jwilson56
Senior Member
Well with my older system had a melt down and the motherboard seemingly has gone on the slow boat to china to get repaired so I decided to get a new faster system as I am now playing COD4. However I recently had some unexpected repairs to my furnace as well as having other expenditures so I decided to rethink my plans on a Asus Maximus Formula Q6600 system. What I came up with and eventually purchased has turned out to be a great machine for the money and cost far less. I thought I would share what parts I purchased as well as some details of construction.
After much research and looking at benchmarks I decided that first the P35 chipset was the best bang for the buck. I found a great deal on an Abit IP35-E and it has glowing reviews and is good for overclocking. Next I have seen many benchmarks that show the E6750 a great performer and even better at Quake engine based games than the Q6600 so I decided to go with that. Here is the list of parts I purchased:
ABIT IP35-E LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard $60 AR
EVGA 512-P3-N802-AR GeForce 8800GT Superclocked 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 $249 AR
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor $189
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound $6
SAMSUNG 20X DVD±R DVD Burner Black SATA Model SH-S203B $29
ZALMAN CNPS9700 LED 110mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler $59
G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) $47
OCZ GameXStream OCZ700GXSSLI ATX12V 700W Power Supply $90 AR
Antec Nine Hundred Case $68 AR
Maxtor 320GB 16MB 7200RPM Drive $65
Total cost in parts $862
I loaded WinXP Pro for now even though I own a copy of Vista Premium. I have the system modestly overclocked to 3.2GHZ and the memory dialed down to 4-4-4-12 and have to say the system is cool as a cucumber. The benchmark speeds are awesome for the money. I will attach some screen captures and pictures.
I plan on pushing it some more down the road as my CPU temps underload are very low right now (Prime95 Torture test). I think it will hit 3.4GHZ with no problem and maybe even 3.6GHZ. I will let it burn in at 3.2GHZ for now as I can run COD4 maxed out at a steady 91FPS.
John
After much research and looking at benchmarks I decided that first the P35 chipset was the best bang for the buck. I found a great deal on an Abit IP35-E and it has glowing reviews and is good for overclocking. Next I have seen many benchmarks that show the E6750 a great performer and even better at Quake engine based games than the Q6600 so I decided to go with that. Here is the list of parts I purchased:
ABIT IP35-E LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard $60 AR
EVGA 512-P3-N802-AR GeForce 8800GT Superclocked 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 $249 AR
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor $189
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound $6
SAMSUNG 20X DVD±R DVD Burner Black SATA Model SH-S203B $29
ZALMAN CNPS9700 LED 110mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler $59
G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) $47
OCZ GameXStream OCZ700GXSSLI ATX12V 700W Power Supply $90 AR
Antec Nine Hundred Case $68 AR
Maxtor 320GB 16MB 7200RPM Drive $65
Total cost in parts $862
I loaded WinXP Pro for now even though I own a copy of Vista Premium. I have the system modestly overclocked to 3.2GHZ and the memory dialed down to 4-4-4-12 and have to say the system is cool as a cucumber. The benchmark speeds are awesome for the money. I will attach some screen captures and pictures.
I plan on pushing it some more down the road as my CPU temps underload are very low right now (Prime95 Torture test). I think it will hit 3.4GHZ with no problem and maybe even 3.6GHZ. I will let it burn in at 3.2GHZ for now as I can run COD4 maxed out at a steady 91FPS.
John
