New PC - Thoughts?

[verm]

Honestly, I don't NEED to upgrade, since every game I play (GTA IV being the exception) plays maxed out just fine. But I have an addiction for putting these things together. Plus I want to move up to Win 7 64-bit (I made sure I grabbed a license before I graduated) and give my brother all my old parts so he can start playing the stuff I play now (Quake III and Unreal Tourney get old after a while...). Right now I have a Athlon X2 4800+, Radeon X1950XTX, 4 gigs of DDR PC400.

Attached (PDF) are three different builds I've priced out. The idea is getting the best bang for the buck. I'm not going to spend another $700 for an i980X just for bragging rights. If anyone has had experience with these parts, I'd love to hear your thoughts on cost vs. actual benefit. Keep in mind I want to get another 3.5 to 4 years out of this, but leave room for upgrades along the way. I only buy new games occasionally and play ~5-10 hrs/wk. I think the performance build is gonna be the way to go here from a performance and expandibility perspecitve.

NOTE: The fans and the power supply are actually to upgrade an old case so that I can throw my old parts in there. The hard drive is going to be paired up with my existing WD5000AAKS to put into RAID 0.

[Fraggle79]

I'd say your midrange setup looks good, however i know I would never trust a $10 psu in my pc.

With the extra cash saved how about a nice sound card?  X-fi cards sound fantastic.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829102024&cm_re=x_fi-_-29-102-024-_-Product

[verm]

well the PSU is worth $120 new and the guy said he's selling it b/c he bought a higher wattage for his new rig. for $10 i'll give it a shot. the one it's replacing is still good so i can roll back my brother's comp to that if need be (it's not for my pc).

I am tempted by the sound card, but I've still got an SB x-gamer live! 5.1 card from forever ago that works great and does wonders for me. i got it to work back when i tried vista out for a bit, so hopefully i can get it working for win7 too. if not, i'd probably but a new X-fi no matter what system i bought. that's just a bonus for me.

[Luggage]

2 suggestions: consider getting an NVIDIA card -- had much better luck with them than ATI.  My knoweledge is ~1.5 years old and I know that makes me ancient but back then ATI cards had all kinds of driver issues that led to sub-optimal perfomance vs. what they were capable of achieving on paper.

Second suggestion is to get 2 hard drives to run in RAID 0 (or >=3 if you really want data security) -- has a big impact on program load-up times...perhaps a small overall benefit but a pet peeve of mine.

I won't give you component-specific advice since has been too long since I looked at this stuff but if objective is to do the build as a hobby, then get a mid-range system that is easily overclockable -- can lead to hours of tinkering and fun to get best performance out of the system for low $.  Of course, you need to be comfortable enough to tinker (I did this with first build as a way to learn about computers) and ok with losing a couple hundred bucks on the off chance you blow something up (but the mid-range price tag should help give you cushion for disasters).

I presume you already have a decent case?

Also make sure to spend some money on decent CPU cooling paste, etc. <-- this is obviously small potatotes compared to rest of they system which is likely why you didn't put on the list.

[verm]

Already considered all of these actually... been doing custom builds since '99 and do HEAVY research every time. Out of all my builds, I actually had the hardest time deciding between ATI and NVIDA this time around. But, $ to performance, it just seems like the 5850 is the way to go for what I want to do, and then still have plenty of room to OC (these cards can do 5870 performance with little extra effort). I've read the latest drivers have been steering clear of the earlier issues last year, so hopefully that won't be a problem.

I am in fact doing RAID 0 (I have the same pet peeve). I already have one WD5000AAKS, so this $50 will be to get the second and stripe. I've already got a backup solution in place so I'm not going to spend the $ for RAID 5 or 0+1. And absolutely, my goal is to get a solid mid-range case (as top-notch would easily be $2000+) that can be feasible to just upgrade down the road instead of re-build. That's why I'm leaning towards the i7-930 rig. The X58 architecture has a lot less limitations, and the CPU, GPU, and RAM can all be OCed hard w/o issue.

Yea, I do have a HUGE case with a ton of case fans, a solid 750W PSU, and i have Antec's silver thermal compound which is supposed to be some of the best stuff you can use. So yea, I think ahead... I think I just get paranoid that I'm missing something so I ask EVERYONE I know for thoughts.

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