Do you think you can do better for the same price?

[chumly]

If so let me know, I'm very open to suggestions.

After some coercion from our good friend, lunyone, I decided to go with this instead of my initial decision:

I put a lot of research and thought into this one, despite the drawbacks of the SLi setup, the benefits for the price are too great. This power supply comes very highly rated. Some of the extras are just personal preference, ie card reader (extra eSATA port) and the additional optical drive (I really like the option of being able to burn two discs or copy disc to disc). I do a lot of video/photo editing as well as gaming. After rebates, I still managed to keep it around $801. There's some good promo's for the month of November as well. I still think I'm going to hold onto my guns until Black Friday. I really want to pull the trigger now though, tell me what you think.

 

[Terry1212]

Don't you need a motherboard?

 

[chumly]

Mrrrrrrr.... yesido. MSI nforce 980a I should pay better attention. There goes another $120

 

[ScrewySqrl]

why not do a single 6870 and go with an AS Rock 870 Extreme 3? that's only $89 Extra.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157198


or a single 6850 and the 870 Extreme 3 is your base cost. the AS Rock board has 16x single, 8x/8x dual so you can add another card easily.

 

[Onus]

That PSU is NOT that great. It isn't "bad," but it's the ModXStreams iirc that were getting good technical reviews, and the others found on dissection to use some substandard parts (like 85C caps instead of 105C). If you don't care to play the rebate game, get a 750W Antec Earthwatts for $90. If you do play the rebate game [and win], a 650W Truepower New will end up costing $75. Each of those has 4 PCIE power connectors; the 650W Earthwatts just has two.

 

[chumly]

That PSU is NOT that great. It isn't "bad," but it's the ModXStreams iirc that were getting good technical reviews, and the others found on dissection to use some substandard parts (like 85C caps instead of 105C). If you don't care to play the rebate game, get a 750W Antec Earthwatts for $90. If you do play the rebate game [and win], a 650W Truepower New will end up costing $75. Each of those has 4 PCIE power connectors; the 650W Earthwatts just has two.

I checked the eggxpert psu hierarchy. That PSU was on the 2nd tier, a couple of positions above the modxstream PSUs. I ended up going with a Radeon 6870 and an 870 gigabyte board, it saved me almost $100 when all was said and done with the combos.

My final computer I bought:

Phenom ii x4 955
gigabyte 870
2x 1tb samsung spinpoint (I got these for $37 each)
550W OCZ Fatal1ty PSU
4gb DDR3 1600 OCZ Stealth (I opted for this because it ended up being like $25 less than the g skills)
Sapphire 6870 GPU
24x dvd burner
912 HAF

TOTAL: $780 (shipped to Hawaii which is usually like $100)

Can't wait to put it together.

 

[mosox]

Looks good. Send some Hula dancers this way.