If you have around 100 bucks to spend, Logitech makes a really good 5.1 surround sound system. Otherwise, any 2.1 setup that Logitech has will suit you just fine.
I’m more worried about the longevity of SSD. That and the prices are still stupid high.
Longevity problems have long been fixed. Flash media these days will last just as long if not longer than the mechanical workings of a platter hard drive. Operating systems can also tell when they;re being installed to an SSD and make alterations on how they cache, journal, and use swap to reduce unnecessary writes. The benefits of a 60gb SSD for a boot drive vastly vastly outweigh the costs imho
My friend gave me his GTX 280 for me to try out since he’s selling all his hardware. Considering replacing the 9800gx2 (x2) with this. Not sure yet.
Hmmm. 60gb is large enough for Win7 Ultimate install?
Surprisingly yes it is as long as you do not install any unnecessary programs or apps.
Keep game installs on a secondary drive (a HDD not a SDD)
Cool thread! 
Here are my specs:
Cooler Master Cosmos
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750
Intel Core2Quad Q9650
ZEROTherm Nirvana CPU Cooler
Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P
Gigabyte GTX 480
1TB WD Caviar Black
8GB Corsair Dominator DDR2 1066
Samsung Blu Ray
Samsung DVD Burner
Samsung 2233RZ 120Hz
Logitech Z-2300 2.1
Logitech G15
Logitech G5
Windows 7 Pro 64-bit
I have a question I’m hoping I can get some input on. I have finally decided to get an SSD for my boot drive. I am currently using a 1TB WD Caviar Black for boot and storage, but once my SSD arrives, I would like to use the SSD for boot and the 1TB WD Caviar Black for storage. I am aware of the BIOS setting change I need to make (AHCI) to allow the SSD to function properly, but what will I need to do to make all of my games and programs install on the HDD and not onto the SSD? I will be running Windows 7 Pro 64-bit.
Here is the SSD I will be using:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167050
Thanks in advance! 
So my motherboard failed so Atlus is sending me a new one. A better one actually. P6t instead. This one will allow me to upgrade to DDR3 ram and eventually to I7 processor. Not too shabby. It just means I’m 3 weeks on my laptop instead.
I am now a true believer.
This is the best and final upgrade for my system.
Even with SATA2, the difference is like night and day…:eek:
Speaking of SSDs, I’m into upgrading a little my Old and Trusty Q6600 soon. I’m not going for a system upgrade because I’d would end up buying a whole new machine (i7, DDR3 RAM, bigger PSU, and so on) and I don’t have the money at the moment but I guess I’ll give it a big boost with two pieces: and SSD for system install and a new video card.
For the video card I was thinking of a EVGA GTX560 Ti 1Gb. Will it hold recent games good enough? It’s a reasonably affordable board here in Brazil lately.
I’ve had a GTX 480 for quite some time now and it still runs everything on ultramax stupid high settings.
Alright so I got word back from Asus. The model they sent me back is P6T DELUXE V2 which means, unless I’m mistaken, I’m forced to upgrade to i7 processor right?
Any advice for getting the least expensive possible? I understand how ridic that sounds but it’s not something that was planned in my budget.
Edit: this is the motherboard http://ca.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1366/P6T_Deluxe_V2/
Is there a way to pinpoint the source of BSOD…I thought it was the memory, but that was replaced and I still get stuff like “irql_not_less_or_equal” and "memory_management:"
Would I need to replace the motherboard altogether?
You are correct. You will also have to make sure it is the correct Intel Core i7 socket CPU, as there are 3 different sockets for Intel Core i7’s. The socket you will need is LGA 1366. Here are your choices you can buy from newegg at the moment:
There are other Intel Core i7 socket LGA 1366 CPU’s, but they are no longer in production. The socket LGA 1366 motherboards also have tripple-channel DDR3 RAM slots, so for optimal performance, it is recommended that you have 3 matching sticks of RAM. If you only use 2 sticks of DDR3 RAM, the CPU’s memory controller will only run them in dual-channel mode. If you go that route, just make sure the RAM you will be using operates at 1.65 volts and lower to prevent damage to the CPU’s memory controller.
