Building a Gaming PC

Thats nice... but why do you need an external HD?

Also, that's a pricey motherboard.

If price is a problem... why not go with AMD?
 
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Odale said:
Thats nice... but why do you need an external HD?

Also, that's a pricey motherboard.

If price is a problem... why not go with AMD?
Click to expand...
external hard drive for backups..i have too many folks that have to clal me because they did not performa backups

why go amd? they are slower performing, hotter, less efficient processors. The price difference is more than eclipsed by the performance differences..especially when you factor is power and performance. With a budget of 1k why go for the slower hotter chip?..if you are going to pay the long terms power costs might as well get the most performance you can for that $$$ and power.

I did not include an OS because I did not know if he needed one..if he does i'll redo my recommendation.
 
The way I see it is buy the AMD 9950 quad core (for the same price) and OC it when the time comes that you need a performance upgrade. It's got 4 cores so one would think that it would not go obsolete as fast as the Intel duo.

Also, as for the power consumption - I seriously doubt it would break your bank.

That motherboard is still pricey. I havn't done research on intel-based boards, but quality AMD boards cost ~$80. I can't imagine quality intel boards going for much more (or less).

USB flash drive for less than $20 will save plenty of important documents and/or game saves and you wont be spending $150. Also, if you take proper care of your computer you shouldn't have to deal with losing mass amounts of data. Its never happened to me and I'm on my 4th or 5th home-built computer.

You can use that $170 (from saving on the Intel board and external HD) on something else... like a more high performance graphics card, or better monitor or even better speakers/sound card.
 
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A slower performing amd chip will not be able to feed a higher performing video card therefore the net affect of spending the money on the faster video card is zero. I am also not a fan of overclocking as it shortens the life of the product and would only further exacerbate the inefficiencies i have noted before. o/c really isn't a viable option in the grand scheme of things..

I went with that intel board because on this machine i wanted guaranteed compatibility and stability..intel chips on an intel board gives you that.

I'll spend the money on an external drive any day to prevent data loss. If you have a malware infection or a hard disk crash you at least have a backup made by the ext hdd's backup software.
 
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still not enough to touch intel in overall performance/power/price. They don't perforam the same amount of work per clock..and the new nehalem's that are out only widen the gap.
 
Meh.

I like AMD's.

And, this is is going to be Wh1te Out's decision soon!

Friend had a P4 that gave him so many problems it put a bad taste in MY mouth.
 
Thank you to everyone throwing in their advice on this. The links to newegg compiled together is the most helpful, since the discussion is just WAY over my head. I'm putting my trust and faith in your experience instead. Maybe I'll start picking away at some of those components for Christmas, then I can game with Mike again. ;)
 
I am still working on my preference of a rig for you, I know you can get 4gig of G-skill ram a 64bit OS and the 4870 in there for under 1k. But one thing to mention at this point is:
I would actually recommend against picking up a part at a time. Instead put the money for each part into an account or piggy bank or whatever. Prices drop every other day. You will get the best price if you buy everything at the time you are ready to build as well as save on shipping.
 
Ok here is my recommendation (thanks to gnomegeddon) It has superb potential for simple and light Overclocking if you want down the road. It has a 80gig drive for OS and then a massive one for data/games, that way you can reinstall your OS at will without having to move your data around every time. The Nvidia card is better then the 4850 but probably not as good as the 4870 (which is still too expensive). Of course 64bit Vista Home Premium for the massive amt of ram and DX10 gaming options (like in LotRO!!)

http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion...2E16813128358,N82E16819115018,N82E16835186134

make sure to clear your newegg cart first...


Oh and FREE Far Cry2
 
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as an FYI...you don't need 2 drives to accomplish that...you can do it with partitions ;) saves either $30 or $70 :) there are a lot of *other* reasons you may want to do it such as putting a swap file on another spindle, but a single drive does not preclude a simple OS restore (also...make sure to use the 'back up entire computer' feature in Vista once you're done...I think all versions have it? not sure...if this one doesn't...it's worth upgrading to a higher version for that alone, among other things)

may want to consider upping the speed on the memory in lieu of the lower drive.
 
no actually you can't use partitioning as a backup..if the drive fails it'll take both partitions with it..
 
doh.. already a bunch of prices went off sale and 2 items are low quantity.. I guess you better ask us for a quote right at the time you have the $1k to spend. :)
 
Hescominsoon said:
no actually you can't use partitioning as a backup..if the drive fails it'll take both partitions with it..
Click to expand...

And generally you don't want the backup sitting in the same case either. While it is rare your drive could still be fried by a power supply failure or by lightning.
 
Hescominsoon said:
no actually you can't use partitioning as a backup..if the drive fails it'll take both partitions with it..
Click to expand...

that wasn't what the requirement was...the requirement was: "you can reinstall your OS at will without having to move your data around every time" not "you can store your data on another drive to potentially isolate it from the OS for the purpose of preventing data from being lost if the drive storing the OS has a manufacturing defect that causes it to fault prematurely". you simply do not need another physical drive to accomplish what was stated. one partition for the OS and one for data meets the goal that was expressed.

for that matter, an additional drive for the sole purpose of storing data as is not a net gain in protection. you still have a single point of failure for your data being wiped so unless you're running RAID your data is still just as vulnerable unless you're storing offsite.

then again, I've had a whopping 2 drives go bad over the last 7 or 8 years, one of which was a laptop drive that was dropped on the floor and banged up during travel so i'll give that one a pass :)
 
true..but partitioning has it's own drawbacks:

Partitioning is a throwback to dos and in the modern Windows file systems this is actually a hindrance. What partitioning does now is now you have 1 MFT per partition. The MFT is the master file table which is basically a database of where all the files are located on the partition. Every partition you put on the disk,l you now have another MFT to worry about. This also introduces a performance overhead since if you access partition 2 on drive one the hard drive has to head to the second MFT..look it up and then go find the file. Also if you copy a file form partition one 2 partition 2 now the system has to physically move the bits from one partition to the other partition on the same drive AND update two MFT's. If everything is on the same partition then moving the files is merely a function of updating the one MFT and it's done. The performance gain is not trivial..try moving a gigabyte of files on a partitioned drive between partitions and then do it on a non-partitioned drive. The difference is night and day.
 
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