- Jun 22, 2010
- 111
- 0
- 18,690
Yes I called myself a "Newb"! This is my first build so I don't know to much about parts other than what the do, but as far as trying to find good products and I'm at a loss. I've been planning this build for a few months now, staying up until 3:00am scowering the web for cheaper better products and reviews so that I can make the best gaming PC I can afford, and with a $2000 USD budget this is what I've come up. I need people to just look over my planed build and see I there are any issues as far as quality or comparability go.
I already have my Optical Drive which is an LG Blu-Ray rewriter which I was given by my dad's friend who said it didn't work on his computer and couldn't send it back, he didn't give me the driver CD but that would most likely be out of date so I can easily get them from their website. I did try to find this for sale online to get an idea about how much it would cost new and I found it listed on tigerdirect for $149.99.
The first part of my build is the monitor, now I've already but this to replace my anciant TV but I figured I'd put it out there for refrence.
Note: I plan on using a triple monitor display so I will most likely be buying 2 more after my actual build.
The monitor I bought was the ViewSonic VX2439wm 24" class 1080p full HD monitor with HDMI input. The monitor cost me $199.99 without Tax or S&H.
The second part that I plan on buying is the case. I want a full tower case so that I have room for what ever the future may bring as far as upgrades. I've been told off to Thermaltake products by a few people, although for the price I found I'm willing to give it a try.
The case I'm planning on buying, but still a possibilty of changing, is a refurbished Thermaltake Spedo Advanced package. I found a refurb on Thermaltake's website for $99.99, which is about half the price as a brand new case.
Have any of you used this case before? What are your opinions, good deal? Bad product?
The third component I plan on buying is my motherboard. I don't know much about this motherboard's quality but it seems to be getting good reviews.
The motherboard I am planing to buy is the Asus Crosshair IV Formula board. This motherboard is a socket AM3 and has USB 3.0 and SATA 6 which is somthing that I highly prefer so that I can easily accomidate future tech. This motherboard costs $299.99 which is at the top of my budget for a motherboard.
My fourth purchase shall be the CPU, and seeing how my motherboard is a socket AM3 my CPU obviously must be as well. I plan on going with an AMD Phenom II X4 970 Black Edition Quad Core. As far as the CPU is concerned It had to have a stock clock speed of at least 3.2Ghz in order for the blu-Ray burner I was given to work. Now I havn't been able to find anything that would back up that report, but seeing how I got the drive soley because it wouldn't work on my dad's friend's computer. This CPU has a stock clock speed of 3.50Ghz and only cost $189.99 as compared to an Intel core i7 extreme that cost roughly $600.00 for a 3.20Ghz, hence why I'm going with AMD.
Have any of you used this CPU? Is it a good buy for the price?
My fifth part that I buy will be the PSU. I've been told that a 750w power supply would do me fine, but I felt like going for a little bit more just in case. I was originaly going to buy the NZXT's 850w power supply for about $20.00 more than the 750w, that is until I managed to come across a 950w for a middle price. I plan on going with the Corsair TX950w power supply for $169.99.
Is this price to cheap for a 950w PSU? Is this PSU any good? Should I go with one of the NZXT power supplies?
After I buy the PSU I plan on buying the audio card.
As far as audio goes I just care that it is atleast 7.1 channel and sounds good. After spending a few days looking I came back to my original option, and after hearing all the good reviews for Creative labs I made my decision. I will be going with a refurbished Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-FI Titanium Champion Edition for $99.99. Although I would prefer a MIDI port to hook up my keyboard to I couldn't find one that came with a 5.25" drive bay audio interface which I wanted more than the MIDI input (I like how it looks)
Are any of you currently running this sound card? How does it work? Is it safe to go with a refurbished version as aposed to a new one? How is the audio interface? Is it worth getting over the non champ ( no interface)?
RAM is a vitally important peice for a computer to run. The motherboard I am buying is able to support 16Gbs of RAM with 4GBs pure slot of GDDR3. I can't afford to go with the full 16Gbs so I plan on going with 8Gbs. I found numerouse (spell check) sets of 8Gb of RAM but I settled with the OCZ OCZ3G1333LV86L for $189.99.
Graphics card will be next. The graphics card causes the most issue for me at the moment. My motherboard supports Crossfire, I don't know about SLI, so I plan on going with an ATI card. After spending days looking for a good GPU that fit my budget I came up with a few options. For a little more than $300.00 I could go for an XFX Radeon 5870, but after looking around a littile more I found an XFX 5770 for about half the price, I figured I could go with 2 5770s in a crossfire setup for less than one 5870, however I'm not sure if the boost in power from running 2 5770s is worth the few bucks I would save and if that wasn't hard enough just recently I found an XFX 5830 for about $30.00 more than the 5770, I then figured if I ran 2 of these instead of the 5770s that they would be more powerful than a single 5870 buth this would cost me more than the 5870 but no so much more that I couldn't afford it. This is really were I need help. Any information about any of these options is welcomed, I would greatly apriciate it if you could tell me the power gain in running any of the cards in crossfire and then compare to the stock speeds of it's single card form and compared to the other cards.
