OK, many of you have asked for a detailed parts list for the two quad-core systems that I'm building. Well, here it is:
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
This is the newer 95W G0 stepping.
- Asus Striker Extreme
This has the NVIDIA 680i chipset and is packed with numerous cool features. The downside is that it's not the easiest motherboard to set up.
- 4 x 1GB Corsair XMS6400 DDR2 800MHz
- ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB DDR4
- Western Digital Raptor X
It's only a 150GB drive, but it's 10,000 RPM and has an access time of 4.5ms.
- Corsair HX520 PSU
A system like this needs a decent quality PSU. The 520W Corsair PSU is not only nice and stable but has some beautiful features such as modular cabling to keep things tidy. If I was planning on going SLI/CrossFire I'd probably go for a bigger PSU, but for the configuration I'm planning, this is more than enough.
- Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro
I really don't like the stock coolers that come with Intel CPUs (of with AMD chips for that matter, but I haven't bought one of those in ages ...) so I replaced them with something better.
I'll tell you more about this system later ;-)