Final build before I order :)

Did have a build coming in last week but I added wrong processor to card and didnt realize it.... had to cancel order and wait for money to come back! Gave me time to rethink what I wanted and came up with this build :). What do you all think.

I was going to order the Corsair Obsidian case,but read reviews stating it wasnt good for air cooled pc's. Soooo I swtiched it to the Solano, then seen complaints about little stuff....Moved onto the case which no one seem to have anything bad to say about!

Case: HAF 932

PSU: Corsair TX750 this should be able to run x2 5850 in crossfire right :)

RAM: 8gb G.SKill 1600mhz DDR3 got this because the price to performance was probably the best I could find as far as peoples reviews went

Monitor: ASUS VH222H-P monitor

GPU: XFX Radeon 5850 will buy a second after my FTHB credit comes in

MOBO: MSI 790FX

CPU Cooler: Zalman CNPS9700nt

CPU: AMD PhenomII x4 955 Black edition

HDD: WD Green 500gb

yea but ive heard mixed opinions on them and am going with the green because i've had it before and liked it. if someone here used them and would like to chime in im willing to change the HDD

Hard drive is a low power-consumption device. Getting any "green" edition is an unnesscary downgrade. I need that Quagmire rant on Brian...

Get the black editions instead. Only thing faster are the SSD monsters.

I would personally spend a little extra and go with the 640GB WD 6401AALS (Caviar Black)

The increased platter density makes it a better primary/OS HDD (one of the best, actually..behind the new 2TB drives sporting even higher platter density), and you'll have a little extra capacity to boot.

I have ALWAYS used WD's black series HDD just because of their performance.

A Green based HDD has an average read speed of ~60 MB/s. A Black based HDD has an average read speed of 90 MB/s.

http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/showthread.php?t=315206

Under Single drives there is a 1TB at spot number 27 out of 29. You can find Caviar Black drives in spots 14 and 16 of 29.

Under Dual drives there is 160GB Raid-0 green array at 23 of 26. You can fin Caviar Black drives in spots 3, 10, 11, 13 and 16 of 26.

Case is good.

PSU is good

Memory is overkill if you're only going to do gaming, so I recommend going 4 instead since it also helps with overclocking. (OC'ing 4 sticks is harder than OC'ing 2)

Monitor is good.

GPU is good.

Mobo is good, especially the 790fx-gd70. The Asus Crosshair III Formula is also a good option since it comes with a sound card.

CPU cooler is a little iffy. I've heard bad things about those Zalman coolers in terms of cooling performance. I'd recommend something like this instead.

CPU is good, although I'd recommend looking for a C3 X4 965 instead (sometimes labelled under '965 125W')

HDD is decent, but I'd recommend either the Caviar Black 500GB or the Samsung F1 Series.

For $10 more, on Newegg for comparison, you can get a 750GB Caviar Black HDD than the 500GB Caviar Green.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136283

I'm honestly surprised that no-one has mentioned the Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB drive.

IIRC, this is the fastest terabyte/sub-terabyte drive out today. It's even faster than the WD Blue/Black 640GB drives, mainly because of the two 500GB platters it houses (versus the 320GB platters found in the WD 640GB drives, and the 250GB platters on the 750 & 500GB drives).

I'm honestly surprised that no-one has mentioned the Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB drive.

IIRC, this is the fastest terabyte/sub-terabyte drive out today. It's even faster than the WD Blue/Black 640GB drives, mainly because of the two 500GB platters it houses (versus the 320GB platters found in the WD 640GB drives, and the 250GB platters on the 750 & 500GB drives).

MaoTheChimp

Looks like I'll be going with 2 750gb caviar blacks then :) and to the guy that told me go with the i7 Im not spending 300 bucks on a cpu when a phenom quad will do me just fine. also the cpu cooler I dont plan on doing a extreme over clock on it 3.2ghz is pretty fast and ill prob put it up to 3.6-3.8 like i did my q6600 so it should hold its own :). I was looking at the 965, but should I really bay the extra money for.2ghz more when im just going to oc the 955 to 3.6? I was just trying to save a few bucks. Ill go down to 4gb of RAM I heard GTA4 is a RAM intensive game so I figured 8gb would help me out. Taking off the extra RAM will help me run x2 750gb HDD tho so Its a nice trade off :)

