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$400 upgrade build

O

omaticrail

n00b
Joined
Nov 9, 2005
Messages
7
My current machine (custom built) has been a trooper for many years, but it has too little RAM, and the only feasible way to fix that is to replace all the guts.

1) What will you be doing with this PC?
Gaming (primarily FPS and WoW), photo and video editing, browsing (often at same time).
2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?
Aiming for $400, all included. I can afford more, but I'm aiming for bang:buck.
3) Where do you live?
Near Seattle, WA.
4) What exact parts do you need for that budget?
CPU, mobo, RAM, SSD, HSF.
5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing?
CMStacker case (a monster), OCZ Powerstream 600, Benq optical drives (IDE), WD6400AAKS & WD2500KS, 8800 GTS 512, 4 port fan controller & thermal monitor. I have a solid water cooling system (would require new WB), but I'm a bit tired of the maintenance. Will switch to air if it can be done quiet enough.
6) Will you be overclocking?
Undoubtedly. Always have.
7) What size monitor do you have and/or plan to have?
I have a Sun 24" LCD 1920x1200 (60Hz).
8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?
November, 2010.
9) What features do you need in a motherboard?
USB2 (rear and jumpers for front) (USB3 a bonus). SATA 6Gb/s. Firewire (or a free PCI slot). RAID. IDE is a must for my existing optical drives, but they could be replaced if it made monitary sense. Would also like high-end sound with SPDIF 5.1 (optical OK, but coax preferred). Could go with a separate card if space and $ make sense.
10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? If yes, what OS? Is it 32bit or 64bit?
I already own Windows 7 Ultimate 64 (retail boxed).

AMD or Intel, doesn't matter to me. I've had all AMD the last 10 years or so. I believe in having lots of memory, and fast storage, so RAM and an SSD are top priority. From other posts I've started to get an idea of what I want, but this list is mismatched and over the target budget....

163 Combo Biostar A880G+ AM3 (a dinky little thing that'll get lost inside my Stacker) & Phenom II X4 925 Deneb 2.8GHz AM3
125 G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Desktop Memory Model F3-10666CL9D-8GBRL
$134 OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD2-2VTXE60G 2.5" 60GB SATA II
A thus-far-unidentified monster air cooler.....or a cheap waterblock.

I've had good experiences with MWave, and Newegg, but will consider other sources with a solid reputation.
 
You're gonna have to expand your budget man: I highly highly recommend a new PSU if you're planning on overclocking. The Phenom II 925 uses a ton of power when OC'd as well at stock. Your PSU is 5 years old and was only considered decent quality back then. As such, there's a very good chance that PSU is not capable of the full 600W of power. It would not be a surprise at all if that PSU is only capable of 400W of power after all these years. I recommend this as a replacement:
$90 - Corsair 650TX 650W PSU
 
Really? That was one of the few PSUs of the day that reviewers confirmed delivered the full rated wattage. And, what would cause a PSU's max output to decrease?
 
omaticrail said:
Really? That was one of the few PSUs of the day that reviewers confirmed delivered the full rated wattage. And, what would cause a PSU's max output to decrease?
Click to expand...

Yeah I know that. But sadly, those reviews also indicated a design not well designed for longevity. As a result, age and wear have a more noticeable affect on that PSU than others. In other words, it didn't age gracefully.
 
I would agree as well that you should most likely look at a new power supply, those capacitors age and their ability to store energy diminish with time. If you are looking for cheaper, another solid option that is cheaper is the Antec TruePower New 650W at newegg for $65 shipped after 10% off code and Rebate.

$400 is a tough price point to hit for quality SSD, CPU, Mobo with USB 3.0 and SATA 3 and 8GB of RAM and heatsink.

You could try the ASRock 870 EXTREME3 (has USB 3.0 and Sata3) and X4 925 combo for $195. The cooler that comes with the X4 is not bad and I got 3.8Ghz stable at stock voltage when building my friends X4 955 rig last week using that same heatsink and temps were respectable, if you want to add voltage then you will want a better cooler. 8GB or ram is pretty much going to cost you $125+ unless you can find a deal.....and you'll be looking at least at $110 for a 60GB SSD that is decent. So $430-ish not including a new PSU.
 
Well I may just have to go for $500, or skimp on something. I can afford it. I just didn't want to go that high. I can get by on a smaller SSD. It's just for boot/swap and 1 game. All my media and regular apps are on platters. I will say this, however: When even a top of the line PSU is considered insufficient after just 5 years, it's clear there is no point in buying *anything* with the notion of re-use.

Nobody has commented on my choice of components. Does that mean I've nailed down about the best combo for that price? I expected some Intel boys to jump in here and have their say.
 
omaticrail said:
Well I may just have to go for $500, or skimp on something. I can afford it. I just didn't want to go that high. I can get by on a smaller SSD. It's just for boot/swap and 1 game. All my media and regular apps are on platters. I will say this, however: When even a top of the line PSU is considered insufficient after just 5 years, it's clear there is no point in buying *anything* with the notion of re-use.

Nobody has commented on my choice of components. Does that mean I've nailed down about the best combo for that price? I expected some Intel boys to jump in here and have their say.
Click to expand...

There's really no Intel counterpart to that setup. Intel is essentially the mid to high-end market now, not the mid to low-end market where AMD is now dominating. That's really one of the better combo for that price.

I would not go lower than 60GB for the OS SSD especially considering for such a good price. The only reasonable palce you can skimp is the RAM: Drop down to a 4GB set or something.

I recommend this PSU:
$90 - Corsair 650TX 650W PSU
 
There are cheaper ssd's, you can get a kingston 64gb for $100, it performs roughly the same with that drive you picked. My kingston drive was faster in everything except random reads/write than my ocz vertex le (which I did not like at all). With the money you save you can buy a better psu.

Heres a nice 650w xfx powersupply for $60 after rebate that I believe is made by seasonic.

Other than that the combo looks ok, I just wouldn't expect much out of the board. It's pretty basic.
 
munkle said:
There are cheaper ssd's, you can get a kingston 64gb for $100, it performs roughly the same with that drive you picked. My kingston drive was faster in everything except random reads/write than my ocz vertex le (which I did not like at all). With the money you save you can buy a better psu.

Heres a nice 650w xfx powersupply for $60 after rebate that I believe is made by seasonic.

Other than that the combo looks ok, I just wouldn't expect much out of the board. It's pretty basic.
Click to expand...

that is a good PSU, But your suggestion of downgrading high end SSD to a low end one is about complete crap.. Kingston doesn't make a high end SSD & the Sandforce based drive in the OP will blow away anything kingston has on the consumer market to date..
 
bastage said:
that is a good PSU, But your suggestion of downgrading high end SSD to a low end one is about complete crap.. Kingston doesn't make a high end SSD & the Sandforce based drive in the OP will blow away anything kingston has on the consumer market to date..
Click to expand...

The sandforce deal is crap. They are all benchmarks and that's it. My ocz vertex le was supposedly rated at 235mbs SUSTAINED write, I got 160mb tops with an average of 95mb. (ocz told me that those numbers come from benchmarks and aren't speeds you would get with real file transfers) My kingston drive was faster than that, along with reads also. (My kingston drive actually gets it's rated speeds) Benchmarks don't show real world performance. To many people knock the kingston drives and boost the sandforce drives, in reality the sandforces drives really only got the random reads/writes going for them they pretty much blow otherwise. And the quality on my kingston drive was alot better too. I recently got a gskill sandforce drive, has problems with disappearing from the bios, I'm pretty much done with sandforce.

Edit: Also the real world difference between the two drives will be minimal, certainly not $34 worth of performance.
 
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munkle said:
The sandforce deal is crap. They are all benchmarks and that's it. My ocz vertex le was supposedly rated at 235mbs SUSTAINED write, I got 160mb tops with an average of 95mb. MY kingston drive was faster than that, along with reads also. Benchmarks don't show real world performance. To many people knock the kingston drives and boost the sandforce drives, in reality the sandforces drives really only got the random reads/writes going for them they pretty much blow otherwise.
Click to expand...


So uhmmm, you are aware that most writes are completely random in nature? And yea your opinion must be right & not that of virtually EVERY professional reviewer on the interwebs.. Dont get me wrong I am not saying that Kingston SSD's are crap, because kingston did a mighty fine job of printing those stickers & putting them on the typical run of the mill jmicron & toshiba controller drives.. But they are not in the same league as the sandforce from an enthusiast standpoint.

Not to mention that this great price savings you talk about.. Its 5 bucks.. Thats all.. The cheapest Kingston 60+ gb drive on the egg is 124.99 shipped & the cheapest sandforce is 129.99.. & if you want to count the after rebate price you have Kingston at 104.99 to Sandforce at 114.99.. So there is no major savings in changing to a kingston drive & there is no performance advantage.. so again.. its a crap recommendation.
 
bastage said:
So uhmmm, you are aware that most writes are completely random in nature? And yea your opinion must be right & not that of virtually EVERY professional reviewer on the interwebs.. Dont get me wrong I am not saying that Kingston SSD's are crap, because kingston did a mighty fine job of printing those stickers & putting them on the typical run of the mill jmicron & toshiba controller drives.. But they are not in the same league as the sandforce from an enthusiast standpoint.

Not to mention that this great price savings you talk about.. Its 5 bucks.. Thats all.. The cheapest Kingston 60+ gb drive on the egg is 124.99 shipped & the cheapest sandforce is 129.99.. & if you want to count the after rebate price you have Kingston at 104.99 to Sandforce at 114.99.. So there is no major savings in changing to a kingston drive & there is no performance advantage.. so again.. its a crap recommendation.
Click to expand...

$96 for the king drive right here. $116 before rebate.

Most reviewers do benchmarks which like I said is what sandforce is good at. (theres a reason [H] doesn't do benchmarks anymore, the results arent all that real) Even if most writes/reads are random at nature you are not writing/reading huge amounts of them at a time to make a difference which is why the real world performance difference is minimal. If you are writing/reading huge amounts or random data then go ahead and get the sandforce drive but your real world difference will be minimal if you aren't doing huge amounts of random data. Also if you go back and look at reviews depending on the benchmarks then a drive will perform very differently. In atto sandforce is a champ, but in crystaldisk it will be different along with as ssd. Here's an example just look how some of the benchmarks are half the speed of atto.

Unless you actually have owned the two and tested them out then you shouldn't say which is better. Anyways, good night, I am off to bed, I will be back tomorrow for more! :p
 
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munkle said:
$96 for the king drive right here. $116 before rebate.

Most reviewers do benchmarks which like I said is what sandforce is good at. (theres a reason [H] doesn't do benchmarks anymore, the results arent all that real) Even if most writes/reads are random at nature you are not writing/reading huge amounts of them at a time to make a difference which is why the real world performance difference is minimal. If you are writing/reading huge amounts or random data then go ahead and get the sandforce drive but your real world difference will be minimal if you aren't doing huge amounts of random data. Also if you go back and look at reviews depending on the benchmarks the a drive will perform very differently. In atto sandforce is a champ, but in crystaldisk it will be different along with as ssd. Here's an example just look how some of the benchmarks are half the speed of atto.

Unless you actually have owned the two and tested them out then you shouldn't say which is better.
Click to expand...

& you dont buy a SSD for sustained long writes, because if you are doing sustained long writes then you need the capacity of a mechanical drive. & for the reccord there are 5400 RPM mechanical drives that can sustain over 80MB/s of sustained writes. & for 100 bucks you can throw 2x 500 gb Smasung f3's in raid 0 & get nearly 200 MB/s in sustained writes & then have nearly 1TB of data instead of 64gb..

