Gigo's building a new rig...

[GigoSai]

... and it's gonna freaking SCREAM.

I should have all the parts together and be up and running by the end of April/early May (the budget is tight I'm only able to grab a few pieces at a time.) My finances aside it lets me stretch out the "hardware pron tease" as I'll be posting the bits as I acquire them.

I've been mulling over names and I'm thinking Awesome-Sauce-A-Saurus (ASAS is almost ASUS right? )

Picked up the brain and spine today.

Parts so far:

MoBo - Asus Maximus III Gene
CPU - Intel i7-860
HDD - WDVelociRaptor 300GB


Any input from you techeads is welcome.

[Moose]

Looks good so far.

I am running Asus I7 1366 chipset board, 6gm of triple ddr 3, with I7-920, with Ait 4890 XT. Make sure to get a good G-card to get ready for new starwars

[GigoSai]

Originally Posted by Moose

Looks good so far.

Make sure to get a good G-card to get ready for new starwars

Im going with ATI for sure, however I'm still a little torn as to weather or not I should go with the crossfire set-up. twin 5770's would cost about as much as a single 5850.
What do you think? Some other reading I've done says the twin set up is the way to go.

Mark my words I will NOT be playing the next MMO at minimum settings, lol.

[Prodimysterio]

Originally Posted by GigoSai

Im going with ATI for sure, however I'm still a little torn as to weather or not I should go with the crossfire set-up. twin 5770's would cost about as much as a single 5850.
What do you think? Some other reading I've done says the twin set up is the way to go.

Mark my words I will NOT be playing the next MMO at minimum settings, lol.

It all depends on the games you play and whether or not they fully support ATI CrossFire configurations. I am hopeful that SWTOR will support both NVIDIA SLI and ATI CrossFire, but games like WoW currently support neither technology. Like in my case, I currently have two overclocked NVIDIA GTX 260 cards and WoW unfortunately cannot take advantage of them being teamed. But even with one card being used by the game, I lag nowhere outside of Dalaran, but that is to be expected by anyone that frequents WoW. So, if the pc titles you play support CrossFire, then get two cards, otherwise go for one bad mama jamma.

The most important decision you made was to go with a nice Core I7 quad-core processor. That and a nice hard drive(s), if possible, will be the two most critical pieces of hardware in your pc for giving you the best possible gaming experience. To be quite honest, most any recent PCI-Express video card over $300 will play any game at great quality unless you are running insane screen resolutions like 2048x1536.

[GigoSai]

Originally Posted by Prodimysterio

.... That and a nice hard drive(s), if possible, will be the two most critical pieces of hardware in your pc for giving you the best possible gaming experience.

This is the HDD I'm currently looking at. Should I be looking at one of those tiny velociraptor 10k RPM drives instead?

..and Prod you helped make my mind up, provided I get the power source I want I can 'have my cake and eat it too' as it were with my video cards. A 5850 now and another in the fall/winter is doable and gives me both a fat card to play with and crossfire down the line.

Whats the story on factory refurbished power supplies? The shop near my house has one of these at %30 off, is it worth the "risk" or should I just skip the deal all together?

[Quietus]

You could always get a raptor for the PC and use a TB external for media storage....also gives you a nice backup solution.

[Moose]

Gigo I will agree with Prod. I almost did the two 4770's at the time but realized that wow didn't support crossfire, so I when to the 4890(lol which died yesterday)

[Jaswa]

I love my raptor drive... Out of everything you can buy to make your PC blaze fast... The Raptor drive makes the biggest diffrence.

[GigoSai]

Local shop had the 300GB Raptor on sale for $200 ($225 Canadian Dollars after tax mind you)

So that's the HDD sorted.

This was an INSANE week at work so I'm not even exactly sure what that's gonna mean come payday. Tune in next weekend, it might be lameness like DVD drives and case fans, or it might be RAM and Vid cardness!! (most likely something in the middle, lol)

[GigoSai]

So that insane week translated into a nice little bonus and I was able to pick up enough to get the system off the ground

- 8 GB kit of Corsair Dominator pc3-12800 DDR3 RAM

- Sapphire 5850 graphics card

- Corsair HX750w power supply

- Zalman 9900nt CPU cooler

- a Samsung 22x lightscribe DvD drive
- Windows7

- and a Cooler Master Storm Scout case to pack it all up nicely. ( I didn't opt for the illuminated fans on the tinted side window, I may put something there later on if cooling becomes an issue)

The landlord is gonna have to wait a couple extra days, and there may be some ramen dinners this month but the system is done, over-budget and ahead of schedule!

The shop where I bought it all offers assembly and OS/driver set up for $40 if you've purchased all the bits from them and so I opted for that route. I pick it up on Wednesday or Thursday.

Edited to add: Just got a call from the shop. Looks like that's to much ram for that MoBo, had to step down to 8GB of 1333 instead of the 1600.

[Lizentor]

Sweet! Sound nice man. I build my machine about this time last year. At the time, I was running 32bit Vista but now that I have 64bit Win 7, I keep thinking I need to buy more ram to get me to 8 GB. I really don't "need" it but who knows. I might decide to build me another one and I can make this one a server.

[GigoSai]

It here!!!

And it's insane

Just ran ToC25 Twins as a tester. I used to either crash or run at about 2 FPS. Ran the whole fight at 50 FPS just now with everything except shadows maxed out

[Oneeva]

Oh wow thats impressive! Gratz on your new toy