i5 but they shipped me the 2600k i7 by mistake, winner winner chicken dinner!

Definitely get an SSD as your boot device, I stuck one on my ageing Pentium D, and it has made a world of difference to boot up and app start up on my w7 install.

I went for a 128GB unit and have a second 750GB disk for data, etc. I moved my user profile onto it as well. Windows thinks the profile is still on C, but I used some built in command to link C:\users to be d:\users instead.

I take it this is a new gaming machine?

A small flash drive certainly wouldn't hurt it, with the changeable/bulk data on a mirrored pair of 2TB HDDs

If you take a google at ivy bridge you might find that interesting.

AMD have bulldozer core products coming out too.

I actually think if it was my cash, I'd wait for the next generation, as you'll get PCIe 3.0 support and a more competitive offering from AMD, such that prices should be nicer. I know it's easy to say just wait a bit, but in this instance, I do believe it will open up a whole range of faster graphics cards to you and better performance for your pound.

What is the biggest issue with the Q6600 for you? I'm assuming you've already overclocked it as far as it will go.

Gaming later on in the year, still can't shake my unhealthy Gran Turismo 5 habit at the moment, although it's cheaper than smack I gues lol.

I do quite a bit of video decompressing and converting lately, and the Q6600 is showing it's age, taking about 5 mins to un zip a 10gb MKV file and anything up to half hour to run it through MKV2VOB, I'm just after speed mainly and the nagging thought that theres better out there always blurs my judgement.

The current cpu is at 3.06 roughly did have it at 3.6 which was nice ... but the crucial memery kept popping at that speed even though it was higher rated (no voltage increase either), now running a mix of ocz and cosair which may clock a little higher but it's happy there for now, Crucial have had four or five set of ram back under warranty lol, the stick are currently sat the machine I'm typing this out in work, no problems with them in this box,

This looks like a winner http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Solid+State+Drives/OCZ+Solid+3+120GB+2.5%22+SATA-III+Solid+State+Hard+Drive+?productId=44531

With this board http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/ASUS+P8Z68+Deluxe+Intel+Z68+%28REV+B3%29+Socket+1155+DDR3+PCI-Express+Motherboard+?productId=45242

And this Ram http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/8GB+Mushkin+Blackline+%23996995+%282x4GB%29+DDR3+1600MHz+9-9-9-24+?productId=44336

Anyone know the default bus speed on the I5 ??

I think it's icthy feet rather any real need lol, and I have the cash ready, which helps :yes:

You might well find it's the storage that's slowing you down for your 10GB file, almost certainly the IO to be honest.

The i5 is an ok processor (Bear in mind I'm playing with bleeding edge chips) and obviously default QPI speed depends on the CPU you go for.

If you want to burn some cash then what you've suggested looks just fine, but as I said, I'd be waiting for PCIe3 and the Ivy Bridge or Bulldozer cored processors.

I have nothing more to add, TBH!

Out of touch at the moment too, having no need for involvement in higher end gaming type rigs. I'd agree with Mark over the I/O on your 10Gb file too.

As what Mark said...

Your Q6600 is more than modern enough, get an SSD for boot and games and a modern (2tb) hard drive for storage and itll give your current rig a new lease of life.. youll save a load of money

I got a Crucial M4 SSD on my Q9450 system at the mo, even tho im limited to sata3g it still boots into windows in 10s and any kind of sluggishness that i used to get when the primary disk is being tanned has gone, not to mention programs start instantly..

If your doing unzips etc with big files, its worth checking where your temp directory etc are.. stuff like winrar will unpack to your temp folder before copying to final location.. so i keep my temp folder on SSD, and all my downloads go to a different drive, so an unzip op will go HDD ---> SSD(temp) ---> HDD

Ovbiously if the same HDD is having to read and write at the same time, performance will be terrible.

As for CPUs... yes AMD bulldozer is out soon, still a unknown quantity at the moment but itll have 6+ cores and be competitively priced.

in the intel corner, the sandybridge 2500k i5 is the sweet spot.. the sandy-i7 is over £100 more for effectively the same CPU (same clock speed) with hyperthreading and a tad more cache.

Intel will be announcing the Ivy-Bridge Core i7 soon, which will replace the old socket 1366 first-gen i7's - expect 6+ cores, quad channel memory and high price tag (and requires a decent cooling solution as they will be 160w cpus lol.

