Spec me a rig (£1k)

[benneh]

Firstly I should list what I'll be using it for. Mainly; Photo editing (RAW) with Lightroom/CS4, Gaming, Video editing/rendering, Avid/vegas/after effects etc, Audio editing and recording, some 3d rendering, 3dsmax/vray/maya etc. Basically a kick ass gaming rig that loves to churn the render, oh yes..

I don't need a sound card, or monitor/keyboard/mouse. I'm thinking (going by the limited benchmarks and comparisons that I've seen, I know nothing) of going i7, on account of doing lots of rendering. I need plenty of ram for photo editing/photomatix so should 8Gb suffice? (also I'm wondering how this will effect OC'ing, I'm not really into overclocking but a nice stable oc is always a bonus ).
Also am I best going dual SLI with slightly weaker gfx cards or just buying one kick ass card?, I'm not sure how that effects pricing, or how it works with regards to applications using the gpu's at the mo, or in the future.
Is SSD a good idea yet?, and I think I'll need a strong PSU, I'll be running 2 HD's in Raid 0 (these need to go into the budget) and 2/3 backup drives for video/music etc (these do not need to go in the budget ;p).

My budget is £1000, can it be done?. Any advice appreciated.

 

[Zenduri]

Your not going to get a decent sized ssd in for that budget so ive axed the ssd idea, I've also chosen a 5850 as its within budget roughly and still give a hell of a bang for its price.
Anything over 6GB at the moment IMO is outside your budget unless you cut corners elsewhere.


£1027 ignoring the shipping as you qualify for freebies

 

[ETNiES]

Hybrid's build is nearly same as mine, and its **** fast

 

[Yiuca]

Ok, for kicks I decided to aim at matching price as the poster above me, but with 8GB. So I'll just go on with my own logic blah blah & you can make up your mind on what suits you best.

So the changes? The most obvious one is the change from socket 1366 to 1156, this can & will affect you depending so it's a personal preference thing, SLI performance while can be done with 1156 it drops to 8x/8x speed for the PCI-E lanes this makes it a little slower with SLI however with the PCI-E controller on the CPU with a single card it's actually faster! In this case I chose the 860 as it's still i7, it has lower power consumption but it can't use tri-channel memory, good thing that it's performance benefits is negligible but maybe it matters to you? Overclocking to the same level can be done although it can be a little more fiddly, but on the upside the 860 at stock is a better choice due to the more aggressive turbo-boost which sees the core clock rise quite abit higher than 920 when using only 1-2 threads.

I chose the Corsair 650W because although it's a few £ more & 50W less I know more about it so I just prefer it, I imagine the OCZ one is just fine too, this is just a personal preference on my part. The cooler, well I chose something cheaper than the H50 for a few reasons, 1 the H50 benefits abit more from a 2nd fan, but mainly because the Alperfohn offers suitable cooling at a cheaper price.

Both setups will give you very similar performance, both have very similar spec & price & the difference between them is mostly preference & upgradability, SLI can be done on 1156 but will see slightly less performance than 1366, but mainly it is that 1366 has a known upgrade path while the 1156 doesn't have a known path however it doesn't mean there isn't a path at all.

I also went with 5850 since it's price/performance is good, I also prefer single cards that perform well as opposed to 2 cards usually but again a personal preference, mainly because 2 card are more electricity & heat. (amongst a few other reasons)

So weigh up what suits you best & see what you can fit in!

 

[Zenduri]

good spec although i chose the 920 as it loves encoding etc a bit more than the 860

 

[Yiuca]

good spec although i chose the 920 as it loves encoding etc a bit more than the 860

I tend to put them at a similar level as it's abit of a mixed bag, although by the tiny margins both the bit-tech & Anandtech reviews put the 860 above the 920 at stock (in encoding) as said in some other areas it's a mixed bag whether it's the 860 or the 920 either come out above the other only by the smallest of margins.

I think both suggestions are good though & as said come down mostly to personal preference as they really are similar & differences are of a very small margin.

 

[1337z0r]

I'd go for the 920 personally, you will have the option to upgrade to i9 using your x58 when they come out. Also 8GB might limit your overclock, I'm sure you should be fine with 6GB. I have 8GB and it's quite rare I will max it out and I usually have 4 virtual machines running under Windows 7.

920 + x58 + 6GB = 4GHz goodness

 

[benneh]

Cheers for the specs/info people, glad I started the thread , I'm way off the pace regarding current gen cpu's. I think I'll go with the 920 spec (with a view to upgrading to a second 5850 down the line if necessary). Also, clocking the 920 with 6Gb of ram seems fairly straight forward, so that's a bonus . Cheers for the help guys.

 

[McstylisT]

Cheers for the specs/info people, glad I started the thread , I'm way off the pace regarding current gen cpu's. I think I'll go with the 920 spec (with a view to upgrading to a second 5850 down the line if necessary). Also, clocking the 920 with 6Gb of ram seems fairly straight forward, so that's a bonus . Cheers for the help guys.

With a decent cooler ( linked in both the potential builds above ) you can quite easily achieve 3.8 - 4ghz its fair to say. Add that power to your 5850 , possibly xfire and your on for some serious game frame rates.

Enjoy

McT

 

[Shakeel]

out of the two posted i would go with the 1st one