Gaming / VM rig

Approximate Purchase Date: Next 2-3 weeks


Budget Range: 2000-ish


System Usage from Most to Least Important: Gaming, Virtualization/Lab, Movies


Parts Not Required: Only building a tower.


Preferred Website(s) for Parts: newegg, ncix


Country of Origin: Canada


Parts Preferences: i5-2500k, generally ATI/AMD but whatever works best. No point putting fanboy ahead of performance.


Overclocking: Maybe leaning yes, but not hard


SLI or Crossfire: Maybe



Additional Comments:


Hello,

PC I am looking to put together will be used primarily for gaming, and for running virtualized environment as I work in IT and it will be my home lab system (but probably no more than 8 or 10 VMs at a time, and certainly not all under heavy load simultaneously).

I am just starting to look at parts but my initial starting point is:

ECS Black Deluxe P67H2-A2 - $195
Intel Core i5-2500k - $230
SAPPHIRE 100312SR Radeon HD 6950 2GB - $285
16 GB DDR3-1600

I figure the case, powersupply, and cooling solution can be sized to fit the rest of the components. For storage I am looking at getting an SSD w/ two traditional HDD providing bulk storage.

For overclocking, I'm not sure how far I will pursue it, but I don't plan on touching the bclk values - I'm not willing to risk the data corruption/loss.

Basically, the ECS board got chosen from what I saw in the $150-200 P67 review they did recently, as it supports the best feature set, such as RAID even on the eSATA drives, which is important to me. The ability to team my NICs is great as well, as I expect I'll likely have a network storage
solution set up sometime in the intermediate future, and it would help when transferring images of VMs and backups over the network.

The i5-2500K got chosen as it seemed the optimal price-perf point - past there is only the i7-2600k at $100 more / 145% the cost of the 2500k.

The Radeon 6950 is nothing real firm. I generally prefer ATI (now AMD, I guess) cards, and had seen you can BIOS flash them into a 6970, but there seemed to be some confusion as well about whether it was this card or the 6850, or is it both? Not sure whether eventually I'll wind up going with a 2-card setup.

Nothing on this list is set in stone, I only started picking out components a couple days ago as a rough idea.

Oh. I have an existing 5.1 sound system, so I guess I need support for that too.

Thanks for any help and advice on this.

-Mike