For SSD, might as well get a Sata6g one.

OCZ vertex are the daddies *BUT* the sandforce controllers are known to have firmware issues and can be a bit flakey (which is why i went for a crucial M4)

If it were my money (and i very nearly almost did a couple of weeks ago):

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/intel-core-i5-2500k-unlocked-s1155-sandy-bridge-quad-core-33ghz-gpu-850mhz-6mb-cache-95w-retail

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/8gb-(2x4gb)-corsair-ddr3-vengeance-jet-black-pc3-12800-(1600)-non-ecc-cas-9-9-9-24-xmp-150v

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-p8z68-v-intel-z68-s-1155-ddr3-sata-iii-6gb-s-raid-sata-pcie-20-(x16)-vga-on-board-atx

and for SSD (for performance)

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/120gb-corsair-force-series-gt-sata-iii-ssd-sandforce-sf2200-read-555mb-s-write-515mb-s-85k-iops

or

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/ocz-vertex-3-120gb-ssd-sata-iii-solid-state-hard-drive-sandforce

Or for a more reliable SSD:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/crucial-realssd-128gb-m4-25-sata-6gb-s-ssd-mlc-flash-read-415mb-s-write-175mb-s

Chuck in a modern 2tb hard drive too for storage too.

Pretty much all of the above turn up on Scan Today only at the weekends so knock a few quid off each price.

Oh, and most important of all, with an SSD, make sure the SATA controller is set to AHCI in the bios..

It's a good shout, as even if you do end upgrading the board, CPU etc you'll have the SSD and newer HDD to use at that point too.

I'm not sure the power will be that bad, since intel are currently shipping Xeons with 6 cores and 60W TDP or 95W TDP for the standard versions.

If you really have some money to spend, then a PCIe Flash device would be even better than a SATA one as there is less overhead to worry about.

If your hard drives are required rather than flash and they are holding you back, then a proper hardware RAID card, with some on board memory with a backup battery, will help matters, as the writes and reads can be intelligently cached, such that the disks are feeding a lot of data at once.

Obviously that would require more than one disk and all said and done would probably not be much cheaper than PCIe flash, although you'd end up with a larger amount of storage.

Ha ha now we are talking

So I'm a mug lol, I really don't know If I can justify £180 on a 120gig SSD, It seem a bit extravagant.

Just another thought, I'm running an ATI 4870 gfx card, any thoughts on it's life expectancy ??

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Radeon+HD+4870

This is where I am at right now, I now thinking a new card and an ssd maybe.

So come on tell me I got it wrong again

http://www.lambda-tek.com/componentshop/index.pl?origin=gbase25.5&prodID=B672233

You know you want to

Seriously though, the SSD sounds like a good move for things, but do be aware that you must move your swap off onto a HDD or you'll knacker the SSD a lot more quickly than you would otherwise.

Graphics cards, that's down to you I think as to how much life you think is in it.

http://www.lambda-te...&prodID=B672233

What the hell is that used for then lol

Another vote for an SSD.

I have a old Dell Latitude D620 that was getting a bit frustrating for general business use.

Got the go ahead for a new laptop but to get anything dramatically quicker with a similar large resolution in a 14 inch screen I was looking at £800+ which wouldn't wash with the boss.

Upgraded the HDD to an SSD, doubled the RAM to 4GB and installed W7.

Totally different machine which is mostly down to the SSD, quick boots and shut downs with programs starting instantly.

Well worth the money.

What the hell is that used for then lol

It's for servers or workstations that need a small amount of very high IOPs performance, which in this instance is provided by SLC grade flash,over very fast link PCIe x4 is 8Gbits data rate or 16Gbits data rate for 2.0, with a long warranted life on it.

I quite like these too, but I don't think you could ever stretch to that being a home box

http://www.ramsan.com/products/pcie-storage/ramsan-70

http://www.ramsan.com/products/rackmount-flash-storage/ramsan-630

Edited 25 August, 201114 yr by cheezemonkhai

http://www.ebuyer.com/268693-corsair-120gb-force-3-ssd-cssd-f120gb3-bk-cssd-f120gb3-bk#reviews

The plot thickens ........

Looks more acceptable roughly a pound per gig