So……..its tax return time…and to many that means that bills get paid, money gets saved, etc……….not so much with me. Lets see over the last 3 years because of my tax returns I’ve bought my 46 inch wide-screen LCD Sanyo….my PS3……and some odds and ends. However this year I decided that I would build myself a new tower, considering I had to use my P4 for my MAME Cabinet. So I was faced with a decision to make. I had a budget of about a thousand bucks to work with. One thing I really wanted was a bigger monitor, so with that in mind I decided on a 22″ Wide-screen Acer. Suckers huge compared to my old 17 inch Standard res. Another thing I wanted was a system that I wouldn’t have to overhaul again in a year. I’m not a DIE HARD PC gamer, so the option of SLI was there, but I decided against it for now. Storage was also kind of second fiddle on this build as well. Case wise I wanted to go with Cooler Master Cosmos case, but just couldn’t bring myself to spend the extra 200 bucks on it when I still had my perfectly good Cheiftec full size windowed just laying there. So, taking that into consideration, here are my new specs.
Cheiftec Full Size tower case
AMD 7750X2 Black Edition (I decided to stay dual core because honestly, triple cores are useless and I don’t multitask or game enough to warrent a quad core of the same clock speed).
4gb ddr2 1066 OCZ 5-5-5-15
320gb Sata HD
Dual Layer SATA DVD Burner
Biostar TF8200 A2+ Motherboard (heat pipes on north and south bridge chips, as well as some pretty decent reviews, decent onboard video and optical audio with onboard HDMI, future board for the HTPC should I later upgrade to AM3)
Cooler Master v8 CPU Cooler (good lord this thing is fucking massive…lol)
OCZ Fatal1ty Modular 550watt SLI Rated Power Supply
XFX 9800GT 512mb ddr3 Video Card (I could of gone with a Gtx240 or so, but for a hundred bucks more it just didn’t seem worth it to me.)
Vista 32bit (Student copy, plus I don’t see myself using more than 4gb’s of ram for anything in the immediate future.)
Asus Wireless Card
Rosewill Media Card Reader
Logitech 5.1 speakers (Same speakers I’ve had for the last 5 and half years…………just cant killem…still work great.)
All in all I spent around 600 on the system itself, and then another 150 on just odd and end stuff I needed for around here. Personally I think I came out on the right side of it. I didn’t need anything extreme, and going AM3 was just too iffy, there’s only 3 or 4 boards on newegg that even fully support it and ddr3, and I refuse to buy intel. Upgrade options later on are a faster quad core (when software is actually WRITTEN for quads), and more ram should the need arise which wont be anytime soon. Build time took around an hour as I had to figure out how the v8 mounted onto the board, and it was a bit akward mounting the board with that hunk of stuff on there. Overall though I’m very happy. vista installed in about 10 minutes. Didn’t have to install any drivers really, downloaded latest vid drivers, and installed the board drivers and I was pretty much good to go. And might I say, I installed the demo version of DeskScapes from Stardock………that is some cool software, not sure if I wanna drop the 20 bucks on it, but its still really cool.
Oh yeah, and did I mention that it has the coolest red ambient glow from the PS and the Cooler……….looks devlish in a way….lol