Getting a gaming rig. Buy or Build?

[Garcian Smith]

largedarryl said:

What's wrong with the case, one of the best cases I've ever purchased.  4 system fans and easy access to the HDD bays.

Do you have something against Antec?  They make good products, but I do agree there are better PSU manufacturers and I was attempting to grab a cheaper one for this price breakdown.

Find me a game that this CPU will not work with?  If this guy is buying a gaming rig, why would he spend the money on a more expensive processor when all current games are offloading workload to the GPU.

Seagate, again whats wrong with them, from my standpoint the were still offering 5 year warranties on their HDD's last year (vs 3 year from every other HDD manufacturer)

Okay, I was being a bit harsh on the case. I just can't stand a case manufacturer that crams bright blue LEDs everywhere - it basically means that whatever room you stick it in will glow blue 24/7. That's fine if that doesn't bother you, but for that price you could have something sleek, classy, and LED-free like the Lian Li Lancool PC-K7B.

Antec's PSUs aren't bad, per se, but for that price you could've had one from a top-of-the-line manufacturer like the Corsair 550VX.

Again, there's nothing wrong with the X4 620, but it's outperformed on most games by the cheaper X3 435/440. The lower clockspeed of the cores really hurts it in games that only take advantage of one or two cores.

Finally, larger Seagate drives are known to have reliability problems ever since they bought Maxtor. (Don't worry - I didn't even know this myself until recently.) I'm guessing that the one you got is this one, which should work decently but only has a 3 year warranty. Western Digital offers an extra two years for just a five-spot more.