I'm just about to build a rig, and wanted people's opinion. It needs to be as future-proof as possible.

Akasa Eclipse 62
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
AMD Athlon 64 3200 (upgrade to X2 later)
Zalman 9500 LED
2GB (2x1GB) CORSAIR XMS3200C2PT TwinX
250GB Maxtor SATA HDD
XFX 7800GTX Extreme Edition (x1, might get another later)
Plextor 716 Slotloader or SATA DVD-r
Akasa Fan Controller

Not sure bout the PSU, either:

Tagan 580 Easycon
OCZ 600 Powerstream
Hiper 580 Type-R
Enermax 600w

What ya think?


Mark.

sounds nice ...
but I would switch the Zalman 9500 to a XP-120 or XP90C
the Zalman look pretty nice but its design is more PR then really useful cooling note that the base plate is not cooled in any way and history shows us that NONE of the coolers reached top values when not cooling the baseplat and only going by heat pipes

the OCZ and Tagan PSU are good
but the MODStream is even better then the Powerstream
I would choose the MODstream

Hmm, that's interesting.

I like the 9500 because the fan is intergrated, so takes up less room. Also, every review seems to say it's as good as water-cooling. Is this not true. My next choice would be the XP-90c.

I've heard the modstream has problems. Is 520w enough to run an SLi rig? Also, do you not prefer the connectors on the Hiper? They seem a bit more secure.


Mark.

when I bought my PC I bought a new watercooling, too since I sold it with my old PC
but I send it back after a while since the Winchester CPU is so damn cool even with default cooler and with the XP120 its extremely cool ... when idle its near room temp and when working about 10K higher then room temp

so no need for watercooling

up to now I did not have a single issue with the MODstream ...
I first had a Powerstream (there was no MODstream at that time) but when I went to a LAN it made *PENG* and stopped working and I do not know why up to now
but the MODstream is very good ... its really quite not those pseudo quite PSU all over the place ... its really quite (the Powerstream is pseudo-quite, too) and the cables rock
there is no problem with the ... and unlike other manufaturers the connection on the back are identical to the normal ones so you so need no special thing .... got a fan with a 4pin molex connector ? plug it directly into the PSU ... the PCIe cable is like the 12V connector with a "holder" it can't fall off in any case
520W should be enough even 450W should do it ... it a question of how the power is divided on the different rails ... the problem when GPUs first needed at least a 350W supply was due to the very week 12V rails at that time ... even a 300W power supply was strong enough at that time but it had to have a strong 12V rail ...
also it differs ... ATis cards were more 5V intensive then nVidias
but as you can see OCZ put alot of power into the 5V rail with the modstream

oh and btw if you motherboard is able to handle the XP-120 I would recommend you to choose it
you can use a 120mm fan which is much quiter then a 92mm fan and you cool everything about the CPU + it is much lighter ... only 400g


btw get a little impression of XP-120 and MODstream here
http://www.warp2search.net/forums/viewto...ight=xp120