*New 5 Year Extreme Machine, Your Opinions?*

[kraiford12]

http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=8899065

5 years is about how long I can put up with the rate at which my computer runs. So about every 5 years or so I build myself a new one. I've put alot of research into this build and am just wondering what your opinions are about the parts/compatability/person experiences/etc.

Any and all comments welcomed, and thanks for the time.

 

[psyco_kitty]

You could go with 6gb of memory for cheaper here.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227477

 

[wathman]

Hm, that's one fancy mouse pad. I got my cheapy mouse pad for $3 at Office Depot and I find it works well enough. Mice have gotten so much better with optical tracking lately that most people can probably do without them.

Microcenter has the Storm Sniper on sale for $119: http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0304046

I'd go with an OCZ Vertex 60GB SSD over the Corsair 64GB. The Corsair is pretty good, and has an extra 4GB, but the Vertex performs better, not as good as the Intel G2's but unlike the G2s, you can actually buy a Vertex now. Microcenter has the 60GB Vertex for $179 after rebate too which is hard to beat:
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0304103

Unless you're a true audiophile and have a nice speaker setup already, I'd skip the Soundblaster. Onboard sound is a pretty good match for most people's computer speaker setups.

In general, I've found MSI boards to be good bargain boards, but sometimes lack features. If you plan to keep this computer around for 5 years, I wouldn't skimp on the motherboard.

The 4890 is a great card, though if you wait a few days you might be able to get a 5XXX series card that will support DX11 soon, this is probably something you'll want .

 

[dndhatcher]

Seems a shame to spend that much money and not get an i5 system. At the very least the i5 should force that old AMD processor's price down if you can wait a couple weeks.

 

[kufan64]

+1 to DND's advice

Also, you don't have much in the way of storage on this computer...
I suppose it depends on what you will use it for, but I'll go ahead and assume you do your share of gaming based on what you're putting inside it...

Your OS will take up anywhere from 5-10GB and games can fill up several GB's a piece with some of the newer ones taking up as much as 10GB or more! Add in your music and other assorted junk and that 64GB will seem awfully small.

Do yourself a favor and grab two 640GB WD Caviar Black's and set them up in RAID 0. That will give you a 2,000% increase in disk space, and they will still be blazing fast.

SSD's still need a little time to mature and get all the bugs worked out IMO. You'll also end up paying approximately $3-4 per 1GB of space for one, as opposed to around 10 cents per 1GB of space for a WD Caviar Black 640GB. That's 30-40 times more expensive for every GB of space for arguable performance gains.

 

[wathman]

While I'm certainly in agreement that we need larger SSDs at better prices, you can make do with just 60-64 GB for your OS partition if you have secondary storage. Personally, I don't play more than maybe 2 or 3 games at a time, if I lose interest in a game I just shelve it, and back up any saves I want to keep. Music, pictures, videos, downloads, and other junk can just as easily be configured to dump into folders located off the C: drive. I switched my primary OS drive over to a SSD and it's been great so far. Everything that doesn't need fast access times I relocated to my 1TB RAID 0 array.

 

[kufan64]

^
I agree 100% with you, but the OP made no mention of any other storage option besides the single 64GB SSD in his list. He could reuse his old HDD(s), or he could have an external drive, and then what you are saying would work very well, but he never mentioned plans to do either. He also said he keeps his computers for about 5 years, which is about as long as I'd trust a HDD to 100% not fail on me, so I wouldn't recommend putting anything too terribly important on the old drive(s).

The main point of my earlier post was just to show the major contrast in the price to space ratio between the two technologies. IMO HDD's will remain the way to go for another couple years until SSD's drop in price, increase in performance, and get all the little bugs and glitches sorted out.

 

[dndhatcher]

Now you also need to revisit your GPU choice and timing with 5870s almost twice as fast as the HD4890 shipping sept 22/23 for $400.

 

[imrul]

cool