£520 to Spend, what would you get?

[spencerlievens]

Ok so I have my system at built and waiting at this stage:

Coolermaster HAF 912+
Gigabyte GA-X58-UD3R
Intel i7 930 D0 Stepping (Plan to OC to 4.0 - 4.2GHz)
Coolermaster V6GT
Corsair TX650W

I have to still get storage, graphics card, memory and dvd/rw and have £520 maximum to spend. I need a top end graphics card with low power consumption due to having a TX650. Please everyone bare in mind the TX650 has one 12v rail @ 52amps. I would prefer 2000MHz ram as I have heard this is best for overclocking the processor and I was personally looking at RAID but I am certainly open for suggestion. Anyway show me your thoughts please

 

[spencerlievens]

Oh and please suggest SLi and Crossfire setups if they work and are compatible with OSX as I have been told the 52amp 12v Rail the Cosair TX650W has will handle the load comfortably.

 

[notshy]

Ok so I have my system at built and waiting at this stage:

Coolermaster HAF 912+
Gigabyte GA-X58-UD3R
Intel i7 930 D0 Stepping (Plan to OC to 4.0 - 4.2GHz)
Coolermaster V6GT
Corsair TX650W

I have to still get storage, graphics card, memory and dvd/rw and have £520 maximum to spend. I need a top end graphics card with low power consumption due to having a TX650. Please everyone bare in mind the TX650 has one 12v rail @ 52amps. I would prefer 2000MHz ram as I have heard this is best for overclocking the processor and I was personally looking at RAID but I am certainly open for suggestion. Anyway show me your thoughts please

Storage - lots of people use Samsung Spinpoint F3's. Note SATA 6B/s isn't supported in OSX so I'd get a SATA 3 GB/s dive.

Graphics - what are you needing this for? Gaming in Windows? 3 options here - older nVidia card on the cheap (9800 etc) which is supported out of the box, ATI 5770/5870 - make sure you buy a dual slot version and should be supported by ATI Experimental Chameleon boot file. Option 3 is the new Fermi nVidia cards but the high end ones are causing issues in OSX.

RAM - I'd go for lower timings rather than higher speeds. Try for some CL7 or CL8.

DVD - Sony Optiarc as per MacMan's user build - very well used DVD writer that is fully supported in OSX including sleep

RAID - if you are using RAID for something other than your boot drive - i.e. boot on one and storage RAID then I think that's fine and you can use OSX software RAID.

If you want a dual or tipple boot - I'd suggest a second drive for Win or Win & Linux to make it easier to install than doing it on one drive.

 

[spencerlievens]

Thankyou this is very helpful and clears up a lot of research I have gathered. The problem I found was that I read so many threads, articles, video reviews and benchmarks that I got to the point where I just got stuck and couldn't decide whether to go down the more power route by buying more cards when I should just concentrate on getting an XFX 5870 @ £200 and worry more about what ram to get and what storage to choose. I have decided that I will be going for 2 x F3 500GB Samsung's in RAID 0 and I have pretty much decided that I am going to go with the Dominator GT 2000MHz kit (I can also see you chose similar) and the Sony Optiarc AD-7260S. This comes out at £464.35 inc. VAT & Delivery.

If you have any tips to make my life easier when it comes to install it would be greatly appreciated as it looks as if your definitely on the ball. This is my system spec:

i7 930 (Overclock to 4.0 - 4.2GHz Hopefully) - Coolermaster V6GT CPU Cooler
Gigabyte GA-X58-UD3R
Corsair Dominator GT 2000MHz 8-9-8-24
XFX Radeon HD5870 1GB - (HD-587X-ZNFC)
2 x Samsung SpinPoint F3 500GB SATA II - 16MB
Sony Optiarc AD-7260S
Coolermaster HAF 912 + Case
Corsair TX650W (Single 12v Rail @ 52amps)

My power supply will be ok but what about when it comes to crossfire and adding a solid state drive?

 

[notshy]

Thankyou this is very helpful and clears up a lot of research I have gathered. The problem I found was that I read so many threads, articles, video reviews and benchmarks that I got to the point where I just got stuck and couldn't decide whether to go down the more power route by buying more cards when I should just concentrate on getting an XFX 5870 @ £200 and worry more about what ram to get and what storage to choose. I have decided that I will be going for 2 x F3 500GB Samsung's in RAID 0 and I have pretty much decided that I am going to go with the Dominator GT 2000MHz kit (I can also see you chose similar) and the Sony Optiarc AD-7260S. This comes out at £464.35 inc. VAT & Delivery.

If you have any tips to make my life easier when it comes to install it would be greatly appreciated as it looks as if your definitely on the ball. This is my system spec:

i7 930 (Overclock to 4.0 - 4.2GHz Hopefully) - Coolermaster V6GT CPU Cooler
Gigabyte GA-X58-UD3R
Corsair Dominator GT 2000MHz 8-9-8-24
XFX Radeon HD5870 1GB - (HD-587X-ZNFC)
2 x Samsung SpinPoint F3 500GB SATA II - 16MB
Sony Optiarc AD-7260S
Coolermaster HAF 912 + Case
Corsair TX650W (Single 12v Rail @ 52amps)

My power supply will be ok but what about when it comes to crossfire and adding a solid state drive?

[off topic]
I've just had a quick look at your blog!

Not saying that you haven't but please make sure that you credit the right people such as Tony and MacMan for their work and please link back to the Tony forum for all downloads and not to host any off site. As I said I didn't see anything on there but I have seen it in the past where people have gleaned information in the forum to just go a post it all over their blog as their own ideas.
[/off topic]

Hard Drives - as I said I would not have your main booting HD to be in RAID. So I would get 3 HDs or 2 x HD and 1 x SSD (as you asked) and run the non-booting drives in software RAID but leave your primary boot drive as a single drive. It's not very straight forward to get the booting HD in RAID and I think that's more for some advanced tinkering once your system is up and running!

SSD - I don't have any history with them but plenty of people on the forum have them. I'd go take a look around. I'm waiting until the prices drop further and considering a cheap low size one for now given that the size is only going to shoot up and the prices drop in the near future.

Multi Graphics Cards - Not very hackintosh friendly and again I would recommend installing with one card and only using one card for OSX. If you want dual cards for Windows then you might have to keep on breaking the SLI bridge. I think some people have got them working but it's again advanced tinkering that you want want to mess up your first install.

 

[spencerlievens]

Ok so after many weeks of researching I have decided on the final components, here is the entire spec:

Coolermaster HAF 912+ (Case)

Gigabyte GA-X58-UD3R (Motherboard)

Intel i7 930 (Processor)

Coolermaster V6GT (CPU Cooler)

6GB Corsair Dominator GT 2000MHz 8-9-8-24 (Memory)

2 x 500GB Samsung SpinPoint F3 SATAII (Hard Drives)

XFX Radeon HD5870 1GB (Graphics Card)

Sony Optiarc AD-7260B (DVD/RW)

Corsair TX650W (PSU)