I'm more than happy with my Corsair HX520W even though it's probably a little overkill for my system.....
Which has gone through an 'intermediate' upgrade over the last month or so.
To start with, I replaced the 2 gigs of Kingston DDR2-667 with a 2 gig dual channel Crucial Ballistix DDR2-800 kit.
The kit was $104, but there's a $45 rebate that's coming in a few weeks and I got $35 out of my old RAM, so it basically cost $25 to upgrade my memory for the next step.
Which was replacing my stable, but non overclockable MSI 945P Neo-3F* board with a Gigabyte 965P-DS3 rev 3.3 board. With this board and RAM, I can run my E6400 C2D at 3.2Ghz (1.35v, 400FSB, 2.5 memory divider, and 5-5-5-15 timings on the RAM) instead of stock 2.13, and it's stable as a rock.
However, temps were a little high with the stock Intel HS/Fan and the passive cooled northbridge heatsink was almost too hot to touch, but my case (Antec TX640b) has an air guide in the door with a mount for a 92mm fan at the end of it.
Mounting a fan in the air guide and a 50mm fan on the northbridge to cool it a bit eliminated the heat issues.
The next upgrade was the videocard. I used eVGA's 'trade up' program to trade in my recently purchased 8600GT for a 8800GTS.
I recently started gaming again, and it was almost painful to play GTR2 with that 8600GT unless you cranked the video settings way down.
The final bit was to use a dremel and cut a hole to mount a 120mm fan in the front of the case to replace the factory stock 80mm mount.
Pics:
Final Setup:
Corsair HX520W PSU in an Antec TX640b case.
Gigabyte 965P-DS3 revision 3.3 motherboard
Intel E6400
[email protected] (400FSBx8)
2 GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2-800
eVGA 8800GTS video card.
4 SATA hard drives
2 SATA DVD RW's
Floppy, Firewire card, and modem for faxing.
