Ok, money almost in my account and ordering a new system imminent. Going to go with the following, it's got £100 off until Wednesday too:

Case Antec 902
Graphics Card SEE BELOW...
Hard Drive Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB
Memory Corsair XMS3 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 (1600MHz) Tri-Channel
Motherboard Gigabyte EX58-UD3R Intel X58 (Socket 1366) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard
Optical Drive LG GH22NS30 22x DVD±RW SATA Dual Layer ReWriter
Power Supply Corsair TX 650W ATX2.2 SLI Compliant PSU
Processor Intel Core i7 920 2.66Ghz D0 Overclocked to 3.40GHz!
Processor Cooler Akasa AK-967 Nero Direct Contact Heatpipe CPU Cooler
Sound Card 7.1 High Definition OnBoard Sound Card
Operating system Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit

The only decision now is which graphics card. I am torn between the 4890 and the 5770. People say the 4890 is faster but i have heard talk of the forthcoming 9.12 ATI drivers due in December will be 5XXX drivers and could give the 5770 a performance boost. From what I have seen on performance figures the 5770 is not that much slower than the 4890. http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/gamin...od%5B2866%5D=on It's making my head hurt.

I know someone mentioned that there are no DX11 games out but the new Stalker does and maybe more games will pick up on this DX version and start using it. I personally think the smaller speed marging the 4890 has does not outweigh the future proofing of the 5770 as i do not get new cards until the stop working.

Any comments?

The question for me would be if the 5770 can do DX11 games at speed, or will it be like the early DX10 able medium budget cards (9600GT for me) which did not have the power?

I can tell you that the 4890 in Stalker takes a severe performance penalty for running in 10.1.

If prices are similar (as they seem to be) I would look at shader performance, DX10 performance and noise/heat level to find a decision. In reality by the time DX11 games hit the market in some strength (Summer next year maybe?) you'll be able to afford a 5870 which would be almost twice as fast.

So "future-proofing" a GFX card beyond a year seems quite pointless given the rapid price drop.

Can't you just re-use the card from your old system for now and wait for 5850 availability? That would be a definite better pick than either of your choices.

It comes as a complete system and has to come with a base minimum of a 4850 and as I really don't know what part of my old system was bad I don't want to put my old 9800 in and have it damage my new PC. And I want an all new one .

I really want the Sapphire Vapor-X 4890 but they only have 2 left in stock (had 10+ yesterday until I made the mental decision that I wanted one!) so it has to be in stock when I order my system in the next day or so.

What I meant by future proofing is that I do not buy hardware when something new comes out only when it is broken or very, very old so I wondered whether the 5770 would enable me to play DX11 games throughout next year. But as you stated the 5770 is a mid-range card and may struggle with DX11.

As I am spending a grand on this system I want to get something that I am going to see a big difference over my old one (C2D 6400, 2Gb RAM, 9800GTX+ 512Mb).

The problem for me when giving advise here is that I have no clue if DX11 is expected to perform equal, faster or worser than DX10.

Fact is that the HD4890 - and likely the 5570 - are the lower end of DX10 cards you can actually "use". Well, depending on resolution - I'm talking 1920x1200 here, lower will be easier.

If DX11 is an equal performance hop as from DX9 to DX10, then forget enjoying it on the 5770. If it's supposed to make things faster, the situation could be reversed.

I think I saw a Stalker Prypjat DX10.1/DX11 comparison somewhere. See if you can find that, or more info on DX11 in general.

EDIT: Here it is: http://www.driverheaven.net/articles.php?articleid=140&pageid=5

It doesn't necessarily compare same settings but shows a performance hit for DX11.

But as drivers mature, that may change - it's really much to early to tell if a 5770 can actually run DX11 at reasonable framerate, and that is the key question here. What resolution are you using?

Is whatever company you are purchasing from guaranteeing this overclock and/or warrantying the system and the CPU when clocked at this speed? This is a big overclock (although certainly not out of the question for feasibility). In addition to the above concerns, if this were my system I would question the stability and validity of this overclock until the system was adequately stress-tested. Do you know the procedure this company is using to validate this overclock?