Looks like I'll be going with 2 750gb caviar blacks then :) and to the guy that told me go with the i7 Im not spending 300 bucks on a cpu when a phenom quad will do me just fine. also the cpu cooler I dont plan on doing a extreme over clock on it 3.2ghz is pretty fast and ill prob put it up to 3.6-3.8 like i did my q6600 so it should hold its own :). I was looking at the 965, but should I really bay the extra money for.2ghz more when im just going to oc the 955 to 3.6? I was just trying to save a few bucks. Ill go down to 4gb of RAM I heard GTA4 is a RAM intensive game so I figured 8gb would help me out. Taking off the extra RAM will help me run x2 750gb HDD tho so Its a nice trade off :)

floridaskater05

Ah so your going with the MSI 790FX mobo with the quad-crossfirex support and the DRMOS overclocking as well. That's a killer mobo you're gonna love it! :D

I know :) its like my old EVGA 780i , but more kick butt! could'nt ask for more! as for combo deals wasnt anything I seen that I wanted to bundle. Think the price im paying is well worth it anyway.. I'll have to wait now tho...because newegg just ran out of the gpu I was going to get lol

I know :) its like my old EVGA 780i , but more kick butt! could'nt ask for more! as for combo deals wasnt anything I seen that I wanted to bundle. Think the price im paying is well worth it anyway.. I'll have to wait now tho...because newegg just ran out of the gpu I was going to get lol

floridaskater05

Looks like I'll be going with 2 750gb caviar blacks then :) and to the guy that told me go with the i7 Im not spending 300 bucks on a cpu when a phenom quad will do me just fine. also the cpu cooler I dont plan on doing a extreme over clock on it 3.2ghz is pretty fast and ill prob put it up to 3.6-3.8 like i did my q6600 so it should hold its own :). I was looking at the 965, but should I really bay the extra money for.2ghz more when im just going to oc the 955 to 3.6? I was just trying to save a few bucks. Ill go down to 4gb of RAM I heard GTA4 is a RAM intensive game so I figured 8gb would help me out. Taking off the extra RAM will help me run x2 750gb HDD tho so Its a nice trade off :)

floridaskater05

If you're only going to stop at 3.6/3.8ghz, then the 955 would be fine for you. However, if you are willing to push the limits of your overclock, then the C3 965 is known to be able to have a higher probability to reach 4ghz compared to the 955.

As for GTAIV being ram-intensive, it's not so much to say that the extra 4 gigs would increase performance. More GPU memory is usually the kicker when it comes to that game though, since it requires at least 1.5 gigs of VRAM to fully max out the game (view distance is a memory-eating monster :?).

well it was for that plus I had the extra slots so I figured why not fill them lol. Ill throw it in later when I got some cash to throw away... will add a second 5850 and 2 more monitors first tho :P and yea I dont need the processor to go over 4ghz

Looks like I'll be going with 2 750gb caviar blacks then :) and to the guy that told me go with the i7 Im not spending 300 bucks on a cpu when a phenom quad will do me just fine. also the cpu cooler I dont plan on doing a extreme over clock on it 3.2ghz is pretty fast and ill prob put it up to 3.6-3.8 like i did my q6600 so it should hold its own :). I was looking at the 965, but should I really bay the extra money for.2ghz more when im just going to oc the 955 to 3.6? I was just trying to save a few bucks. Ill go down to 4gb of RAM I heard GTA4 is a RAM intensive game so I figured 8gb would help me out. Taking off the extra RAM will help me run x2 750gb HDD tho so Its a nice trade off :)

floridaskater05

yeah, you want 7200 rpm 32mb cache hard drive for sure. toss out the green crap. i'm all for saving the planet but sometimes hard drive performance comes first :Dpaullywog

There's a bad feeling with the ASUS monitors. Go for LG or Benq since it seems you wont be spending much on your monitor. Go for the Caviar Black 640 $95 bucks at most whats the fuss. If you're gonna put 8gb ram on it you better get it on a 64-bit windows and get a something like core i5 or i7. I dont think Phenom will support that much Ram, you better off with a intel core i5 or 7.

Hard drive is a low power-consumption device. Getting any "green" edition is an unnesscary downgrade. I need that Quagmire rant on Brian...

Get the black editions instead. Only thing faster are the SSD monsters.

redneckdouglas