New Comp - Thoughts?

[Minute]

Saw this Tax, might save you some bank on your memory. Not that memory is expensive anyway, but http://slickdeals.net/permadeal/82348

Btw, if you're going to turn it into a media PC, I suggest looking into XBMC Eden. With the AEON skin & a few pluggins I pretty much never have to leave it. It's a complete interface. I have the XBMC Remote on the Nexus 7 so we can lay on the couch & control the TV, Movies, Music, Youtube, fucking everything right from the tablet like some cray futuristic Minority Report stuff. It's trippy

[Taxious]

Thanks for the suggestion with XBMC. That looks like it'll work out quite nicely, being able to control it with my android. I'm planning on getting a good wireless keyboard / mouse pair for it anyway in case the bf wants to play games using the TV. It's gonna be pretty sweet once I have everything set up in my tiny studio apartment!

[Bahd Zoolander]

You should try putting all the parts together here: http://pcpartpicker.com/

Easy to see all the prices, including things that are on sale, and it generally won't let you put things together that aren't compatible. It'll also show you an estimate of power required so you don't end up with an underpowered power supply. I recommend you stick to a reputable brand for PS. A 500W Seasonic is usually a much better bet than a 700W offbrand.

Edit: Looking at your wish list, you really don't need an i7 to play games, and the rest of the build doesn't support that much processor. You'd be better off with an i5 and bumping up the video card you have on your list a bit. Here's an i5 build I made a little while ago as an example: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/djqn At 4ghz and with several more hard drives than you see on that list it's running great.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

That Core i5 sure looks sweet for notebooks.

[Arathena]

Speaking of, with the profusion of processors these days, how do you tell what's good for what these days? Hoping to be building a PC come spring, will be looking at trying to put together a midrange gaming PC, with the exception that I know for Dorf Fortress, I'll be wanting something that can wail on a single threaded process.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Speaking of, with the profusion of processors these days, how do you tell what's good for what these days? Hoping to be building a PC come spring, will be looking at trying to put together a midrange gaming PC, with the exception that I know for Dorf Fortress, I'll be wanting something that can wail on a single threaded process.

For any single thread, it's mostly about raw clock speed.

[Ddrak]

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html#cpuvalue

[Taxious]

Thanks for the suggestions, I saved about $200 swapping out the HDD, motherboard, and memory.
http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/Publi ... r=28751628

After posting that, I came home and drunk-ordered everything on that current wish list. I realize I could have done things differently but I'm almost up and running after piecing things together this evening.

I did have a little scare where I tugged on a connected SATA cable too hard and it ripped out the dock on the motherboard for it. I could only see two ports total so I was mildly flipping out and kicking myself because I thought I'd ruined one of the two and I would ideally need 3 to handle my SSD, HDD, and DVD drive. Then I remembered Minute's motherboard advice that I took about getting one with more than 2 SATA connections and found more hidden in a weird hidden vertical collection on the mobo that I've never seen before (you plug the cables in perpendicular to the mobo).

Long story short, Minute saved the day by a great suggestion (also saving me money), thanks, gnome!

That motherboard has 2 Sata3, 4 Sata2. This would be ok if you weren't going to add anything else, but it's going to eat a donkey dick if...

[Minute]

Yeah, I'd say about 90% of my online ordering is done impulsively while shitfaced. The upside is what a cool surprise it is when it shows up at your door & you had no idea you ordered it! P.S. Might wanna lay off the roids bro. Hulking out & ripping shit off your motherboard is a nono

[Taxious]

Yeah, I'd say about 90% of my online ordering is done impulsively while shitfaced.

For larger purchases like this, I find I have to be in an altered state to actually press the "order" button. My sober self has issues with spending big dollar amounts. Frugal Taxious is frugal.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

I look at it like the computer is a tool that I use to make my living. If I were a mechanic or plumber I would want the best tools, so what I spend on computer equipment is sacred cow shit in our house. I'll wait for a month ordering something I want from Hong Kong to save 10 bucks, but for the computer stuff I don't dick around. It's also good to have a benefactor. Either way, you gots to compile the csharps.

Speaking of which, I saw that you were planning to go freelance, so I've been waiting for the boss to complain about being behind on stuff so I maybe snag you a few hours here and there. We laid off my friend who had been there for 5 years because he did a sucky job. So now the boss is (really) mad and we are behind. But we do need some help, and he doesn't seem to mind having consultants...

