Re: Need your valued opinion on this PC deal

Arccos wrote:
On May 13, 4:15 pm, "MetalGuru" <f...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
In the end I decided not to go for it, both Rosewill and MSI are not
great when it comes to reliability so I'll be putting another system
together using different brands like Antec and ASUS or Gigabyte.

If you're still looking, I generally work from the system builds at
Tom's Hardware.
...usually the $500 build and improve some of the parts where the
pricing pinched their performance. In the case of that $500 system, I
would absolutely get 8Gb of ram and a higher wattage PSU.

Yea, I had already looked at those but the $500 system includes an AMD CPU
(which in fact I'm partial to since it usually provides more bang for the
buck compared to Intel) but at this point in time is probably not a good buy
because of its aging socket which will limit future upgrades. It's still
unclear at this point if future AMD processors will be compatible with that
interface (AM3 I think it's called?) but very likely won't.

So I'd rather buy a sandy bridge mobo and maybe throw a lower end i3 on it
(which are fast enough for my present needs) then have an easy upgrade down
the road to an i7 or whatever else is out by then. It's a strategy that's
always served me well in the past.

It sounds like you're reusing your graphics card. Are you going to be
reusing any other components? I usually reuse my hard drive, video
card, DVD drive, Windows license, case, and sometimes the PSU. Saves
quite a bit of money. I think I calculated about $300 or so last time.

No, I'm in the market for a new GPU also - presently leaning towards the
XFX Radeon HD 6870 1GB Video Card but that's still open ended as well.

I do have an extra case and DVD drive lying around but I'll probably just
get everything new for the first time ever since my first 486 PC way back
when :)

Also, if you want to, overclocking CPUs these days is really easy.
Both manufacturers provide software tools that make it easy to do some
basic automatic overclocking with a couple mouse clicks, and even the
pack-in heatsink/fan can handle it. On Tom's advice last time, I got a
3-core CPU and unlocked a 4th successfully with about 5 minutes of
work, saving myself about $50 in the process.

You got lucky, a buddy of mine was unable to unlock the 4th core - it's kind
of a gamble but I'll definitely be trying to squeeze every drop of power I
possibly can out of the components. But OC'ing is kinda far down on my list
of priorities when picking out parts to put a system together.





.

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