Comments Please

[danielw2599]

Hi all,

Given the amount of experience and knowledge on here I was wondering if I could get some comments or suggestions.

For the last 5 or 6 years I have beem using DELL XPS gaming laptops starting with the M1710 up to my current M1730. They have been good but obviously near impossible to upgrade and for sometime now have started to show their age.

I have about £1300 to spend (give or take) not including the monitor and heres what Ive come up with so far....(Some items deleted for clarity)

Case PCS MAELSTROM T900 BLACK GAMING CASE
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Processor i7-950 (3.06GHz) 4.8GTs/8MB Cache
Motherboard ASUS® P6X58D-E: DDR3, USB 3.0, SATA 6.0GB/s, 3-Way SLI
Memory (RAM) 4GB SAMSUNG DDR3 DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz (2 X 2GB)
Graphics Card 1280MB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX570 - 2 DVI,mHDMI - DirectX® 11, 3D Vision Ready
Memory - 1st Hard Disk 120GB OCZ VERTEX 2 SATA II 2.5" SSD (upto 285MB/sR | 275MB/sW)
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM
Memory Card Reader INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (XD, MS, CF, SD, etc) + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT
Power Supply 800W Quiet 80 PLUS Quad Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan (£89)
Processor Cooling SUPER QUIET 22dBA TRIPLE COPPER HEATPIPE CPU COOLER (£19)
Sound Card ONBOARD 8 CHANNEL (7.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Network Facilities ONBOARD 10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT - AS STANDARD ON ALL PCs
USB Options 6 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL (MIN 2 FRONT PORTS) AS STANDARD
Operating System Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 32 Bit - inc DVD & Licence (£79)
Office Software FREE Microsoft® Office Starter 2010 (Limited functionality Word & Excel)
Warranty 3 Year Gold Warranty (2 Year Collect & Return, 2 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour) (£69)

I want to be able to play FSX (finally!) with a good degree of detail tho not necessarily full detail and to be able to play the latest FPS games. Ive got about 4TB of external storage so the SSD will be used just for the OS, Programs and Games. Oh, and maybe in the future I would like to add a second graphics card.

Comes to £1291 inc VAT and Delivery.


Any suggestions welcome

Thanks and Happy Christmas to all

 

[PCS]

Welcome to our forums and Happy Christmas to you too!

The spec you've put together looks great - well balanced, and will certainly be upgradeable in the future.

 

[bg92]

I would advise you to take 6gb of ram to take advantage of tri channel technology, and take the corsair 850w psu in case you would want to go sli in the future

 

[danielw2599]

Thank you both for the quick feedback.

Re RAM: I only plan on having a 32bit OS, would the extra ram (and cost) be worth it?

Good point about the power supply as SLi is something I may look into in the future.

Thank

 

[bg92]

I would get 64bit OS, and 6 gb of ram, and thats so you could upgrade ram in the future and make use of it becuase from wht I know 32 bit uses a limited amount of ram.

 

[danielw2599]

Thanks alot, your input is much appriciated. Would you care to venture a guess how it will cope with FSX....which is my main concern.

 

[bg92]

I'm guessing that it should be fine, you should be able to run any game you want without problems on this system

 

[Meds]

FSX is a Microsoft game so for them to design a game which doesn't work properly on their best selling OS (Home Premium 64bit) then it would be a massive failure! Check the link below it confirms that FSX is fully compatible with Win 7 64bit;

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/co...en&pf=0&pi=8&s=Microsoft picture It&os=64-bit

I'd follow bg92's recommendation and get 6GB to use the tri-channel functionality.

 

[danielw2599]

The thing is, while FSX does run on windows OS, it is a resource hungry hog.