Configuration Help

Hello Everyone,

I wanted to buy a new computer and have been looking around for awhile. I priced out the parts and then a friend recommended this site to me. I had a bad experience with a small OEM before and was skeptical, but since these guys seem to have great reviews ( and unlike the other company which was more of a "bang for your buck", never skimp on cost if you want quality). Anyways, I read the instructions on how best to ask for help so I'm going to be following that guide. If you need more information I would be happy to provide it

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Budget
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*I'd say between 1600-2000. I can go a little over and a little under than that but i would like to keep it in that range
*The budget will not have to include a monitor but if it were to include keyboards and a mouse that would be great, if not no biggie either. I can get those for cheap anyways.
*The computer must be able to handle two monitors easily

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Use for my computer
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*Honestly the only game I really play on my current computer is SC2 and that hardly needs a high-end system. However there are some games that are coming out that I would love to be able to play on my computer and make them look better than on my ps3 (for example Rage by Id software looks awesome)
*I also need the computer to be a dev environment. I am a programmer by profession. I know this doesn't require a lot of the high end stuff but I have been thinking about indie games development for the xbox and it would be nice to have a decent system for that.
*In my spare time, I like to mix music. I play the guitar and also like to remix songs that I like. So a pretty nice sound card is a must. Obviously it doesn't need to be top of the line, trust me unless your yo yo ma, your probably not going to be able to tell the difference in anything above 160kbps (and for 90% of the population anything above 128kbps is unlikely to make a huge difference)
*Finally I do enjoy watching movies on my computer. Although the opportunity is rare. HD is great but most of the time I just watch stuff on netflix cause I'm too lazy to mail the stuff back. I have my ps3 anyways.

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Special Needs
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*Instead of the GTX 480 card I was thinking of getting a 2xGTX 470 in SLI.
*Liquid cooling sounds cool(no pun intended) but I have never had one and I don't know what kind of maintenance they will require.
*I would really like hot-swap bays for hard drives

Thanks in advance for the help guys and gals.

Thank you very much for your help. I will probably forgo the GTX 470 SLI since I'm probably not going to need it. I used your second configuration and made a couple of changes to it.


http://www.digitalstormonline.com/comploadsaved.asp?id=433830

Basically I added a 32 GB SSD Drive for the primary OS and then a 1TB drive for a secondary drive. Do you think its a good idea. I currently use a 256 GB SSd drive on my laptop and it is absolutely amazing. I don't think i want to spend that money again though.

I know I'm going to be picking up more games in the future, but after reading your article I realized that "max" settings is not something I should look for necessarily within my budget.

On soundcards though, the reason that I wanted to Auzen X-Fi Bravura was for the interchangeable OPAMPS. If you don't know what those are you can read http://www.auzentech.com/site/products/opamp_intro.php its a pretty good intro. However unless you really are into professional music mixing etc. that feature is totally useless for you and so probably not worth the money for the card.

Again thanks for your help and I think i picked out a good computer for my budget.


Edited by kcudeht - 19 Aug 2010 at 4:05pm

That is an SLC SSD.. best you can get

Hey wow! That's a X25-E for $130? Get it!! DS must be hard up to get rid of their stock of them, since prices on them never dropped and they're usually stupid expensive.

They don't have the slow write speed like the MLC X25-M or X25-V models, even their small file write speed is a bit better too.

Thanks for all your help guys, i really appreciate it. This has been very helpful.

Do you guys know if DS will pre-install a game I already have? I own SC2 and it won't be a big deal to download the game or anything but it would be nice if they could use their OEM copy and have me provide the license code etc. It's not going to stop me from buying th computer by anymeans.

Gah. just hit stage 7. no turning back now i suppose. lol. Well, at least i'll get it soon!   

Yeah, you'll probably need that 8GB in order to fit a game on it along with your OS and programs, but the performance on the E is quite a bit better than the V, according to the previous posts.

@kcudeht, the guy who this thread was actually meant for, you could email them and call them up and ask that, i'm sure they probably could.



Edited by Ch3ssplay3r - 19 Aug 2010 at 5:33pm