I'm about to buy all this kit...

I have been looking at building a new PC for ages as mine is getting a bit old. I have been looking over reviews of many different components and chosen the ones below. I haven't bought anything yet as I want to ensure that everything I am buying will work together.

1x Antec 900 Ultimate Gaming Case
1x Antec TP-750 PSU
2x WD 150gb Velociraptors 10000rpm 16mb cache HDD (to be raid 0)
2x Sony DVD RW
1x Asus M4A79-T Deluxe MB
1x AMD Phenom X4 965BE CPU
1x Artic Cooling Freezer Pro 7 R2
1x 4gb (2x 2GB) Corsair XMS3 DDR3, PC3-12800
2x XFX HD4890 1gb (to be crossfire)

Does anyone have any comments on this spec? Anyone used any of these components and found any problems? Have I made a balls up? Any other comments?

Thanks

4890 is a good card and good value now the 5870 is out, i just bought the saphire 4890, but crossfire is a waste of money.

Also not sure if the 10k drives are worth it, not sure of the price but iirc theyre not cheap. and if you go that route you will probably want additional secondary storage ie a slower cheaper larger capcity hard disk.

Thanks for the reply.

The two disk will give me 300gb ish and that is plenty as I only use my pc for games and don't need lots of storage.

Just out of interest why would crossfire be a waste of money? I've never used crossfire/sli before.

i would omit thos two 4890's and get ONE 5870, also as the other guy said the raptors are now very old kit and still quite costly, get 1 ssd drive instead and say 1 250gb sata2 instead. your system will be better off that way

also as for the case i would recommend the coolermaster HAF 922 or 932, better cooling and working space

sli/crossfire is a waste of money because you can only get 60% more performance MAX with 2 cards so you'll be paying full price for something you can only use 60% of also lots of games suffer TERRIBLE micro stutters with both sli and crossfire, with 1 5870 u'll be ok for 2 - 3 yrs or so for ANY games which it will plow through without breaking sweat

Edited by deleted (Thu 14-Jan-10 13:27:09)

Just the few people i've come across actually running crossfire systems all said it didnt make that much of a difference. For the price of 2 x 4890 cards you can get a 5870 which will blow away 2 x 4890s in crossfire in every benchmark you can think of, and give you dx11 support.

the 10k drives arent as expensive as i thought but the clicking noise would put me off. could be worth looking at a decent ssd as an alternative.

thats true, i use to own a 4870x2 from sapphire which in 90% of games worked better by disabling 1 of the cards, it had to go as the usage didnt justify the price, i sold it and bought a nvidia gtx275 which is powerful enough for anything really and certainly faster in most benchmarks than the 4890

Thanks very much for this information. I will take a look at SSDs and also see about the 5870.

Cheers!

In reply to a post by NeilA:

Thanks very much for this information. I will take a look at SSDs and also see about the 5870.

Cheers!

I would just stick in two 500gb hdds in raid 0 tbh. If you have the money go for a 3 hdd raid 5 system. Ditto with the others regarding the 4890s ..

Personally I would say 300gb is way too small. Also if your getting win7 make sure you put x64 version on

As mentioned elsewhere I would seriously consider SSDs

Some more good reasons for choosing a single graphics card vs 2x Crossfire

1. 2x cards consumes more power and generates more heat vs one
2. You need a connector for 2x crossfire (small cost)
3. According to this review (Asus-M4A79T) 3 out of 5 of your SATA connectors will be blocked using two double width cards!
4. With one card, you have the option to get a second if the price becomes affordable and you are convinced your games will benefit