Everything here is bought. Last to consider is maybe a sound card, water cooling, and an ssd in the future.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/EHrV
My GPU is a Radeon 5850 (actual card)
Hard drive is just a 640gb WD CB
Optical drive is adjfnhlainv;er.
And then lots of case fans.
Pretty happy with this build... I put a lot of time in to picking out the parts and I should get a decent overclock out of it. We'll see what happens. What do you guys think? Would you have done anything differently?
Also, I want to dedicate a 8800gt to physx. Can someone walk me through that and what exactly the benefits of that even are?
And don't boo hoo me over my psu. I bought it last year and it's still running strong. I've had zero issues with it.
It looks good to me. For the future, I would suggest a Samsung 840 Pro unless something better is out at the time.
What kind of water cooling are we talking about here? Closed loop or a full custom loop?
What kind of sound card are you looking for? Stereo or Surround Sound?
As far as the 8800GT goes...last time I checked you couldn't dedicate an Nvidia card to PhysX if you're using an AMD card as your main graphics card, unless there was a driver update that changed that.
I might have gone with a different case, but that's just personal preference anyway. Looks like a nice build to me.
Looks good. I know you got the 5850 from your friend( creepy stalker -.-), but when I read you're gonna be doing a custom water cooling solution, I thought I'd just share this. There's this 5870 for sale on Ebay( used, but hey, so is the one you got). It's PowerColor, and it's fitted with liquid cooling solution, er cooler, so you can connect it to a custom loop and all.
Case is, meh. You could have done better. But if it's serving you well, then why not?
For the custom loop, I'd suggest Swiftech parts. Like for the CPU block and pump, the Apogee Drive II. It has both the block and pump in one, so it saves space, and lessens the possible leak points in your system.
Overclocking the 8350 might be a little tough with that mobo. If I remember correctly, it has 4+2 power phase, which is bad news for overclockers. If you wanted to max out that CPU, a mobo with an 8+2 phase or 6+2 phase would suit you better. But who knows? You might get a decent OC.
Sounds good, but the sound card probably won't even be worth it if you're just grabbing the cheapest one you can find. The water cooling sounds like it should be fun, lol.
Also, last I checked having a low-end card as a dedicated PhysX card working in tandem with a more powerful card made the overall performance slower. It's sorta like Crossfiring a higher-end card with a lower-end card. The higher-end has to wait up for the lower-end one to process its stuff. It's bottlenecking the performance. That's how that dedicated PhysX thing works as well( again, last I checked). And even if you have equal cards, say a GTX 670 with another 670 as a PhysX card, there is a performance increase over the single 670, but only by a few FPS. Running them in SLI would be the better choice. For an AMD+ NVidia tandem, it's different, because you can't really connect them, but the bottleneck situation still applies. And if you get, say a 7870 and have a 660 as a PhysX card, then getting a single 680 would have worked better.
For your case, it's different however. You got that 5850 free, so aren't being held back by the " get the more powerful single GPU card instead" reasoning. Maybe getting something like a 650 Ti as a PhysX card might give you better performance. Oh wait, but getting a second 5850 to Crossfire would offer even more. You might argue that Crossfire has problems, but so does that dedicated PhyX card+AMD thing. Plus getting two 5850s in Crossfire should in theory give you 7950 like performance( albeit without the 2GB of ram). AND there is this mod that allows you to run PhysX with AMD cards on PhysX enabled games. I think you just have to change a few lines in a config file