using an SSD for a boot drive is seriously a must.
its one hell of an improvement even if you pick up the cheapest OCZ agility, its still alot more faster than your average HDD.
heck, before, my OS takes like 30-40sec to boot, after i switched to OCZ agility 2 40gb it got boosted to 15sec-25sec. thats like half shaved off right off the bat.
for the ram, i suggest taking a look at this
Corsair 2000MHZ CL9-10-9-27 2x2GB. the SNB has the memory multiplier unlocked, picking a high clocked ram would be a good thing.
PS: it says theres one one stock right now and it has a 40% off so Grab the ram now before the sale wears off.
Lupin's suggested board looks neat, if you get that you`d have an option to add another kit of that ram to get 8gb too.
Hey lupin, any AMD boards you know that can do SLI without any issues?
i think Xfire a HD6950 would be a beast enough to play anything from this age's games by a huge margin and i'd doubt that it wont be enough for future games. go buy one first if it cant fit your budget and buy another later to Xfire.
Asus 2GB HD6950 kind of curious tho, i see this asus to be cheaper than the other brands with only 1gb of ram...
Note: the HD6950 can be flashed into a HD6970 but seems like only the 2GB version could only be flashed and it is highly dangerous
.
* preferably, i`d agree with vuzedome, GTX 560 Ti is theoretically on par with HD6950 and is just behind HD6970, tho one little thing, just to be safe STAY AWAY from OCed GTX 5xx, they have issues specially when SLIed.
Asus GTX 560 Ti 1GB GDDR5 -OR-
Gainward GTX 560 Ti 2GB GDDR5the only reason you should be considering ATI over Nvidia would be image quality, ATI seems to have the advantage of better image quality(HQV 2.0 benches says so) and multiple monitors(well over 3, specially on multi-GPU setups) other than that, Nvidia has the upper hand on 3D support, Physx and Cuda.
* another thing, SLI/Xfire on HighEnd cards have some serious issues, they tend to overheat(90c-100c), specially the upper card and specially on mobo that has their PCI-E too near each other. if you consider multiple cards, try and pick a mobo with a decent spacing between the PCI-E slots.
for power supplies at least 600Watts for an 2-way SLI/Xfire rig would be enough but 700-1000Watts of raw power would be nice, specially if you`d upgrade more and pay attention to their efficiency rate, mostly at 80% and theres some at 85% rarely 90%. overkill of a rating isnt too bad, but tightly clinging to your max wattage is bad, a spike can blow it up and by blow it up, it`ll literally go in smokes and sometimes it`ll include your other parts that`ll go in smokes.
tho i dont see any decent PSU under £70(by decent i meant more than 500Watts and 80% rated)
for Cases, pay attention to what size of the board it can accommodate, how many HDDs and how spacious it is. too big would be OK but its irritating, too small would be abit bad as airflow would get obstructed and the insides would be cramped and hard to assemble.
oh yea, watch out for cases with tons of lightings, once i had one of those because i was facinated by it and guess what, it lit up my room like i had my nightlamp(my study lamp imho) on -,- so i modded all those led lights with a 220ohm resistor to limit their brightness.
if you dont have any cases in mind right now, try
ASUS TA-K51 , its tool free, has filters, plenty of bays to put drives on, an ATX can fit in it, it isnt too big neither it is too small and decent looking.
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