Well, that’s no longer accurate.
On its way are:
Asus P6t Deluxe V2
i7 920 processor
4gb ddr3
replacing the 9800gx2’s with GTX 280’s.
So.fucking.broke.
I installed replacement SSD’s into both my 6 year old laptop and my new one. Both perform way better, about 3x.
The ‘measurement’ was to watch how many times iTunes bounced up and down before it loaded after a reboot (and ensuring no background services are running).
5400 rpm laptop hdd: 3 bounces
SSD: Less than 1 bounce (~1/2)
Max throughput increased. Copying to or from external drive becomes saturated at maximum bandwidth. Less peaks and valleys.
Access time decreased. Shown above by the ‘bounce’ test, searching, and other basic disk access operations.
Longevity and Performance over time is maintained by on drive chips. (early SSD performance would degrade over time as file system got chaotic)
Unfortunately, pretty much any SSD drive over 128 GB is unreasonable.
SSD performance is good if you don’t game, if you do, you won’t fit your data on one. If you game, RAID is a much better option.
You could also just get a large amount of RAM, then dump the OS + most used software to RAM. The performance should be very nice after everything is copied over. SSD + total RAM dump would be optimal. However, I don’t expect to see this implemented into any major OS’s for a long time.
It would operate like a Linux live distribution, and make immediate changes in RAM, while writing to the SSD at the same time for redundancy(doing both at the same time, sort of like a Ramdisk and SSD in raid 1).
I’m sure that it would definitely be the best for large datacenter solutions, such as youtube. Everything could be on an SSD, but on boot, the OS would immediately dump into ram, along with the most watched videos. It would then leave half of the total ram for other videos on an on-demand basis. When a comment is made on any video, it would immediately be dumped into ram, and start the write to the SSD array when enough can be made to justify the use of the write cycle.
This prolongs both SSD and would increase end user performance. I have no clue if this is how youtube would operate, but I believe it would be the most efficient method of distribution.
This could also be done on a consumer OS, but for Windows 7, you’d need 32gb of ram… possibly more(I can’t recall the full install size) and performance probably wouldn’t be much better, the CPU would probably be a bottleneck in this instance, and initial boots would probably be too long(for a server that is on 24/7, it would be fine as it only has to do it once). The server would also need ridiculously large amounts of ram, somewhere along the lines of terabytes per server in the instance of a data center.
I went from an OG P4 to a Celeron D to a Pentium D 915 to a Core2Quad 9450 to my current i7 2600K. The Celeron was my first custom build and it was a micro ATX system in a q-pack. After that I switched to a full size ATX for the 9450 build and then kept the same case for this one. Seconding the love for SSD’s, I had a cheapo 64gb SSD on the 9450 machine and even that was much nicer than a traditional HDD.
Current machine:
i7 2600k
Asus P8P67 Pro Mobo
8GB of RAM
ATI 5750
Win 7 Pro 64-bit
Corsair C300 128GB SSD (main)
1x 320gb HDD
2x 1TB HDD
1x 2TB HDD (in an external 4-bay eSATA enclosure)
When I get around to it I’m going to swap out for an nVidia card again, add more RAM and fill the rest of the external bays wth 2TB HD’s. I want to replace the 320 with another 2TB as well. Eventually I’d like to build a combo server/router machine but I need to stop spending money on cars and comics for that to happen.
I finally decided I should upgrade to Win 7 from XP. I’m looking to buy an SSD to install Win 7 to. Is this OCZ drive a good choice?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227725
Also, I sadly lack a 2.5" mount in my PC. Is this bracket universal to fit in any case?
I actually just installed that exact SSD into my Acer Aspire 7520 laptop last night. I installed Windows 7 64 bit on it with zero problems and it’s running perfectly. Don’t pay too much attention to stop watching the boot times untill after the million windows updates have installed, after windows is up to date with no new updates to install you will notice faster boots. One thing to note, always remember that windows will see the drive size in binary numbers, so don’t freak when windows says the drive only has 55.7GB available. 60GB is equal to 55.7GiB in binary. Also that bracket should work perfectly for you, the SSD has all the same screw locations as a HDD.