6 replies to this topic

[Athin]

Held off on building my new PC till I could raise my spending limit, and this is what I have in mind.

CPU:

Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz

-$230

PSU:

CORSAIR Enthusiast Series TX650 V2 650W

-$90

GPU:

Radeon 7970 3 GB

-$550 /want

HDD:

Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1 TB

-$134

MoBo:

ASRock Z68

-$122

RAM:

Corsair Vengeance Blu 8 GB (2X4 GB)

-$50

CPU cooler:

COOLER MASTER Hyper 212

-$30

DVD:

Asus 24xDVD±RW Drive

-$24

Case:

Corsair Special Edition White Graphite Series 600T

-$170

I'd like to remain around $1500, so give me your damn opinions!

[Cat]

dat case spensive

[Jettfaxi]

It all looks good, personally though I would swap out the ram just because the corsair RMA process is a ballsack if you ever need to make a claim on it. Generally takes well over a month to get your ram back. The 7970 is an awesome card, it's just WAY overkill for any games that are out right now. The 6950 I have can run anything out right now at max settings with no slowdown, and is ~$200 cheaper. Another thing, Visiontek = bad, try to stick with MSI, Asus, Gigabyte or Sapphire for ATI cards. Waiting for a month would also be a good idea, so that the card manufacturers can start making their own cards, as opposed to the reference model first run ones, if only because the coolers on the reference models are always loud as fuck. Also, hard drive prices are actually starting to drop, if you can wait a month or two, the price on that drive might actually begin to approach sanity.

[Athin]

I haven't really heard much negative talk about Visiontek cards aside from them not holding true on their lifetime warranty on older cards. I'll look into that further.

Also, is that PSU going to be sufficient for this build?

[Athin]

I also considered

SSD:

OCZ Agility 3 AGT3-25SAT3-60G 2.5" 60GB

-$90

However, I hear that the difference between having a SSD for the OS and a HDD is like the difference between a minivan and a Smart car with a rocket on the back that runs for five seconds before it burns out. SSDs will improve boot time and program loading time, but they generally won't improve performance in normal use once your programs are running. But I hear conflicting opinions on the subject.

[Jettfaxi]

SSDs are awesome for boot drives, on a fresh install, windows 7 goes from totally off to the desktop in about 15 seconds. It's also great for loading games off really fast, but that's it. Just loads quicker. The tiny performance boost is not worth the cost right now. As for the power supply, I ran your stuff through antec's power supply calculator (which is down right now, but is also hosted here: http://extreme.outer...n.com/PSUEngine) and it came out to 482w, or just under 75% load. This is just fine with what you have there now, including the SSD. However, If you are planning on doing any additions later, you may want to consider beefing it up a bit.

[Athin]

I might up the power supply for future expansion but I just wanted to make sure that was sufficient for this. Thanks for the replies Jett!