please rate my system, reccommend next upgrade

[damarble]

OK, here is my new system I'v almost finished:

-Hardware-
Abit IC7-G
3.2E P4 with E0 stepping
Corsair Twinx1024 XMS PC3200
Fortron 530W PSU
XFX 6600GT
NEC DL DVDRW
120GB WD HDD with SATA adaptor

-Cooling-
Danner Mag 3 (maybe, it is in another system now)
7/16 ID Masterkleer tubbing
BIXII
Maze 4 GPU block
Danger Den NB block
Custom CPU block, I cant remember who made it but it is very nice
2 120mm Delta fans for BIX2, 2 other 120mm for case ventilation (cant remember the name)

Did I forget anything important? And which of these parts would you consider the worst bottleneck? Thanks!

 

[Amarkarian]

More hard drive space definetly

 

[aeiou]

That depends on what he is doing. For gaming, 120GB should be more than enough. I would say the next thing to upgrade would be the cpu, unless you are planning some major overclocking. In which case, the next thing would be the video card.

 

[Sucka]

Not bad, but why not make yourself more upgradable and go with the newer Chipsets? I had a very nice s478 myself, but it's really not future proof at all. Either way, not a bad midrange system, that E0 should push past 4.0GHz without breaking a sweat.

 

[nealric]

vid card if you like gaming.

 

[attack]

vid card if you game, if you video edit more RAM, otherwise I say save the cash, I don't think you'll gain a noticeable increase in performance from a chipset/ram timing/CPU upgrade, unless you need to crunch numbers for something.

 

[damarble]

Not bad, but why not make yourself more upgradable and go with the newer Chipsets? I had a very nice s478 myself, but it's really not future proof at all. Either way, not a bad midrange system, that E0 should push past 4.0GHz without breaking a sweat.

Since I already have everything that's listed, so no newer chipset. I would have prefered a 775, but first I got a mobo cheap, then got a CPU for it, found the mobo was dead, got new mobo for CPU, hated slow Celery, got new CPU. So that's how I ended up with a S478.

I plan to OC as far as I can get it, but the WC is not hooked up yet so no OC yet. I'm almost reaching 60c load @ stock speed, that bothers me.

I probably wont be upgrading anymore actually. Maybe a Raptor? But when this thing gets too old I will probably move to a dual core AMD, with PCIE and the works. But thats not for a while and the new technolgy should stabilize by then.


I'm not a hardcore gamer, but when I do I want it to be a great experiance. I may log 5-10 hours a week. But this is more of an all around multimedia system, too provide decent gaming, music, video, internet, or what ever I come up with to do. And I think this combination will do everything I need competantly, although not the greatest for any. A jack-of-all-trades, so to speak.


Anybody know how high this RAM will OC? I know it's decent RAM but I'm wondering if I should have gone with PC4000 or even higher.

 

[maxio098ui]

vid card and maybe hd

 

[maxio098ui]

o and get a lian li (sorry couldnt resist)

 

[batboy]

Actually, the system looks pretty good. I don't recommend any major upgrades because you are already about as far as you can go with this platform. Don't get a better AGP vid card because your next system will have PCI-E. Same with CPU, because your next one should be socket LGA775.

You do have two sticks of RAM for dual channel, right? About the only thing that might be improved is the harddrive. If you are using an SATA adaptor, does that mean your 120 is a regular IDE drive? If so, maybe get a faster SATA drive, like a Raptor and use the 120 as a data or backup storage drive.

You might consider sinking the mobo mosfets if you want to do some cooling mods. With watercooling, you should be close to 4 gig with that system.