Your thoughts on this possible PC setup

[ParaSitius]

Been looking around and checking many websites for ideas and stuff (also thanks to Feign for his recent links to RPS which helped) and sort of slapped together the following.

Case: Coolermaster Storm with 650w psu (bundle) £110 (chosen as it looks purdy)
CPU: Intel Core i5 2500k 3.3GHz socket =£168.46
Heatsink: Arctic Cooler 13 £20.38
Mobo: Asus P8Z68-V LX £76.64
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Sport 8gb ddr3 1600mhz £38.10

Lastly is the graphics card which is the one bit of kit I've always had issues trying to choose. It seems that the GeForce GTX 560Ti is the card to buy from what I've read so now is which brand to choose from as I've learnt from the past that choosing the wrong one can be a bit of a fuckup.

Choice 1: MSI Twin Frozr II £173.52
Choice 2: Asus DirectCU II £168

Is it worth looking at a 2gb card? I've read that it's good for texture heavy games like BF3 and Skyrim but not much else and some have shitty memory which nulls the extra gig as it slows down the whole card.

This card for example, MSI GTX 560Ti with 2gb £197.47

Totals (with the above three gfx cards):
Asus = £581.64
MSI = £587.16
MSI 2gb = £611.11

If anyone has a scoobies about SSDs then feel free to suggest one, I'm not looking for anything bigger then 60gb though as I'm probably only gonna slap Win7 Ultimate on it.

Much appreciation for any and all advice.

[feign]

If anyone has a scoobies about SSDs then feel free to suggest one, I'm not looking for anything bigger then 60gb though as I'm probably only gonna slap Win7 Ultimate on it.

I bought this - Crucial 128GB 2.5" M4 SSD SATA-III 6Gb/s - Read 415MB/s Write 175MB/s, as the crucual M4's were winning all the plaudits only 2 months ago.

and it's now only £116.

the 64mb one - http://www.ebuyer.com/342457-crucial-64 ... t064m4ssd1 - is £64.

[DrKazza]

for ssds... 64 is the MINIMUM you can have.

I tried a 32 and found that it fit the operating system, but when it came to upgrading from vista to 7 the total space needed to dl and perform the upgrade was about 33gb... so don't go for too small an SSD, 128 is good, 256 is probably overkill

[ParaSitius]

Well, 64gig should be more then enough though I'll have a look at the 128gig. I'm guessing the Crucial brand are the sdd of choice.

Any suggestions on a gfx card? I think the rest of the setup is pretty good but I just never know when it comes to those damn cards.

[ParaSitius]

eBuyer are doing a deal this weekend on the Asus DirectCU II Top Edition, an overclocked version to one of my choices in my original post. Also has the Crucial memory I've chosen on the weekend deal as well.

[larchy]

There's the low end 560, the 560Ti which is the decent one, and the 560Ti 448 which is a bit quicker. 2GB+ versions of the latter seem hard to come by and the 1280MB versions are around £225, whereas 2GB 560Ti's are around £200. These aren't a bad choice and if I was buying a new gfx card, especially of this sort of performance, I'd definitely get a 2GB card. The likes of Skyrim and Shogun will gobble all that vram up easily.

However For that price range the new Radeon 7850's can be had for around £190 with 2GB framebuffer. They're considerably faster that the 560Ti's, being a little bit below 570 level while being far more power efficient than the 560Ti's - about 30W lower when idle (taking just 3W when the display is in sleep mode!) and about 50W lower under load.

The 570's are about £225 with 1280 framebuffer; the same as the 560TI 448's, making the latter a bit pointless really.

[ParaSitius]

Larchy, once again I doff my hat in your general direction and thanks for sparing a few minutes to check out the setup I've picked.

I hadn't even spotted the 7850, cheers for the heads up.

Think I did a better job this time round picking the other bits of hardware as you pretty much built my last PC I was so damn useless.