Need a new Rig and advice

Ok its bought and paid for.

Amazon Total 580 Amazon gift Card -580 New Egg total 727 PC Sale -500 Total owed 227 Total computer cost 1307

Got off with only having to shell out 227 for the whole rig between a work gift card and the sale of my other PC!!
 
Great decision go get rid of that enermax and go with a real PSU. That Corsair is nice. In fact, your whole setup is really nice.
 
If you can swing it, I would get a core i7. I recently did and couldn't get any happier. People are suggesting sound cards and I don't see the need for that. On-board sound is great these days and you aren't even going to notice it taking any CPU cycles with the i7. DDR3 is also relatively cheap these days. If you can, definitely get 12GB and if not, you can always upgrade to that much. With 12GB, you'll hardly ever see the hard disk spin up except when launching rarely used programs. I've also read that with 12GB, SSD drives really aren't even needed at this point in time.

As for power supplies, how many watts you need depends on your components. With six hard drives, I used an Antec 850W. I only use one video card though so you might have to adjust for your video card too. In any case, never skimp on your power supply and go with the top brands ... Antec, Zalman, PC Power & Cooling and others although I can't tell you since I don't have any experience with others.

Good luck with your build. If you go over your budget, why not just wait until you get enough money for a slightly better build? ... or are you under time constraints?
 
@Vern - You must not have read his initial post.

He's already chosen the Core i7.

And yes, while the price of DDR3 ram HAS come down and is much better then it was just a few months ago, it's still not a truly feasible purchase for most people while DDR2 is still extremely cheap and the processors are not far off from Core i7. @ $169.99 and a $20 MIR for 12GB.

SSDs have multiple different uses. Non moving, quiet, cool running, minimal power use hard drives. If noise was an issue, he could go with an Intel SSD or Kingston SSD (rebranded intel) and his machine would blaze even more but still remain quiet. And yes, the Harddrive would still spin up for a lot of applications. Just because he has 12GB of ram does not mean every application whether it's used a lot or not is loaded into the ram for launching and running purposes. It's all loaded from the hard drive. It's just hard drives are getting faster and faster that their throughput is great anyway. With the new 320GB Platters, and I believe 500GB platters, speed, silence, less heat and even less power draw is still obtainable with tradition hard drives.

While a do agree about your statement about the power supplies, six hard drives, one video card, doesn't quite justify the need for 850w of power. It's a bit overkill. But I suppose better to have extra then to little.

I completely agree with your statement about sound cards. While onboard sound has become increasingly better in quality, a lot of them still do lack certain features like EAX 5.0 which is commonly used in gaming. But of course, it all depends on what you are playing or if you are playing.

For instance, on my gaming machine, I have a Creative Labs X-Fi Platinum where I get EAX 5.0. Most of the games I play don't utilize this, but the occasional few do. Whereas on my HTPC I use onboard sound because it outputs 5.1 via Optical S/PDIF to my receiver where the receiver will do the primary sound almplifaction and processing. But even if I did output to a 5.1 speaker set from my HTPC, the quality would still sound wonderful.

Please, don't take this the wrong way. I'm not attacking you or your post. I'm just clarifying on a few things so as not to confuse people.
 
@sheeps ... we've been on this right forum long enough to know that it's all in the name of a good discussion ... and everyone likes that.

To me, getting a core i7 and not using what the it was made to do ... DDR3 in triple channel is like separating peas and carrots.

My point with the hard drives hardly spinning up with 12GB of memory was after the OS and all the pre-caching was done. The premium to get a decent size SSD HDD and the premium to get DD3? ... 12GB is where I would go and where I went with my own rig.

With my current setup, I didn't think 850W was too much. I upgraded from an Antec 650W and that setup with 5 hard drives resulted in a very unstable OS. Blue screens every few minutes. So depending on how many components he wants to use, 650W might be enough, it may not be. I would personally overcompensate especially with less reputable brands that don't output a steady 850W performance even though they are advertised and rated at that wattage. You mention Enermax and although I have read good things about them, I have also read not so good reviews about some models while researching for a suitable PS for my setup.

