| Squilliam said: Ok heres my first draft:
Total W/O shipping/MIR/Tax = $1053 (-MIR $30) Now the explanation. The Phenom X4 and that motherboard have some of the best features/performance you can get for the price. It comes with USB3.0 and fast SATA ports as well and because you don't need an integrated GPU you don't pay for it in this model. The HD 5770 is as requested and it represents the best value in that range. The G-Skill memory is quality memory but you're not paying a premium for it here. The Antec Sonata is a moderately quiet case which has been made to a high standard and comes with a pretty good, reliable PSU and as far as I can see is some of the best value. The OCZ Vertex SSD is fast unlike mechanical drives and makes the system much more responsive especially when you're multitasking, also its extremely reliable and makes the system a good performer in all areas. The Western Digital HDD is good price/quality/volume. I cannot recommend Seagate as I've had 3 drives fail on me in the past 6 months out of 5 Seagate drives I had. Windows 7 Professional comes with better backup utilities as the main draw card. However you can save $40 if you're happy with Home edition.
|
That's a decent build, but it could be "optimized" better in certain areas.
1) If you're going to spend $160 on a quad-core Phenom, then you might as well plunk down the extra $40 to get an i5-750. It's a much faster CPU thanks to the turbo mode that does an on-the-fly low-level overclock when less than four cores are being used, and it's a stellar overclocker as well. That said, you won't see much drop in performance if you decide to go with a much cheaper Athlon II X3 435 or X4 630 instead.
2) Not a knock against your build, obviously, but you definitely don't need more than 4 GB RAM unless you're running some sort of really RAM-intensive apps on a regular basis. If you have to ask whether you need more than 4, then you probably don't.
3) The Sonata 3 is a decent case with an equally decent bundled PSU, but if your budget permits it I'd advise going with a 550W Corsair or SeaSonic, an Antec P180 Mini (the best price:performance case on the market right now), and a Micro-ATX mobo.
4) The SSD is a nice idea that will give you faster boot/load times on games and productivity apps, but I'd recommend going with an 80 GB Intel X25-M instead. There's nothing wrong with the OCZ, but the X25-M is slightly faster, can hold 20 GB more stuff, and is only slightly more expensive. But again, only fit this in if you can afford it.
5) The biggest factor in HDD speed is something that isn't usually advertised on Newegg or elsewhere: The number of platters. One or two high-density platters means faster seek and write times, and the 750 GB Caviar Black has three 250GB platters - not exactly ideal. Look for a Caviar Blue or Black (or Spinpoint F3, if you can find them) that's either 500 GB or 1 TB, whatever your budget and needs permit, and Google a couple of reviews to check how many platters it has before buying.
6) Unless you think you'll be using XP Mode a lot, then feel free to drop down to Home Premium.
EDIT: And to answer mrstickball's question about productivity apps, the biggest factors will be having enough RAM (you won't see any benefits above 4 GB, but don't go lower than that; type really doesn't matter and you should be fine with DDR3-1333, or hell, even DDR2) and hard drive speed (again, either get one of the recommended models with 1 or 2 high-density platters or get an SSD - preferably both). Having a good CPU helps too, but you'll see vastly diminishing returns for anything more than a speedy dual-core (for productivity alone, something like an Athlon II X2 240 will work fine). However, for gaming, you'll want a decent triple- or quad-core anyway, so you don't even need to worry about your CPU bottlenecking your productivity.
"'Casual games' are something the 'Game Industry' invented to explain away the Wii success instead of actually listening or looking at what Nintendo did. There is no 'casual strategy' from Nintendo. 'Accessible strategy', yes, but ‘casual gamers’ is just the 'Game Industry''s polite way of saying what they feel: 'retarded gamers'."
-Sean Malstrom
