New High End PC for Dad

[toddrbridges66]

After reading many threads on the forum it appears that I am seriously in the overkill category. If that is in fact the case by how many $? I am frankly not interested in saving $200 at the risk of not being able to turn this into a high end gaming PC to give to my son for his birthday a few months down the road. Now if the parts and pieces I have or are considering will not work for a heavily based Home Theatre PC that is a whole other story. If I am spending $500+ too much then I would certainly be willing to scale down and build a PC that I will keep as a HTPC. Any of the parts (less the case) I am willing to hold onto for a soon upcoming project. In other words if you tell me to hold onto everything and buy completely different things for "Dad's" high end HTPC I would do it. Bottom line I am looking for some direction. I thought I was on a reasonable path until I started reading.

1) What will you be doing with this PC?
Heavy Home Theater (lots of streaming), Photo & Video Editing (Not real high end), Some gaming, Web Surfing
2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?
Wow tough question. I can spend plenty but don't have to.
3) Where do you live? US
4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, RAM, case, etc.
Motherboard, CPU, RAM,
5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing?
Have been buying parts as I found some good deals (NOTE: I will be building a fairly high end PC for my Daughter soon and am willing to rat-hole parts for that project if they don't fit this project.)
Coolermaster HAF932 Full Tower Case (will use this for this project for sure)
Cooler Master Silent Pro M 850W Power Supply
EVGA GeForce GTX 470 (Fermi) 1280MB GDDR5 SLI
Lite-On iHAS524-98 Internal DVD Writer
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64BIT
HP BD240I Blu Ray Combo Drive
2 X Western Digital-Caviar Black 1 TB (WD10000LSRTL)
1 X Western Digital 500 GB WD5000AAKS Caviar Blue
6) Will you be overclocking?
HUH? LOL Prob not.
7) What size monitor do you have and/or plan to have?
Have a 24” monitor and 55” LCD 120mhz refresh 1080p
8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC? Now
9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? USB 3.0? SATA 6Gb/s? Etc. That is what I am here for what do I need? What are luxuries?
10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? If yes, what OS? Is it 32bit or 64bit? Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64BIT

Considering:
1. GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD9 LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 XL ATX Intel Motherboard / Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield 3.06GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor COMBO $739.99 + a little shipping
2. EVGA X58 Classified 4-Way SLI Motherboard / Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield 3.06GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor COMBO $579.98 + a little shipping
3.6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Low Voltage

 

[QuiteSufficient]

That is obnoxiously overkill, a $400 complete AMD-based tower would handle everything he needs to do, and even that would be overkill.

The term "home theater" PC usually means very low-end/power-conscious. It does not take high-end hardware to serve this function.

I would save that 470 GTX for your son, unless your dad plans to play a lot of FPS games at max settings. A 470 will clobber just about any game at max settings at 1920.

You don't need Raid (but I think just about any board you buy now has software raid). Just about any board has firewire now. You don't need SLI, but its not terrible to have if you ever think you would buy a second card. USB 3.0 is nice if you regularly transfer things to flash drives or USB back up drives. You don't need SATA 6.0 for standard (non-SSD) hard drives.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...72&cm_re=amd_athlon_ii-_-19-103-872-_-Product
$74 processor

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...0&cm_re=gigabyte_880gm-_-13-128-440-_-Product
$95 motherboard (you could really spend as little as $40 and be fine for this use)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...cm_re=corsair_xms3_4gb-_-20-145-260-_-Product
4gb of reliable memory is more than enough for this use. If you really want to be safe you could go 6gb.

I use this PSU a lot, its great for the price
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817171046&Tpk=cooler master 460rs

Use your case and whatever hard drives you want. You could put the 470 in that combination above and it would plow through any game, or keep that for your son and get something like

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130564
for your dad

Or even

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...cm_re=gigabyte_450_gts-_-14-125-342-_-Product
(out of stock right now)

 

[sugosugita]

^ +1. a home theater PC is like the antithesis of high-end. So don't get all crazy. Of course if you're on of those people then by all means.....