I plan on having a seprate HDD for my OS. As much as I would love to utilize the speed of an SSD they are currently just out of my price range. Since the OS is using only one HDD I wanted it to be fast so preferably 10,000 rpm, although I am willing to sacrafice 2,600 rpm for a cheaper price, the hard drive doesn't need to much space, just enough for the OS, and possibly for 2 more OS systems if I find the need to run Linux and a way to install OS lepard. I figured 300gbs would be more than enough and at $39.99 it seemed like a good deal. I unfortunatlt did not right down the rpm or the memory space, so I could be wrong with 300gbs. The Seagate Barracuda was my choice.
As for actual memory space I wanted plent of space. I was originally going to go with two 1.5Tb HDDs, but after looking further I found a set of four 1Tb HDDs in a set, these drives are OEM packaging and only have a 5400rpm speed, however this gave me the idea to get those instead and run them in a RAID 5 or 1+0 format increase the speed. The 1.5Tb drives were about $87.00 each and had a speed of 7400rpm, the four pack cost $239.99 for all for which is about $59.99 each. I'm not sure which is a better idea, any opinions?
At this point I should be done with all necessary parts and there for are only left with finding a keyboard and a mouse. I've been looking at several different keyboards, namly the Logitech g19 which is about $180.00, the Logitech g15 which is about $100.00 and the Razor Lycosa. Seeing as how the keyboards have so many different features it really comes down to price and personal opinion. At the top of my price range is the G19 which caught (spell check) my eye with it's full color LCD display and the many "G" keys. At the lower end of my price range is the Lycosa which i've heard nothing but good reviews about but it lacks the LCD that I truly love. However I did find a possible compramise between price and luxury features with the G15 which is less than the G19 but more than the Lycosa and still has the LCD though not full color, and I beleive the second variation has USB 2.0 as opposed to the original, but not sure.
Which keyboard would you guys recommend?
As for the mouse I can't fine to many the really stick out. In my research I found out about the Cyborg R.A.T. Gaming mouse series which had a few custom butons but the main feature was that it could be custom sized in a sense, with out having to buy a seperate size, better worded you can adjust it's shape and size in seconds. If I went with the R.A.T I would be going with the R.A.T 7 due to the fact that it has the most features of the series minus the wireless, which although nice to have it would tack on alot more money, the R.A.T 7 costs $99.99. Another mouse I was looking at was the Razor Naga which had an aditional 12 custom buttons on what they called a thumb pad, it also had enough memory to store 10 different macro layouts for different games. The Naga cost $89.99 but is coming out with a new wireless hybrid version soon called the Naga Epic for about $120.00 which would be cheaper than the wireless R.A.T 9 and still not brake the bank, although as I mentioned wireless is merely a luxury and not a necessity.
I already have my Optical Drive which is an LG Blu-Ray rewriter which I was given by my dad's friend who said it didn't work on his computer and couldn't send it back, he didn't give me the driver CD but that would most likely be out of date so I can easily get them from their website. I did try to find this for sale online to get an idea about how much it would cost new and I found it listed on tigerdirect for $149.99.
The first part of my build is the monitor, now I've already but this to replace my anciant TV but I figured I'd put it out there for refrence.
Note: I plan on using a triple monitor display so I will most likely be buying 2 more after my actual build.
The monitor I bought was the ViewSonic VX2439wm 24" class 1080p full HD monitor with HDMI input. The monitor cost me $199.99 without Tax or S&H.
The second part that I plan on buying is the case. I want a full tower case so that I have room for what ever the future may bring as far as upgrades. I've been told off to Thermaltake products by a few people, although for the price I found I'm willing to give it a try.
The case I'm planning on buying, but still a possibilty of changing, is a refurbished Thermaltake Spedo Advanced package. I found a refurb on Thermaltake's website for $99.99, which is about half the price as a brand new case.
Have any of you used this case before? What are your opinions, good deal? Bad product?
The third component I plan on buying is my motherboard. I don't know much about this motherboard's quality but it seems to be getting good reviews.
The motherboard I am planing to buy is the Asus Crosshair IV Formula board. This motherboard is a socket AM3 and has USB 3.0 and SATA 6 which is somthing that I highly prefer so that I can easily accomidate future tech. This motherboard costs $299.99 which is at the top of my budget for a motherboard.
My fourth purchase shall be the CPU, and seeing how my motherboard is a socket AM3 my CPU obviously must be as well. I plan on going with an AMD Phenom II X4 970 Black Edition Quad Core. As far as the CPU is concerned It had to have a stock clock speed of at least 3.2Ghz in order for the blu-Ray burner I was given to work. Now I havn't been able to find anything that would back up that report, but seeing how I got the drive soley because it wouldn't work on my dad's friend's computer. This CPU has a stock clock speed of 3.50Ghz and only cost $189.99 as compared to an Intel core i7 extreme that cost roughly $600.00 for a 3.20Ghz, hence why I'm going with AMD.
Have any of you used this CPU? Is it a good buy for the price?
