Your comments on the following config will be appreciated

X-post from "sales advice" as I may get more feedback here.

Before I fork out some serious money for it, I would like to know if you see any incoherence/flaw/weakness.

Intended use: gaming, CUDA programming (scientific calculus).


Case
COOLERMASTER HAF-X FULL TOWER GAMING CASE

Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7 Six Core Processor i7-970 (3.20GHz) 6.4GTs/12MB Cache

Motherboard
ASUS® P6X58D-E: DDR3, USB 3.0, SATA 6.0GB/s, 3-Way SLI

Memory (RAM)
6GB KINGSTON HYPER-X TRI-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (3 x 2GB KIT)

Graphics Card
1536MB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX480 GDDR5 PCI EXPRESS - DirectX® 11 + MAFIA II

Memory - 1st Hard Disk
80GB Intel® X25-M 2.5" SSD (34nm / upto 250MB/sR | 70MB/sW)***SPECIAL***

2nd Hard Disk
640GB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD6402AAEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)

1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM

Power Supply & Case Cooling
CORSAIR 1000W MODULAR PSU (HX1000) 80+ ULTRA QUIET (£169)

Processor Cooling
TITAN FENRIR EVO EXTREME HEATPIPE CPU COOLER (£39)

Sound Card
Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ Xtreme Gamer (£59)

Network Facilities
ONBOARD 10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT

USB Options
6 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL (MIN 2 FRONT PORTS) AS STANDARD
Operating System

3 Year Standard Warranty (1 Month Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
Delivery


Price of the config on this website: £2,136.00 including VAT and delivery. Seems fair to me.


Monitor: not included above as I plan to buy a Acer GD245HQ


Warranty: I have seen several people recommending silver. Why?


What would a "network gaming card" bring to the table that is currently missing?


Thanks for your insights and comments!

Cheers

fmorin said:

Warranty: I have seen several people recommending silver. Why?


What would a "network gaming card" bring to the table that is currently missing?

Click to expand...

Silver warranty gives you a years collect and return warranty instead of a month, well worth it for a fiver

To be honest a 'network gaming card' probably won't really make much difference, I wouldn't bother.

Not sure I'd bother with the 1600MHz RAM either, good if you're overclocking, but not worth it if you're not.

Silver warranty - for £5 you get 1 year's collect & return should anything need replacing as opposed to 1 month.

I'd ditch teh soundcard as onboard is more than good enough here. CPU is a bit ott but I guess itll be future proof that way. Good choice on the HX1000W for SLIing a second GTX 480 in teh future. Hope youre gonna come use those CUDA cores with us in folding@home GPU client

Hi,

Thanks for the quick replies.

Good point for the RAM freq. I probably won't overclock (not sure that the air coolling would make it possible anyway), so I might as well fall back to the slower RAM.

Yes, the cpu is a bit overkill for now, but I want to invest (painfully) now and keep the hardware for a long period of time. Depending on how my CUDA experience goes, I will indeed put another card in the config within a year or so. The question I will have to ask then is whether another GTX480 will mean adding to / changing the cooling capacities of the current config. I have read that these boards run really hot...

folding@home... why not, I am working in health-related nanomaterial R&D

I wouldnt say 'really' hot, hot, but not overly hot.

No you can still overclock with air cooling as you have chosen a Titan Fenrir, and a HAF-X even better cooling than my HAF 932, so you wont have any problems with overheating here, none whatsoever.

The Titan Fenrir cools better than the standard Coolit Eco A.L.C. it's just that it's louder. You could probably go up to 4.2GHz with it but I wouldn't recommend it because you'll void your warranty and since you're not familiar with overclocking you may break something. If you're not going to add another GTX480 then it would be a better idea to drop down to a TX650/750 and save the money.

Thank you all for your comments.

I will most likely pull the trigger on this config in the coming week or so.

I will just need to check if delivery and warranty conditions apply to mainland Europe, and what the extra-charge for this may be.

Thanks again!

Ooh where abouts in mainland europe if I may be so noisy as to inquire?

Sleinous said:

Ooh where abouts in mainland europe if I may be so noisy as to inquire?

Click to expand...

Ideally, delivery would be to San Sebastian, Spain. If Spain is a problem for whatever reason, the South of France could also be envisioned for delivery (area of Hendaye).

Why the question?

Oh not Aix en P then lol, couldve roped my bro into pinchin' your rig mwhaha

Warranty to Europe is slightly different than to UK - there is no collect and return. Return costs are shared, so if your computer was to fail you would need to cover the cost of returning it back to us, and we would then cover the cost of shipping it back to you.

We also offer component exchanges, whereby if a component failed you could remove it from the computer, post it to us, and we would post you a new one/repaired one back.