either a caviar black or an SSD~
I threw together a quick build in my spare time and I’d love to know what everybody thinks. It will be a long while until I drop the ball, but I want to know if this looks good.
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD3H Intel LGA1155 ($190)
CPU: Intel Core i5-3550 Ivy Bridge 3.3GHz 77W Quad Core ($210)
RAM: Corsair XMS 8gb DDR3 1600 2x4gb ($42)
GFX: EVGA GTX 670 Superclocked 2GB ($420 normally, out of stock right now)
Case: NZXT Phantom (already own)
PSU: Thermaltake 650W (already own, may eventually upgrade to modular, probably 850W or higher for expandability)
Total Cost to “upgrade”: $862
What do you all think about it? I wanted to do it for $850, and I came in very close. I could opt for the regular GTX 670, but I don’t find it worthwhile right now as the superclocked models will OC better as they are some of the better chips, so it’s worth the extra $20 to me.
So I got a second monitor and my plan was to have the small monitor to do EVERYTHING that wasn’t a full screen game.
My problem? Setting a screen to “primary” not only gets everything fullscreened there but it also gives that screen the taskbar and all the small windows open there by default.
How can I make it so that everything I full screen defaults to one monitor while the other does everything else?
Doin some upgrades to my Asus G53-SX DH71. Decided to get the new OCZ Vertex 4 SSDs and run two in RAID. And while I have the thing open, I’m adding another 4gb of RAM so I’ll have 16gb total. Totally necessary, I know.
-OCZ Vertex 4 256gb SSD
-OCZ Vertex 4 128gb SSD
-Crucial 4gb DDR3 SO-DIMM 1333 RAM
Just ordered some upgrades…
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157281
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226188 x 2
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811146061
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835233052
Putting my old Ath-Phenom x3/x4 450 in there along with my 5670, but I’ll probably be getting a 8 core 8150 Zambezi and dual 6870s soon.
Going to under run the memory to 1600 Hopefully at 7, 7, 7, 24, 1T. I know that it should do 7, 8, 7, 24 1T at 1600+ easily. Probably can’t do that until I get the new CPU though. :tup:
I would’ve said Samsung but Seagate owns them now. It is basically just Seagate and WD now (Hitachi HDD was bought by WD last year). All 3 year warranties have been lowered to 1 year and 5 year warranties are lowered to 3 years now from both companies.
Also, when looking at NewEgg reviews, make sure you differentiate between people who ran it in RAID vs those who didn’t. They have specialized HDDs for RAID that has less failure rates than regular desktop drives but a lot of people just grab regular desktop drives and RAID those (because the price is comparably good still even with the failure rates).
As for failure rates per HDD, they are about equal so it is best to just base it on customer service. Right now Seagate has my business because they have been the most accomodating to me. This is of course depending on your region. Euro or APAC customer service for these companies can be different and sometimes even Canadian and US CS for tech companies are different. This is all anecdotal of course since you can’t really measure the real world failure rates of drives unless you have long term usage.
HDD I have used in the last 3 years and failure rates:
2 x WD Black 640GB - still going
1 x WD Caviar Blue 500GB - failed
1 x Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB - still going
4 x Seagate barracuda 1TB (24AS)- 1 failed (I raided a pair of them and one of the RAID drive died after 3 months, the other drive is showing a yellow notice in crystaldisk info but it is still going and not producing any errors. The other two that have not been RAIDed are still going strong)
1 x Seagate barracuda 500MB - still going (24/7 PVR HDD)
WD Caviar Green 2TB EARX - still going
BTW Caviar Blacks are LOUD AS FUCK. You can hear it reading the drive. Samsung spinpoint F3 is the quietest and relatively the fastest. The difference is minimal in real world scenarios between non-caviar black 7200rpm drives anyway. Although I love how I can transfer a ton of large files between Caviar blacks and it moves pretty fast compared to other drives. I’ve only needed to do that twice so it doesn’t really have much real world application. lol.
I’m looking to build a PC basically, at least for the time being, to run Diablo at around mid settings and for work. How much should I expect to spend?
It is a good baseline. The main picture is updated periodically.
I built a machine specifically for D3, and I offer it at a discount to SRK members.
You don’t have to spend much for D3. I run it on a 5 year old Core 2 Duo with a GF 9500 GT with max textures and it runs fine.
Is the price already the discounted price or no?
Yeah it is. It also includes shipping.
Cool, thanks.
Logitech G500 Mouse came in the mail today :D. The macro buttons should hopefully come in handy for good old TF2.
Less of hardware question but I recently got a monitor in addition to my enormous television for my PC, the plan was to use the PC for everything and the TV for full screened games or if I needed something out of the way. I understand dragging but how do I make every game load up to the TV?
Making the TV the “primary” monitor solves the full screen issue however, it prevents me from making any new windows during a game because I can’t drag them over to the monitor.
http://www.bitfenix.com/global/en/products/chassis/prodigy
[media=youtube]Xqn-e9qAvtI[/media]
Yo ulllll!
Hey guys, I just want to ask which would be the best monitor for me?
Im looking for a 100-200$ 1080p montior, about 20-23", and would be best to have as little as input lag as possible, since Ill probably use it to play SF4
Planning on doing a low budget rebuild of my wife’s ancient desktop and giving it to my son. After doing some looking, I decided against the FX line or the A8 AMD processors and will pick up a Phenom II x4 and a half decent mobo. He’s going to do homework, light gaming (minecraft, poptropica, whatever else a 10 year old can find online that daddy won’t shut down) and not much else, so nothing super serious will be needed. New hard drive, 8mb memory, MAYBE a video card (in case anything needs to get played on the plasma in his room), card reader, and call it a day. Figure I can probably do everything under $225 at Microcenter.
After that, it’s time to plan on a rig for daddy. My lil’ Athlon that could needs an upgrade. Wouldn’t mind staying with AMD, but that i5 kinda makes it pointless, Suggestions?
I really hope that 8mb is a typo… that would not be a fun minecraft experience. If you want my advice, you almost always want a GFX card, even the cheap ones are better than integrated in most cases.
As for your PC, how much do you have to spend for yourself? I’m personally ditching AMD in the near future to swap over to intel as they are getting destroying this gen, bulldozer just isn’t as good as it should be, the Phenom II x6 chips are often better than bulldozer. I’m personally going for an i5 3570k. It’s a much better offering, although buying a new mobo along with a CPU doesn’t seem that appealing, but newegg has a lot of good combo deals with the i5 at the moment, so I think you’ll be able to find yourself a decent setup for a reasonable price. As for everything else, that depends entirely upon your budget and intentions.
Yeah, the 8mb was a typo. Go figure. Um… budget? If I can keep it under a grand for everything I’d be happy. But since I’m spreading this out over time it may go above that. The thing is, I don’t do much with my computer. Some web, some music production, some 'shop, very little gaming. That could change with the right setup, but we’ll see. Eying an i5 of some ilk, considering a SSD for Win7, a quiet case (that fractal design caught my eye) that kind of thing. A decent gfx, but nothing in the $300 range if I can help it.