More Questions Than You Can Shake A Stick At

Hey Darkwing... Most of these are just opinion.  You're going to get a different answer from each different person:

1. I think you wants nvidia instead of ATI

2. check answer to number 1.

3. if the mombo says ddr3 then it works with that, if it says ddr2 then it works with that

4. cooling is used to help you over clock your processor so you can get a faster speed, eg., you get a q9450 which is at 2.6GHz and you can over clock that to run at say 3.2GHz. Now liquid cooling will get your fastest/most stable results. which is best for you? stage 3 or if you want to have great OC then liquid cooling.

5. check answer to question 4.

6. check answer to question 4.

7. going from 2.6 to 3.2 is a pretty good leap in performance.

8. check answer to question 4.

9. that depends on what you are getting. I will configure something at the end of this post.

10. I think if you shop around one drive should be cheaper,but you don't want to get one big drive and run everything off of that. forget raid, instead get a 150GB Raptor which has a 10,000rpm for your OS drive then get a second slower drive for everything else, eg., 500GB 7200rpm.

this way things are easily managed and if your OS drive goes bad you won't lose your files on the second drive. It also makes defrag and backup and all around maintaining much easier.

11. look for gray to gray frames per second, resolution, manufacturer, color depth, color count, contrast ratio.


I'm a bit over your budget $3083

but its a kick butt system and you can upgrade it next even to be even a bigger monster with a simple processor upgrade.

so have a look and see what you think all the none needed stuff is out.

I would recommend raising the warranty to 4 years

basically, OS, programs, and such, files and everything else independent of the os would go on the second HDD.

for example all your music and dvd files need to be on that second HDD, otherwise if you have one HDD and it goes bad you lose everything.

your biggest cost in that system is your video card, other then the cpu

ya I run 74GB Raptor just fine, but then you will need to install your games on the second HDD, cause they are getting pretty big these day.

I kept the same configuration, but droped down to stage 3 fan cooling and the case down to 850si and the price came down to 2734.

the only thing I don't like is that if you don't get liquid cooling now, to upgrade that later you will have to send it in.

Edited by DST4ME - 02 Sep 2008 at 5:15pm

I'm sorry I forgot to mention, in order to get the 2700 price I had to drop the ram to 2GB also.

but again in a few month you can spend a 100$ and upgrade to 4GB

will i take a huge performance hit from dropping to 2gb? i would prefer the 4g very much so what i did on that config is dropped the case to the antec 900 (i hope that doesnt ruin anything) and got about 200 off. air flow doesnt matte so much when ur liquid cooled right??  Also i threw in all the crap with it so see the total cost i would be looking at. This is the new tag thing it is now.