Ultim8 - great list.
Just a few points:
- The 2500k is an i5, not an i7.
- XFX, in my experience, is awful. I had a motherboard from them that died. The RMA spanned several months, during which they sent me two warped motherboards and a faulty 5770 before finally sending me a working item. I'd avoid them like the plague.
- Other than price, is there a reason you chose an AMD card over an Nvidia card? Just out of interest.
- Hard drives. As you said, their prices are ridiculous at the moment. For now, I'd hold off buying HDDs, or buy a second hand one if you really badly need it. The prices should be back to normal by mid-summer at the latest. Alternatively, external hard drives can be had relatively cheap; buy an external unit and rip the drive out of it.
remf - if you want a smaller unit, go with a Micro-ATX board, which will let you use a smaller chassis. You won't be able to use multiple GPUs in a xfire or sli setup, but that would push the price right up anyway. If you're doing video editing frequently, you'll benefit from going with an i7-2600k or i7-2700k, both of which have hyperthreading.
I personally have a custom water cooling loop, which is almost silent, but that depends on how much you're willing to spend. The most noise would probably come from the GPU under load, but a full CPU+GPU loop, plus the radiators and reservoir, would be expensive and probably wouldn't fit in a micro-atx case (I struggled to fit mine in an Antec 900 which is a midi).
So price/performance, you might want to consider something like the Corsair Hydro series, but with Scythe Gentle Typhoon AP-15 fans.
Hi Adzie,
Sorry I have been busy and not getting onto the forums much lately but here are a few answers for you.
Your correct the 2500k is an i5 not an i7 I copy and pasted a lot of the descriptions from the etailers.
XFX was aweful but here in the UK there RMA centre is actually exceptionally good now, I have dealt with there RMA before and I too waited a while. They have however contracted in a firm i know well that do an excellent job at the rma side so for UK based issues there shouldn't be any issues.
AMD over nvidia....ok so bang for buck the AMD card wins obviously but myself at the moment feel that multiple monitor setups are much easier with ati than nvidia cards. Dont get me wrong im not a fan boy I loved my 8800GTS SLI setup previous to getting the 5870 "Six" editions, I did then go for sli GTX 470's (well 465's flashed to unlock the additional memory and shaders) but they were louder, performed around the same and to enable multi screen I couldnt run them in sli which kind of defeated the object of 2 high end cards. Nvidia may have fixed this now but overall at the moment I think AMD are winning on Price vs Performance vs features your actually gonna use. Also if your looking and thinking cuda then sure if your into one particular app but to be honest AMD's stream is often better quality and faster, Quicksync seems to be beating them all.
I also totally agree with you on prefering external storage over filling your rig with HDD's. I built a little mini-itx freenas box running raidz on 4 x 2tb hdd's and it max's my GBit network out.
Congratz to the newly wed publix too and just remember mate to agree with everything they say and you will be fine......but watch out for the trick questions as they like to do that at time......oh and then there is the questions they ask that there is NO right answer to, Oh and you have to work on your telepathy because you need to know what they want you to do before they do.....Simple
Remf it depends how much of an audiophile you are and ultimately how much you wanna spend.
If its just for gaming then use the onboard it will be fine, onboard is usually ok for most people and it will allow you to hear footsteps. Or you could have a look at something like the Asus Xonar DG 5.1 PCI, these are cheap and have a built in amp for headsets.
Thanks for the link Curtis i usually use
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/2 as you can do GPU, SSD, CPU ect ect and they use virtually every kind of benchmark needed to make a decision and allow you to compare.
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then yeah why not.