I really would appreciate it if someone could give me their opinion on this new system. I would be running it on XP x64 and using it for gaming amongst other things. It comes in at just under £1000 with a cool case, which is the absolute maximum of my budget. It seems to tick all my boxes, but I'm worried that it might go out of date too quickly and that the graphics card might be wrong. Thanks to anyone who can help (fingers crossed) Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 LGA775 'Wolfdale' "Overclocking E0 Stepping" 3.33GHz Overclocked to 4.00GHz! - Asus P5E-VM HDMI Intel G35 Micro-ATX (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard - Corsair 4GB DDR2 XMS2 Dominator PC2-8500C5 TwinX (2x2GB) - ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2048MB GDDR5 TV-Out/Dual DVI/HDMI - Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB SATA-II 32MB Cache - Pioneer DVR-216DBK 20x DVD±RW SATA Dual Layer ReWriter (Black) - Corsair TX 650W ATX2.2 SLi Compliant PSU - Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler - Arctic Silver 5 Heatsink compound professionally hand installed by our technicians
If I'm not wrong the 4870 is pretty much top-of-the-line now, both in terms of performance and heat production.
You mean the 4870 X2 is the top end or flag ship GPU for ATi and yes it's power hungry and creates a lot of heat, i think you need a minimum of 700watt psu but im not sure.
With the 4870 X2 I would definitely recommend that you get a bit bulkier PSU. Something around 750W would do you best. I'm just curious as to why you are throwing all of this high range components on a Micro-ATX board? You won't see a performance decrease, but you will have a limited amount of upgradability in the future. If you are using a Micro-ATX case you may want to rething a few of your choices. The 4870 x2 creates ALOT of heat and if you have a macro-ATX case there will not be as much room for it to disappate. So you may consider upping your case/mobo form factor.
That's a very good point i didn't see that micro atx board it will be limiting and hard to work around because the 4870 X2 will probably obstruct most of the pci slots and everything else lol.