@ Joe: The company is www.overclockers.co.uk and it's this one http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-030-OE . The whole system is guaranteed for 1 year and has won an award from Overclockers3D.net and that's all I know.

I will check with them though, thanks for bringing that up.

@ RSC: Max res of my monitor is 1680x1050.


And the 4890 Vapor-X has just gone out of stock... ah well, guess I'll have to look at the stock one.

I would skip the Seagate drive. The 11 series is the particular bunch that had so many issues with data loss and just going south in general. If you can't get the new 12 series, get a different brand drive.

I'm going to cry...

How about the Western Digital Caviar Green 1.5TB SATA-II 32MB Cache? http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduc...amp;subcat=1279

Tom's has some good articles about HD models.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/1.5tb-hdd-caviar,2331.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-ecogreen-hdd,2317.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Seagate-Barracuda-1.5-TB,2032.html

Tom's has some good articles about HD models.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/1.5tb-hdd-caviar,2331.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-ecogreen-hdd,2317.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Seagate-Barracuda-1.5-TB,2032.html

More info on the 11 series.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1050374/seagate-barracudas-7200-11-failing

http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=540

Thanks for the links Speedbump and the headsup on the Seagate 11's. How come they can still sell them knowing that some may be timebombs?

There is a SB 1TB 7200.12 and you say they are ok? I may forgo the 500Mb and go with that otherwise I will get a WD Caviar I think.

This is really giving me a headache now! I thought I was decided and now I am worried about the CPU overclock, the graphics card and (was) the hard drive .

The 12 series is all new and is the fastest Seagates made right now and should be fine.

With the western digital caviar green 1tb it states the spin speed as Intellipower, any ideas whether these are as fast as 7200rpm drives or doe it mean it spins at different speeds depending on what it's doing? Googled it but couldn't find an explaination.

Well, I have done it! Ordered this morning...

Went for the Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB Hard drive as I had heard good things about them, the Sapphire 4890 and changed the CPU cooler for the Coolermaster V8.

£40 over budget though. Should be here on Tuesday, just in time for Left 4 Dead 2...

Thanks for the advice guys.

Sounds like a nice setup, evenly matched components, and plenty of power. If the OCing (which I never like) doesn't come back to bite you, you should be a happy camper.

A little overclocking never hurt anything. It's the suicide runs that will get you. My little 2.8 woldfdale will boot fine at 4.3Ghz, but I'm afraid it might catch on fire.

Mace, when you get it: please let me know if your system is the same as mine on bootup, as you also have the Antec on an intel board.

Mine starts off all fans for half a second, then becomes quite, beeps a few times, and only then does it start sending signal to the screen and gives me the Bios splash.

Come to think of it, it might be the GFX card as I'm not seeing any ATI Bios for the card show up?

It's perfectly okay the way it is, I'm just curious if it's the case or the board (more likely) causing that "pre-check".

Will do. Are the fans quiet on the Antec case?

@ RSColonel:

Mine starts fans up immediately and signal is sent straight to monitor they don't go off until I shutdown.

Aye, thanks. Must be the P55 Mobo then that does the warmup dance.

The fans are constant speed on mine, you set them on the back of the case. I have three (top, front, back) all at lowest, and they are very unintrusive, yet do an excellent job of keeping the CPU and GPU fan at low RPM.

Yeah the fans are great. I have them all on high as i am not sure what temp it is inside the case (any free utilities?) but the air coming out the back is freezing lol. The Coolermaster V8 CPU cooler is MASSIVE! It fills the entire width of the 902 case.

Very impressed with this system and despite the 2 crashes i had on the first day, which must have been Steam as it's never happened since, has run perfectly.

Speedfan can monitor your GPU, CPU, mobo chipsets and hard drives temps and can also control some of the fans too.

http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

Mace, not sure how bad your processor and HD is, but my i7-860 with the cool running SSD remains at 5 to 10°C above room temperature, GFX remains under 50 most of the time. And that with the case fans on low.

These are really some of the best temperatures I've ever seen, so running your case on high might be noise overkill.