My fifth part that I buy will be the PSU. I've been told that a 750w power supply would do me fine, but I felt like going for a little bit more just in case. I was originaly going to buy the NZXT's 850w power supply for about $20.00 more than the 750w, that is until I managed to come across a 950w for a middle price. I plan on going with the Corsair TX950w power supply for $169.99.
Is this price to cheap for a 950w PSU? Is this PSU any good? Should I go with one of the NZXT power supplies?
After I buy the PSU I plan on buying the audio card.
As far as audio goes I just care that it is atleast 7.1 channel and sounds good. After spending a few days looking I came back to my original option, and after hearing all the good reviews for Creative labs I made my decision. I will be going with a refurbished Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-FI Titanium Champion Edition for $99.99. Although I would prefer a MIDI port to hook up my keyboard to I couldn't find one that came with a 5.25" drive bay audio interface which I wanted more than the MIDI input (I like how it looks)
Are any of you currently running this sound card? How does it work? Is it safe to go with a refurbished version as aposed to a new one? How is the audio interface? Is it worth getting over the non champ ( no interface)?
RAM is a vitally important peice for a computer to run. The motherboard I am buying is able to support 16Gbs of RAM with 4GBs pure slot of GDDR3. I can't afford to go with the full 16Gbs so I plan on going with 8Gbs. I found numerouse (spell check) sets of 8Gb of RAM but I settled with the OCZ OCZ3G1333LV86L for $189.99.
Graphics card will be next. The graphics card causes the most issue for me at the moment. My motherboard supports Crossfire, I don't know about SLI, so I plan on going with an ATI card. After spending days looking for a good GPU that fit my budget I came up with a few options. For a little more than $300.00 I could go for an XFX Radeon 5870, but after looking around a littile more I found an XFX 5770 for about half the price, I figured I could go with 2 5770s in a crossfire setup for less than one 5870, however I'm not sure if the boost in power from running 2 5770s is worth the few bucks I would save and if that wasn't hard enough just recently I found an XFX 5830 for about $30.00 more than the 5770, I then figured if I ran 2 of these instead of the 5770s that they would be more powerful than a single 5870 buth this would cost me more than the 5870 but no so much more that I couldn't afford it. This is really were I need help. Any information about any of these options is welcomed, I would greatly apriciate it if you could tell me the power gain in running any of the cards in crossfire and then compare to the stock speeds of it's single card form and compared to the other cards.
I plan on having a seprate HDD for my OS. As much as I would love to utilize the speed of an SSD they are currently just out of my price range. Since the OS is using only one HDD I wanted it to be fast so preferably 10,000 rpm, although I am willing to sacrafice 2,600 rpm for a cheaper price, the hard drive doesn't need to much space, just enough for the OS, and possibly for 2 more OS systems if I find the need to run Linux and a way to install OS lepard. I figured 300gbs would be more than enough and at $39.99 it seemed like a good deal. I unfortunatlt did not right down the rpm or the memory space, so I could be wrong with 300gbs. The Seagate Barracuda was my choice.
As for actual memory space I wanted plent of space. I was originally going to go with two 1.5Tb HDDs, but after looking further I found a set of four 1Tb HDDs in a set, these drives are OEM packaging and only have a 5400rpm speed, however this gave me the idea to get those instead and run them in a RAID 5 or 1+0 format increase the speed. The 1.5Tb drives were about $87.00 each and had a speed of 7400rpm, the four pack cost $239.99 for all for which is about $59.99 each. I'm not sure which is a better idea, any opinions?
At this point I should be done with all necessary parts and there for are only left with finding a keyboard and a mouse. I've been looking at several different keyboards, namly the Logitech g19 which is about $180.00, the Logitech g15 which is about $100.00 and the Razor Lycosa. Seeing as how the keyboards have so many different features it really comes down to price and personal opinion. At the top of my price range is the G19 which caught (spell check) my eye with it's full color LCD display and the many "G" keys. At the lower end of my price range is the Lycosa which i've heard nothing but good reviews about but it lacks the LCD that I truly love. However I did find a possible compramise between price and luxury features with the G15 which is less than the G19 but more than the Lycosa and still has the LCD though not full color, and I beleive the second variation has USB 2.0 as opposed to the original, but not sure.
Which keyboard would you guys recommend?
As for the mouse I can't fine to many the really stick out. In my research I found out about the Cyborg R.A.T. Gaming mouse series which had a few custom butons but the main feature was that it could be custom sized in a sense, with out having to buy a seperate size, better worded you can adjust it's shape and size in seconds. If I went with the R.A.T I would be going with the R.A.T 7 due to the fact that it has the most features of the series minus the wireless, which although nice to have it would tack on alot more money, the R.A.T 7 costs $99.99. Another mouse I was looking at was the Razor Naga which had an aditional 12 custom buttons on what they called a thumb pad, it also had enough memory to store 10 different macro layouts for different games. The Naga cost $89.99 but is coming out with a new wireless hybrid version soon called the Naga Epic for about $120.00 which would be cheaper than the wireless R.A.T 9 and still not brake the bank, although as I mentioned wireless is merely a luxury and not a necessity.
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