I got a weee bit of cash coming in! Want advice!

[werxen]

Hey guys so I have some cash coming in I wanted to get a new build up soon.

Right now as you can see my system is pretty beefy - in my opinion anyway. It does pretty much everything I want although there are a few bog downs.

1) The harddrive I have is a single 500 gig seagate 7200 rpm. It sucks so much ass. Slow, very full etc. I need more space but specifically I need more speed. I wanted to get a couple small SSD drives that will ONLY host the operating system (probably windows 7) and firefox. That is ALL that will go on the SSD so they do not need to be larger than ~ 30 gigs total.

2) The gpu. I cannot max out games like I used to. Puts a chip in my ass... I remember when my 4850 could max out everything but Crysis. At this point I think its a resolution vs. ram issue - I run all my games max resolution (1080) with a 500 meg card. Kinda slows it down. I was thinking 5850.

3) The processor. I was thinking of getting a i3 - 2 cores with hyperthreading = 4 and overclocking the piss out of it.

What do you guys think?

EDIT: btw I was searching theegg for some SSD drives, check out this guys review - made me piss laughing


Pros: WOW! takes about 10 seconds from POST to my desktop. No lag time EVER when doing everything except gaming. no noise!

Cons: my girlfriend doesn't understand why this is so awesome

 

[jimmysmitty]

Well TBH, I think a 30GB SSD would be great. Even just one. It would easily equal the performance of two SATA II drives in RAID0 alone.

The 5850 is a nice jump. That or a 4890. If the 5850 is the same price, grab it. 1GB of memory for the GPU would be great. People always said it was useless but I think its useful now.

CPU wise, well I cannot say. Haven't seen real performance charts yet. Personally I wouldn't go lower than a quad because of the way 7 handles multiple cores. But I can understand if its for budget reasons as very few games actually use more than 2 real cores.

Other than that, this may be the worst place to ask. Be ready to get advice and more than you ask for....

I understand your Con. My fiance never understands why I get excited building a PC.

 

[werxen]

Cmon jimmy I have been here for awhile now lol. I was thinking of 2 SSDs in raid 0 though some people say 1 good enough. Though I want these SSD drives to last for awhile. BTW if I were to go quad should I go i5? Are they rereleasing the i5s in 32nm? I like the 32nm thought - higher overclock, less heat, and less power consumption. I am kind of a green whore.

 

[jimmysmitty]

Lol.... green whore

I would wait for the 32nm i5s. There will be some, absolutely. The 32nm should give a nice OC ability since it also has a second gen HKMG. Haven't seen a release date yet though....

 

[geofelt]

1) Kingston has a 40gb ssd which uses the intel controller and supports trim. I am not certain which model, but reviews were good.
Ditch the ssd/raid-0 idea for the OS. I tried it. the synthetic benchmarks were outstanding, but it did not translate into noticeably better performance. I raided them to gain a single image, not for performance.

2) 5850 is a good value card that should run most games in 1080P well.

3) i3 is not out yet, as far as I know. I think the chip will be great for gamers. Very few games use more than two cores.
I worry that overclocking may be limited because of the integrated graphics. In previous generations motherboards with integrated graphics were poor overclckers because the graphics part could not be overclocked. But, with a turboboost of 3.73, do you really need to overclock? We'll see.

 

[13thmonkey]

I've had 1 30Gb drive for just the OS, and it was horribly limiting, specificaly outlook became an issue as it was comsuming c1GB and you can't move the files.

I've now got two 30Gb's in raid0 win 7 and its lovely, 30Gb is just too close to call. If you've got a lot of RAM then the hiberfil.sys file is also large and locked to the c:

 

[blackhawk1928]

Give me a budget to work with, the usage of the computer like general applications, what kind of performance is important to you and etc. Be specific then we'll narrow down to what are the best parts for your needs, and tell me how much GB's work of Data you have so we know whats the best storage config for ya.