Don't worry about offending me man. As long as your posts contribute to the discussion, it's all good.
 
To everyone: Thanks for the input you have been instrumental in making my decision. And to be honest proved to me that I need to hang around here a bit more.

This is my final set up. I need to finalize the order on amazon tomorrow well today waiting for the gift cards. I will throw up the 3dmark scores of it when I run them assuming they run on windows 7. The only thing i worry about is the wirelss card working with windows 7.

Case Cooler Master Centurion 5 ATX Mid Tower Case Silver- (CAC-T05-UW) 1 Amazon 55
CPU Intel Core i7 920 2.66GHz 8M L3 Cache 4.8GT/sec QPI Hyper-Threading Turbo Boost LGA1366 Processor 1 Amazon 280
CPUFAN Zalman CNPS9900 1 Amazon 70
Case FAN Zalman ZM-F3 120mm Quiet Case Fan with Silicon Pins 2 Amazon 22
VidCard EVGA 896-P3-1170-AR GeForce GTX 275 896MB 448-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card - Retail 1 New Egg 240
Mobo GIGABYTE GA-EX58-UD3R LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail 1 New Egg 200
RAM Crucial 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) Triple Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model CT3KIT25664BA1067 - Retail 1 New Egg 80
Hardrive Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drives - OEM 2 New Egg 200

PSU CORSAIR 650w TX Series 80 Plus Certified Power Supply 1 Amazon 100
 
@Vern - Great! I'm glad someone understands that it's all in the name of discussion and helping each other out. I've run 6 hard drives with a 7800GTX, dual core, 4GB ram, optical drive, SB X-FI on an OCZ Powerstream 420w PSU. No stability issues. I've also run 4 hard drives, dual core, 4GB ram, optical drive on a 380w. I guess I'm more shocked that you went with double what I used for almost the same setup.

When I finally go Core i7 which will be a while because I think my Q6600 will last me for a long time that I won't need to upgrade. I will definitely get some decent parts.

Right now I barely use what I have.
 
Well I got all the parts and put it together. When I turn it on the fans turn on and some lights on the mobo turn on but nothing happens. Took everything out but processor and turned it on with same thing happening. No beeps no nothing I figure its a bad mobo or a bad cpu so im sending the mobo back first. Advice?

I alos took it out of the case and ran it on the static bag with same results to make sure I wasn't grounded out.

On a side note the zalman is really freaking big lol and so is the GPU another half an inch and I wouldn't be able to fit it in. And the most surprising thing is the CPU did not have any pins just little metal conectors on the bottom thats new.
 
Might check and see if the motherboard requires all 24 pins to have wires on the psu plug for that.

I have one system that needs all 24 wires from the psu to go to the motherboard instead of the usual 23
 
Might check and see if the motherboard requires all 24 pins to have wires on the psu plug for that.

I have one system that needs all 24 wires from the psu to go to the motherboard instead of the usual 23

I have the main plug going to it and then I have the 6pin plug. Are there more?
 
I'm talking about the 24 pin plug to the right based on the picture of the ram slots. That said there are 24 pins in the plug and at least a year or so ago I found the majority psu's have 23 out of the 24 pins wired. That said I have a XFX motherboard that would not boot without having all 24 pins on the power supply side being wired.

I'm not saying that is your problem but its something to check to be sure
 

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Also Hi EP and people. I found this place again while looking through a oooollllllldddd backup. I have filled over 10TB and was looking at my collection of antiques. Any bids on the 500Mhz Win 95 fix?
Any of the SP crew still out there?
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Impressed you have kept this alive this long EP! So many sites have come and gone. :(

Just did some crude math and I apparently joined almost 18yrs ago, how is that possible???
hello peeps... is been some time since i last came here.
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