Fifoo

As I'm a little experienced from self-building PC's ("self-made man with plenty of totally annoying hours just for tryin' to make the best"), I'd be proud if I could give you a little help (apologies for my bad English, I'm French). You MUST be a passionate to do so, because it demand so much "never-ending work", and it depend on your level of understanding, novice or advanced user... I want to be sure your knowledge is the last one... Drop me one if I made a mistake :wallbash: In the case you enter in the last category, you don't need to read all this pm, you can directly go at the end of it, I've putted some links for help. But if you want, you can read it entirelly, it's long but I've some tricks for you, I think it's good to remind those old tips, and of course, it never hurts. :biggrin: First of all, the BIG questions are: 1. What OS you want to be yours... Linux? XPpro? Vista? Or W7? I'm supposing it's W7... as your choice is upon an i7 processor. Well but, if you give your choice for an other OS than this one, I think you don't need to have such an expensive processor for playing games, it's due to system implementations and if it would be only for "havin' Quad", then, Man it's your choice. The reason I tell you that, is simply because you MUST have a complete system capable of working ("sic") with those features for the BEST "High-perfs", as it depend on the way you are intended to use your PC. :blink: In an other way, if you don't have softwares (I mean: "all of your stuffs") certified for workin' with "Quad", you've lost your money, and it's better to buy something you can use at the top of it. If you want to make Overclocking at very High-levels, and ONLY in that way, I think the i7 is a bad choice due to FSB frequency, intel has put a limit on it because the "Quad Core" temp go annoyingly high, due to the technology of it... Perhaps they'll do better things in the future, an "Extreme edit" with unblocked FSB... ("my dream")... I don't know if they have attempted to do this for the next years... You have to read good magazines about Overclocking, if you want to know how it works... I personaly don't know much about W7 as an update of Vista (not my taste, but the choice is yours), and we, Frenchies, only have a Beta v. in German language. I'm waiting about a solid release in a few months in Europe (if I don't miss something at this time)... I'm runnin' under XPpro Sp2 at this time, with High-tweaked levels of optimizations, and my "OMGWTFBFGSAUCE" PC love that way... And me too :biggrin: And YES, I think it's better to have a stable and optimized OS, even if it smells a little "prehistoric", than turning arround an unknown bugged one. Of course, it's better to be an advancer user for doin' such optimized things, but some tweaks are helpfull for the novice too! :smile: 2. And what's about your needs... It's for Creating? Multimedia? Webbing? Modding? Overclocking? Playing games? Or, perhaps, all of those beautiful things?... (whatelse?)... As it's highly depending on your choice of hardware, and how much $$ you can put on the table! Well, well, for PLAYING GAMES... It's my choice too, but not the only one... :wink: I see that you did a selection ("not bad") :thumbsup: 3. But, how about your understanding of all of your choices? Little trick, but a good-one, you don't need to have the last "High-ends" hardware materials for having the best setup... "until you are passionate about that"... It doesn't help you if they are working bad together and at low levels... The only thing you gain then, is loosing your money! I prefer stable and highly-optimized good customizations for playing my favourite games, with a perfect bios setup and good overclocking settings that never fails, untill you want to see the so known and charmin' "Black Screen", but I hope you don't. But this is my "Way of life" to use PC's, and you have to make plenty of choice between those annoying stuffs of customizations... Protect your PC from crash with a good multi Fan-cooling system, it helps a lot. Mount your PC in the best Case you can find, it's really good for your comfort, for upgrading, and the most important, for Low-temp... And don't forget the way you install your OS, peripherals, codecs, drivers, and so on. It's REALLY important for having HIGH-PERFS!!! I NEVER USE Cool'n Quiet, it drops dramaticaly down FPS, and this feature is not friendly with Overclocking. And if you think it's important to have such a feature, well, but let me tell you it's only a commercial argumentation. Your gain for conso in Watts are so petty... I've tested this a lot with my Core2 Duo, and it's not good for my use of Overclocking... The BEST, of course: havin' GOOD Fan-cooling systems, and a HIGH PSU Certified 82+, between 800-1000 W. for the best stability. Well, it's up to you for now, and I highly recommend for all of you guys, who wanted to understand all aspects of your PC, to put an eye on those awesome links, it's a vast and amazin' place, but that would help a lot :wink: 4. Links... For the fans of Oblivion who are asking about tweaking gaming experience, here is the excellent Elder Scroll IV: Oblivion Tweak Guide by Koroush Ghazi. And the complete system optimization guide for Windows users, designed for novice and advanced users, The TweakGuides Tweaking Companion, by the same Author, it is written in plain English to help you genuinely understand all aspects of Windows and your PC. If you want to know about optimizing your Graphic Card with basic and advanced settings, try The Gamer's Graphics & Display Settings Guide, by the same Author. And an other one, intended for Nvidia users, the Nvidia Forceware Tweak Guide, allways by Koroush Ghazi, would help a lot. An other good place for optimizing your BIOS, as often Mainboards manuals have poor descriptions to do so, Tech ARP - The Definitive BIOS Optimization Guide Well, it's done, sorry for my long pm, I just hope it would help you. :biggrin: .............. All credits to Koroush Ghazi, as he have made a fantastic work, many thanks to him, I'll never forgot...

And if he get banned from an other Forum (I do not hope so), he was'nt be abble to post here, if I'm right. No, the best to do is to contact an Admin, the entire sites were on move last days and the probability of a bug is high, our Admins are on hard working to do the best for all of us, hats down for them all :thumbsup: