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$500 and $1000 Builds

Yes, get Windows 7 Home Premium. (And yes, that is a great promo code. So great, in fact, I'm using it myself. :D )
 
I just ordered the 128gb SSD from Amazon for $100. I had two gift cards so I only had to pay $20 out of pocket.

Was just curious, does anyone use camelcamelcamel? I got a price notification for the GTX 670 for $370 on NewEgg. But...it shows it as $420.

We're getting there. Few more weeks and I'll be rockin' a new system!
 
I thought you had nearly everything by now!

What do you have left to buy (and when)?
 
Motherboard, GPU, Processor, and cooling unit. Story is my girlfriend's birthday is in a few days. Going to take her out and pick something out at the jewelry store. The following week I'll pick up the remaining items I need. So we're talk two or three weeks.
 
Are you going to buy them all at once or individually depending on when you have the available funds?
 
Depends on what's out there with prices. Want to stick with using Amazon and Newegg. I'll compare how much each thing is. But I'll probably order all within a few days or the same night.
 
Wow this setup list is looking really nice. Looking forward to hearing about the final build. :)
 
Might be a bit better than anticipated. I haven't started into the $500 that was given to me yet. In essence, I have about $800 - $900 to spend on GPU, CPU, and Mobo. I'm looking at 4gb 670s and perhaps an i7. I know I don't need it now, but five years from now it may be a good investment.
 
i7? Do you need hyperthreading? Equipment to be good performance five years from now is like trying to see if anything of the Conroe era is considered good performance now.
 
Hrm. Not really looking into the hyperthreading. Outside of that, there really is no benefit from the i5 to i7 huh? You know what, I'll do the i5 and with the extra I'll be saving I'll get another HDD in the future.
 
Okie doke, final decision tonight.

15pmmn5.png


Looking good? I can afford a 4g GPU and an i7. But if you think its absolutely not necessary for gaming I'll go with the above picture. Not going SLI and not looking to OC.
 
these days you really dont need AS5, for the 1-2 change you might get in a few months on an i3...
 
on an i3...ya, considering how many hours it takes for AS5 to properly set...
 
Alai said:
My apologies for such a rude question, but are you on drugs?
Click to expand...

Nah he's just a tad off today:

AS5 = Arctic Silver 5: popular 3rd party thermal paste that people use when they reseat the HSF on their CPU

1-2 change: (guess here) how much lower in degrees the CPU will get after putting on AS5

Though not sure how he ended up with an i3.
 
Ohhh... He saw the initial post and made a comment on it. I forgot OP had AS5 in the initial list.

I just saw i3 and then AS5 (which hadn't been mentioned at all for about two/three pages so I forgot about it) and I thought he had gone crazy.
 
So here is what the final build looks like:

Antec 900 Case

Gigabyte GA G75 Motherboard

GTX 670 FTW GPU

G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB RAM

Intel i5 3470 CPU

Cooler Master Hyper 212 CPU Cooler

DVD Drive

Windows 7 64-Bit OEM

SeaSonic X Series X650 Gold PSU

Crucial M4 128GB SSD

Western Digital Red 3TB HDD

Think that's everything. The prices there varied from what I paid. A lot of the stuff I got was on sale or had some promotion. Overall, unstoppable PC. I tried and got hooked on Battlefield 3. I play that non stop on ultra graphics with no FPS hits at all.

Few snags I did hit though. My old drives were IDE. Had to drive my ass 45m away to Staples in hopes they had a CD drive for sale so I could install windows. Only thing they had was an external drive for $60. I bought it, installed Win7 with it, and drove all the back to return it. And my motherboard only came with two SATA cables. I figured anything that uses a SATA drive would come with the cables. Fortunately I found a small computer shop in town (literally a 10'x10' room) that had some cables kicking around. I had no idea this place even existed. So I managed to get the WD HDD and the DVD drive wired in.

Had a scare last night. My 3TB arrived and I set the case on the table. wired in the new drive. Did a bit of wire management. Made sure everything looked alright. Go to click it on, and the fans start for a half a second then shut off. Everything just clicks on for a millisecond then off it went. I figured I did something to my motherboard or something. So, I take it all apart again. Put it all back together. Same thing. Check everything over again, the CPU cable on my PSU came unplugged. Plugged it back in, and we're good to go.

But there it is. Hoping this build will last several years like my previous Q6600/8800GTS build did. With another case and another copy of Win7, I could have a second shitty computer. No idea what I could do with it. But everything works. Not going to play any of today's games. Maybe a media center or something. Who knows.

I thank everyone for your help. :)
 
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I used parts of my older PC for a Frankenstein HTPC setup previously. Now that I'm going HD, I built an HTPC from scratch. Now I'm left with an old pieced together HTPC that I'm not sure what I want to do with it.

Seriously thinking about setting is up as a server to run services, one of which will be a Caching proxy server on my network. Since it's about to start getting used heavily transferring HD video to the HTPC and other computers on my network.
 
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