Fact is that SSD's do not sell for there sustained write speeds. They sell based ont here random speeds, because when using the system browsing the net, or whatever else "most" people do on a daily basis everything is all random. Hell currently I have a x25v 40gb that is Way faster to use then ANY mechanical drive in my desktop & several 5400 RPM samsung Eco drives in my Server connected via Gigabit, & I can copy a file from my server to my desktop & it only writes at about 35MB/s which is right where it should.. Going the other way its about 90-100 MB/s because after the transfer starts the samsung eco drives can write faster then my Intel SSD.. Doesnt mean I should drop the SSD & go back to mechanical though, because the random seek times that an SSD excells in are what makes it so much better..

And if you want to leave newegg for pricing the 60GB G.Skill Phoenix pro can be had for 105 shipped elsewhere. But I never recommend buying anything from anywhere else anyway so I only take newegg's prices into consideration.
 
bastage said:
& you dont buy a SSD for sustained long writes, because if you are doing sustained long writes then you need the capacity of a mechanical drive. & for the reccord there are 5400 RPM mechanical drives that can sustain over 80MB/s of sustained writes. & for 100 bucks you can throw 2x 500 gb Smasung f3's in raid 0 & get nearly 200 MB/s in sustained writes & then have nearly 1TB of data instead of 64gb..

Fact is that SSD's do not sell for there sustained write speeds. They sell based ont here random speeds, because when using the system browsing the net, or whatever else "most" people do on a daily basis everything is all random. Hell currently I have a x25v 40gb that is Way faster to use then ANY mechanical drive in my desktop & several 5400 RPM samsung Eco drives in my Server connected via Gigabit, & I can copy a file from my server to my desktop & it only writes at about 35MB/s which is right where it should.. Going the other way its about 90-100 MB/s because after the transfer starts the samsung eco drives can write faster then my Intel SSD.. Doesnt mean I should drop the SSD & go back to mechanical though, because the random seek times that an SSD excells in are what makes it so much better..

And if you want to leave newegg for pricing the 60GB G.Skill Phoenix pro can be had for 105 shipped elsewhere. But I never recommend buying anything from anywhere else anyway so I only take newegg's prices into consideration.
Click to expand...

I'm not saying buy the kingston because it has faster sequential speeds, what I am trying to say is that the sandforce drives aren't all they are cracked up to be and that the real world difference between the kinston drive and sandforce drive is minimal at best and that the kingston drive can in fact be better than a sandforce drive. Also most ssds DO sell based on their sequential read/write, you are not going to get anywhere near the listed speeds with random reads/writes. Go back and look at the gskill drive I posted, the random reads/writes arent near 275mb/s at all. (unless you are saying that buyers don't buy them for the sequential read/write, I am unclear if you meant that or what manufacturers rate the drives at).
 
munkle said:
I'm not saying buy the kingston because it has faster sequential speeds, what I am trying to say is that the sandforce drives aren't all they are cracked up to be and that the real world difference between the kinston drive and sandforce drive is minimal at best and that the kingston drive can in fact be better than a sandforce drive. Also most ssds DO sell based on their sequential read/write, you are not going to get anywhere near the listed speeds with random reads/writes. Go back and look at the gskill drive I posted, the random reads/writes arent near 275mb/s at all. (unless you are saying that buyers don't buy them for the sequential read/write, I am unclear if you meant that or what manufacturers rate the drives at).
Click to expand...

I know that the Manu specs are are inflated in pretty much all cases.. & if it actually was a 35 dollar difference then sure then kingston is probably the way to go. But its actually only a 5-10 dollar difference and the extra performance from the Sandforce drive is worth it.
 
It seems like there's an issue with Sandforce drives having a buggy TRIM and garbage collection when the SSD is filled up:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3997/ocz-revodrive-x2-review/4
The RevoDrive x2 features idle garbage collection, which for most users should be sufficient to keep the drive running at full speed. There is a problem however. Current SandForce drives have a bug that impacts TRIM (and idle garbage collection). If you fill all available NAND on a SandForce drive by writing incompressible data to all user accessible LBAs and all spare area, the drive will no longer be able to restore itself to full performance via TRIM or any idle garbage collection. This impacts the RevoDrive x2 as well as standard SandForce SSDs.
Click to expand...
 
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