GA-P55A-UD3

[Morné]

Hi there

I have a gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3 motherboard and was wondering if the EVGA GTX460 1GB will work on it and which i5 processor will be the best?
I am thinking of getting a Thermaltake Element G case but still not sure on what power supply to get.

Thanx

[Slimshaedy]

Hi Morné and welcome to the the forums:)

Well first off the gtx 460 is an awesome card and yes it would work very nicely on your motherboard. In fact any PCI-E graphics card would work:) And the i5 760 would be your best bet. Its an awesome cpu.
For the power supply, I would recommend a Corsair TX750W or the Corsair GS700W if money is tight... If your really really tight on money you could get away with a 500W but I wouldn't recommend that, as that is the boundary, and your power supply might not be able to handle the load. 600W will be fine but 750W will be perfect,

[Morné]

Thanx slimshaedy

What would you recomend for cooling on a tight budget and what is better for movies and internet browsing hdd or ssd?

[naughty]

ssd drives have a lot of potential speed but the problem for me is that they are generally still small - so IMHO you use those as an O/S drive and then use some bigger HDD's for storage especially for movies - my movies are around 20gb to 40gb at a time cos im storing all my blu-rays in mostly non compressed form so an SSD doesnt really make sense

also if all you have is the mobo what i personally would do is get rid of that and purchase a newer socket 1155 based mobo and buy a sandy bridge cpu - cos those are all pretty much good starting from the entry level i3 2100 all the way up to the i7 2600k and i would also get a Z68 chipset based mobo (as opposed to your current P55)

[Slimshaedy]

For cooling I would recommend an air cooler. There's so many to choose from, I did so much research when I bought mine, and I got the Coolermaster V6 GT, it cost me R590. Then there's the Zalman CNPS10X Extreme, that cooler cools a few degrees better than the coolermaster but it costs R100 more because you have to buy a bracket which will fit your motherboard. And then there's the best cooler available and that's the Noctua NH-D14. It cost around R700, the reason I didn't buy this one is because it doesn't look good with my setup...

As for HDD, for movies and internet browsing a normal sata6gbps drive would suffice. It wouldn't make your movie look any better, your internet would be capped by your connection speed not your hdd. In gaming your games would maybe load a few seconds faster,Windows would also load a few seconds faster. For your uses I wouldn't recommend an SSD bro, you wouldn't fully utilize the speed.

And as naughty suggested, why don't you try get yourself some newer tech? Have you only got the motherboard at this stage? Because the lga1156 is actually obsolete and the newer lga 1155 took its place,and at more or less the same price

[StarBound]

My brother has this board. It can do crossfire but not SLI so if your going for an nvidia card it has to be a single solution. My bros specs are GA-P55A-UD3 with i7 860, 460gtx all running on an odin 575w psu. I'm taking your running on a budget so an ssd is in no way viable to you. Its great for windows boot times but thats it. If your going to load up your drive with movies then a 1tb+ hdd might be the thing your looking at.

A heads up though the board does not support a marvel controller like some other boards which means when you use usb3 or sata6 on it it might affect your graphics card (pci-e x16 becomes x8).

I would also recommend getting a socket 1155 P67 board. You don't need to waste the extra money on a Z67 board as the gaming side of it is indifferent. An i5 2400 would do the trick. If your into overclocking then the K versions would be your answer. The other thing about the P67 chipset it supports usb3 and sata6 off the bat.