http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820233296
It's actually $66 not 60, but shipping is free at least.
E: I think its just a 1 day sale as well.
Last edited by Corndogman; September 19th, 2012 at 05:57 PM.
You can use your old DVD drives in the new case, the 5.25" bay is a standard. I'm assuming you bought an ATX PSU, so any ATX case and most micro-ATX cases will house it.
It's old and crippled, and I don't like buying crippled hardware...Z68 was the superior option during SB's heyday and well worth the premium, as it opened up many upgrade options. He's also going to want something that can potentially do PCI-E 3.0 if he decides he wants to upgrade the GPU again...those Radeon HD8000-series chips are just around the corner.
Spend more now, spend less later. Spend less now, spend even more than you should later. If he were on a higher budget I'd say go with X79, as the price difference over a top-end Z77 is negligible and it still has some life left in it. LGA 1155 is about to reach end-of-life, while LGA2011 still supposedly gets one more refresh. Socket AM3 on the AMD side is also supposedly a dead end now.
Ok so heres what I've got now, thoughts?
Intel Core i5-3450 Ivy Bridge 3.1GHz (Only $15 more than the other one, faster and consumes less power)
ASRock H77 Pro4-M
IN WIN MANA134 Black SEEC Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
CORSAIR XMS 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM
Along with the Radeon HD 6950 that I already have and 500w PSU.
Looks good to me. I would say bump up to 1600MHz on the RAM, but I know that Intel CPUs really don't care what speed your RAM is. AMD CPUs are more affected by it. Case isn't really my style (I like sleek and minimal), but the price is right and the reviews are good. My only gripe on the case is that there aren't more reviews.
My reasoning for that case is that its the biggest one I could find at that price. I basically had to hammer my GPU into my current case so I wanted to make sure I had lots of space for that and cable management. I'm not entirely sold on its looks either, but it looks rugged as hell, and in reality its just a box that sits under my desk so I'm not too concerned about it. Might change it though.
I've already purchased the RAM since its a limited time offer, but I'd like to get some more feedback before I go ahead on the other stuff.
And you see very little improvement with it. Intel CPUs don't care much for increased speed from what I've seen, and what little they do won't matter because he's not building a high-end rig here. He'll be HDD and GPU bottlenecked before that RAM speed really starts to matter.
In the final analysis, capacity is often more important than speed. If you run out of RAM, it won't matter how fast it is because there won't be any left. You can argue that he doesn't need 16GB and that 8GB is enough, but if he wants to save money down the road he's better off grabbing 16 now rather than 8GB now and 8GB later. DDR3 prices are nearing the bottom of the price curve.
Last edited by Warsaw; September 19th, 2012 at 09:36 PM.
16 gigs for $100 USD isn't bad at all, I jumped on 8 Gb of 1600 for 50 when it was on sale a few months back, I thought that was a total steal, since the last time I bought RAM it was 4 Gb for $100, and that was on sale. So maybe prices have just dropped dramatically, but that seems like it was a good price to me.
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