I just set them on high to make it the coolest without really knowing what temp it is inside the case. I have just installed Speedfan and all 4 cores are below 38C then I have TEMP 1, 2 and 3 which are no gigher than 45C (lowest is 26C which is TEMP 1) any idea what they correspond to?

Sign up for the Speedfan beta. You have to register to get to the download. Download it and all you have to do is take the executable that's in the download and overwrite the executable in the folder where Speedfan is installed. Make sure Speedfan is not running when you do this.

From what I've read, my board shows IT8718F three times and three different temps. I gather these are sensors in the mobo that monitor temps and control the fans if you have the mobo set up to control the fans. From several forums, the last one, which is always the lowest, can be disregarded and is a glitch of some sort.

Speedfan shows my temps as..

GPU: 48C vid card

Temp1: 30C mobo sensor

Temp2: 32C mobo sensor

Temp3: 25C disregard..glitch

HD0: 31C C drive

HD1: 32C D drive

Temp1: 40C northbridge

Core0: 39C CPU

Core1: 39C CPU

I'm seeing a "System" and a "CPU" Temp which are always the same, and idle at 25 to 30°C (25 is hard to believe, that's my room temperature).

I'm seeing an "AUX" at 37°C idle which I figure is the GFX card.

And last of all I have six Cores (Core0 to Core5) somewhere around 16 to 17, these must be wrong since that is cooler than ambient.

I recon as long as nothing goes over 60 underload I'm well in safe territory.

EDIT: Testing ASUS PC Probe, that one shows the same values as I see directly in my BIOS.

But there must be errors, since 20°C for the CPU, 30°C for the Motherboard is unbelivable.

There is always Core Temp. It used to regarded as more accurate than SpeedFan. Something about the way temps were calculated, but I think SpeedFan has implemented the same calculations. I ran them side by side recently and they were the same, now.

A couple of years ago though, Core Temp would show much higher temps. It works on AMD too.

Ah, the little useless things you pick up in your quest for overclocking nirvana.

http://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/

Then, if you want really try out your new overclocked wonder, try out Prime95. It will submit your deathstar rig to the ultimate test, maxing out all cores and memory at the same time. That is how I found my maximum stable overclock of 3.8Ghz. Anything over 3.8GHz would either bluescreen or just lockup. You can watch your temps max out in real time. Pretty useful for seeing if your cooling solution is going to hang in there when the going gets tough. Also very useful to see if you need to back off on the Vcore a little before your proc goes up in a puff of smoke.

http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft/

Thanks for the additional pointers, but I think my low temperatures are actually the way Intel does it. I seem to remember a while ago reading an article that said the intel temperature reports where always on the low side, hardware-wise already - not dependent on the software used to read the probes.

I uninstalled Speed Fan as my PC crashed after i had installed it and after uninstalling it hasn't... Seems to be very 'sensitive' to what is installed, is that W7?

One feature i do like in W7 is when I installed a version of Kaspersky W7 obviuosly didn't support because my PC would not start up past the BIOS screen so W7 kicked in and asked if I wanted to run a scan. it did so, found the problem, sorted it and it restarted fine. With XP I would have to restart in safe mode and try and figure out myself what the problem was.

Lesson learned - make sure I know software is for W7! I keep forgetting lol.

One question though, I left my PC on downloading something the other day and when I came home from work the PC looked as though it was shut down, fans off etc. but when I pressed the power button it came on immediately and the download had paused but W7 was still running, it didn't ave to start up. I am guessing this is an energy savig feature? If so how can I turn it off?

Speedfan (which I also had on the XP box for two years) has never caused me problems... it does seem to install some kind of system driver but if it's off, it shouldn't interfere with anything.

Yes, one of the new Win7 features (more like "process") is that when something unusual happens, it will offer to look trough known solutions. For example if you deactivate your speakers in the Audio panel, and then go to Maintainance Center asking why you can't hear soumd, Windows will correctly find that the speakers have been disabled. Of course that's a basic example, but shows how it works.

The mode you descripe sounds like hypernating (suspended to RAM), the energy saving features are one click away from where you set a screensaver, or in the system control panel. That was one of the last things I checked before finishing my upgrade, but my shop must have set that alright.