Building a cheapish strictly for gaming PC

Blackice, that info is VERY old. You should never disable your pagefile, especially on a SSD. A solid state drive is pretty the perfect device for hosting the pagefile.

I did forget about the pagefile though when I calculated the space required. With the normal Windows growth from a year of use, and the pagefile, along with those games, and necessary programs, it might be a bit too much space to have on a single 120GB drive. I would try and get something 160GB or more. This looks like your closest bet:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227612
Even though it has the nasty SF controller :/ Reviews dont look very good on it at Newegg either.



Also, TOR is around 40GB:

 

Id go with the MSI of those two. I like Gigabyte, but that model doesnt have nearly as much useful stuff on the I/O panel as the MSI does. No one needs a parallel or serial port in the home these days. I dont even think there are drivers for printers for a modern OS with anything that uses a parallel port. lol

 

MSI seems to be hit and miss, especially the lower end boards. I personally love MSI. I have only owned 2 boards by them but they both worked good for the time I owned them. Others have reported boards randomly dying, catching fire, and burn marks on them after a while of use. But many others have said that their boards work perfect and have had no issues. So I cant really say whether it will be a good board or not, but sadly Id have to guess youd be in the hit and miss range as that board is one of the lowest end board MSI makes for that chipset.


If you want SLI support, then Id recommend this one instead:
http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=60747&vpn=GA-P67X-UD3-B3&manufacture=Gigabyte

I havent had as much luck overclocking Gigabyte boards, but a lot of people love their boards and tell me they work great. The UD3 is supposed to be one of the best low end boards you can get, and the UD7 is supposed to be one of the best high end boards. The UD3 also comes with an extra 2 SATA ports if that matters to you. I know when I look for a board I always get the most RAM slots possible and the most SATA ports possible.

 

Sandy Bridge does not officially support 1.65v, only 1.5v memory. So from an official standpoint no you cant use it, but when has RAM ever been about what is the official spec?

Intel ran into the same problem AMD has in their early processors with integrated memory controllers. That is that when the RAM voltage is too far out of balance with the memory controller voltage, the mem controller "pops" and dies. 1,65v is the farthest you can go before you risk serious damage to a Sandy Bridge processor. However, just like in the days of old AMD, there is a way around this issue. Sicne the memory can onyl be so far away from the memory controller, the solution is to simply raise the memory controller voltage. If you add .1v to the memory controller, you raise the maximum limit before damage on the RAM by .1v as well. Going up by .2v on the memory controller raises the safety threshold of the RAM by .2v. And so on and so forth. However, it should be noted that you really should not raise the memory controller voltage more than .2v at most. As this will put too much voltage into the controller and risk damage to the controller directly. You should never need more than 1.7v to the RAM anyway unless you are doing extreme overclocking on sub zero cooling, so the voltage increase limitation of the memory controller is also a non-issue.

On another note, anyone see the latest RAM clock feats? Some guy stuck 64GB of RAM into a new Intel 2011 socket board and overclocked all of it to 2700MHz. Holy Shit.

 

They are average, not great but not terrible either. You dont really see that many bad reviews on them with people who have problem so they are a safe bet overall. But they also dont have the most spectacular reviews of the most stable voltage no matter what you throw at it. Fine if you dont want to push your overclocks pretty high.

 

Nearly all graphics card manufacturers are around the same until you get into the custom versions of cards. Usually only the big name brands put out custom cards too, with the exception of Palit who is a much smaller company. All other cards except the expensive versions with different names attached just use the same exact reference design and components. The main difference is volume of production and quality control.