Time to put together a new computer and I'm not entirely aware of all the products out there. I primarily use the computer for gaming but I use the computer for office applications as well. I was also looking at upgrading to 24" monitor over the one I have. My old computer had ASUS as the motherboard and I trust the quality of their products. A friend also had mentioned that there were solidstate harddrives on the market I'm curious about the performance in comparison to the Western Digital Velociraptor. What is your opinion on those. I anticipate spending around $2000 to $2500 for this little project.
1.) ASUS used to be a great board...but their quality has dropped off sharply recently. I would recomend DFI or Gigabyte now. 2.) Solidstate hard drive are slightly faster for random reads, but are generaly slower for sustained reads(the reads that take the longest and that you use the most). For that kind of build price, you can easily get into a good RAID-10 setup using multiple cheap hard drives (I like the seagate 1.5TB's myself) this will give you a lot more space, faster sustained reads (games load screens will go faster), and also relaibility (if a hard drive fails, you do not loose data). If you don't know much about RAID, wikipedia has a great article on it. Also, there are non-solidstate drives that are even faster than the Velociraptor series, these use SAS...SAS RAID cards cost about the same as SATA RAID cards. SAS hard drives cost more than most SATA hard drives, but not much more than the Velociraptor. 3.) I like the Acer 24" screens a lot...they are very affordable and reliable, with low response times & beautiful picture. 4.) With a build price like that, you will be tempted to go with the Intel I7, but the I7 is not much faster for games than the Core-2-Quad. It's main advantage is in video processing where the large cache can actualy be used. 5.) I assume that you will be going with an SLI or crossfire setup for video. Doing this, you must be very carefull picking a mainboard. Many mainboards have 2-4 PCIe-x16 slots, but very few of them will allow you to use even two of these slots in x16 mode. The better boards have a x16/x16/x4 configuration allowing for two video cards to run at full speed, with room left over for a x4 RAID card. There is no board available that will do x16/x16/x16/x16...this is because there are no chipsets with than many PCIe lanes. 6.) DDR3 is all the rage right now, but good DDR2 will still beat DDR3 stick-for-stick and GB-for-GB. 7.) Don't forget your controls...a good mouse and keyboard will improve you gaming experience as much as the 24" screen. 8.) Don't forget your audio...a 5.1 or 7.1 speaker setup not only improves the overall experience, but can give you an edge in online games compaired to someone using a 2.1 system. 9.) To make sure that you have as much available to the game as possible, get a gigabit NIC (intel makes a nice one for under $40) and a good sound CARD (HT Omega makes a great card with great audio quality and every hookup a gamer could want for $90). Dissable the onboard stuff as it will steal CPU cycles. The same goes for the onboard RAID...it waists CPU cycles and does not provide the speed of a good hardware RAID card. Use the onboard SATA ports for hooking up your DVD/Blu-Ray drives, not hard drives.
1. Agreed 2. SSDs with integrated controllers are the ones to buy, e.g. OCZ Vertex. Integrated RAIDed SSDs even better, but they cost a fortune. The Velociraptors are good, but still suffer the drawbacks of any HDD, power, heat, noise, life expectancy. I should qualify that while SAS RAID cards aren't much more expensive than S-ATA ones, standalone adapters are MUCH more expensive, especially since all motherboards come with S-ATA ports, and barely any come with SAS. 3. Times do change, but I've seen a lot of pretty dire screens from Acer in my time. The picture may well be good, but I'd be concerned about its long term lifespan. I'd recommend Samsung, Viewsonic, LG or Dell instead. 4&5. If you do go dual graphics, you'll see the benefit of i7. If you don't, there isn't much to justify the extra cost unless, as said, you edit video. 6. Agreed. DDR3 should never be chosen other than being compulsary (i.e. for i7) 7. Moreso than that, a serious gamer focuses on their input peripherals. I tout Razer mice and Saitek keyboards (but not the Cyborg) 9. I have NEVER found onboard networking a problem except for when it breaks, and it hasn't broken that often. In the era of quad core CPUs, we don't need to disable stuff like this any more