[Taxious]

Speaking of which, I saw that you were planning to go freelance, so I've been waiting for the boss to complain about being behind on stuff so I maybe snag you a few hours here and there. We laid off my friend who had been there for 5 years because he did a sucky job. So now the boss is (really) mad and we are behind. But we do need some help, and he doesn't seem to mind having consultants...

I'm ready whenever Free!

[Taxious]

Wishing I would have done something like this with my case!
http://million-dollar-pc.com/systems-20 ... io/038.htm

[Partha]

So I'm a cheap bastard, and this is what I've put together from various Black Friday deals plus my natural penny pinching self.

Rosewill Thor V2 ATX Case
Rosewill Lightning 1300w PS
MSI 990FXA-GD80V2 Motherboard
AMD FX-8350 Vishera 4.0G Processor
2x 300GB Velociraptors
Sapphire Tech RADEON 7950 (one for now)
32GB G.Skill RAM
Asus VH236H Monitor

Total ran me slightly less than $1500, which is the most I've ever spent on a system. Was nice to have a little 'go-crazy' money for once.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

So I'm a cheap bastard, and this is what I've put together from various Black Friday deals plus my natural penny pinching self.

Rosewill Thor V2 ATX Case
Rosewill Lightning 1300w PS
MSI 990FXA-GD80V2 Motherboard
AMD FX-8350 Vishera 4.0G Processor
2x 300GB Velociraptors
Sapphire Tech RADEON 7950 (one for now)
32GB G.Skill RAM
Asus VH236H Monitor

Total ran me slightly less than $1500, which is the most I've ever spent on a system. Was nice to have a little 'go-crazy' money for once.

Nice, but why the spinning drives and not SSDs? They were practically giving away SSDs for Black Friday.

I bought a laptop on Cyber Monday. Asus notebook with an AMD A8 4500M quad core for $400. So yeah, love for AMD. Got some other good scores too like the Toshiba 1TB USB3 portable drives for $59 at Walmart. I sent the kids to Walmart and said "Now, I'm not saying do whatever it takes to get this list of items.." and they brought them all back haha.

[Minute]

Yeah, should have got you an SSD, at least for your OS bro. Makes a huge difference, even coming from a 10k rpm drive. Also, 32GB of memory? Jesus, why? I would think that could cause some harsh latency issues in seek times. I run 16 with no swap file & still never even come close to peeking.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Running a bunch of virtual machines will chew up all that RAM and all those cores pretty quickly.

[Partha]

Nice, but why the spinning drives and not SSDs? They were practically giving away SSDs for Black Friday.

I bought a laptop on Cyber Monday. Asus notebook with an AMD A8 4500M quad core for $400. So yeah, love for AMD. Got some other good scores too like the Toshiba 1TB USB3 portable drives for $59 at Walmart. I sent the kids to Walmart and said "Now, I'm not saying do whatever it takes to get this list of items.." and they brought them all back haha.

When I started this little project, I found those Velociraptors on sale for $70 each is why. I've also never used an SSD drive and still don't quite trust them. I grabbed quality stuff with deep discounts on selected days to maximize value.

The PS was a $120 discount. The drives were each $80 off. The RAM was $50 off. The case was $60 off. And so on.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Those raptors are badass, they're just not as badass as they used to be, and they're just about obsolete. Though, they would probably outlive most SSDs. Overall it looks like a good machine, though I avoid Rosewill like the plague. My sister had a Rosewill PSU almost burn her house down. I believe the CEO of Newegg ended up personally comping her a Coolermaster. That's just one bad experience of many. I have a pile of broken rosewill crap.

Your CPU is a good centerpiece. It looks like a great chip. I was going to hit my boss up for that same chip but it may or may not drop right into my motherboard. Right now I have a couple year old Phenom II 1100T. So I think my next project is to move all those massive, slow, 5400 RPM so-called "green" drives onto to the network and then hit the boss up for a few SSDs. That should speed my shit up. Papa needs the terabytes, but over gigabit ethernet it's just like having them in your machine /shrug.

I've been an SSD holdout too, but I've come to the conclusion that even if they're disposable it's still not much of a choice because they are just getting so wicked fast. Heh, at least they will be cheap to backup.

[Ddrak]

My biggest issue with SSDs is it means I can't have everything I usually use on a great big C: drive. With that, I love the idea of Apple's Fusion drive, or even using an SSD as a true cache for a spindle (ReadyBoost style, but with 256G instead of 4).

Anyone know any good solutions for asymmetric RAID that's cheaper than Drobo?

Dd