This is from an AMD fan boy, you will probably get a little better performance with an I5 than the AMD fx 8350 but not much. I prefer AMD because it usually a little cheaper than Intel , for comparable performance...........it always depends on what you want to do with it ;)
My question is, with SLI do you need matching cards. I have a MSI 4gig gtx 680 card and was wondering if I could match it with a 2 gig card. I'm more familiar with AMD crossfire than SLI
For the amount of working that you were saying I would check geeks.com for referb computer. You can pick up some cheap debranded or just referbed Dells and HP's
It almost sounds like, the Ram you bought was at a lower voltage that the board put out and fried all the ram..............the other thing is maybe the mosfets have let loose on the mother board I had that happen just recently on a MSI 990fx board with military class parts
I personally have an AMD 8150 and noticed that the 990fx chip-set works better with just 2 sticks of memory in the mother board. If you really need 16 gig of memory and like g.skill go with this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231528
I have a WD wd20ears 2T drive that I broke off the sata connector and was wondering, if it is possible to replace the PCB board on the HD and recover the data on the drive.