Please advise....

I suppose I should add that I'll be connecting to a 24" HP HDMI monitor. Sound is not a big deal, running Dolby 2.1 now with 2 speakers and a subwoofer (sounds great to me!).

What would you reccomend for alternative chassis. I want a good cooling configuration, and it woud be sooo nice to have handy peripheral plug ins. Gettin' a bit long in tooth for crawling around a rig. I decided to go with a 1000w Corsair PSU for quality.

Justin has an irrational hate of the HAFs. 

I prefer and recommend the HAF 932. Absolutely great case for the money, lots of room, very good cooling.

I like the assassin case as well. Looks like it would keep the components cool and clean sense I have a black lab that sometimes parks herself right infront of my HAF case. Question tho what is the difference between the assassin and raven 2 cases? they look really close together but the raven 2 is much cheaper.

Originally posted by Dragoonseal Justin has an irrational hate of the HAFs.  I prefer and recommend the HAF 932. Absolutely great case for the money, lots of room, very good cooling.

And apparently SLI    Theres nothing wrong with SLI if you can afford it buy it, and when its tiem to upgrade, buy two new cards and SLI those...but the 570 has at least 2 or more years of decent functionality....or more.

Well, since I dropped the sli idea (because I'm a simple man, with simple tastes, who likes simple things, THAT DON'T BREAK....or otherwise tax my patience); I find I have a few more $$ to spend. Now thinking of a 40 Gb SSD No.1 drive, a 80 Gb SSD No.2 drive, and the 1 Tb Corsair drive for No. 3. No. 1 drive will be for OS and graghics apps. No. 2 drive strictly for gaming, and No. 3 drive for multimedia. Does that sound reasonable?

I thought you guys recommend Intell SSd's. I don't see a 120 Gb Intell in config options. There's a Corsair 120 Gb SSD. How's that compare to Intell? A 120 Gb SSD is more than enough for me. 160 Gb is too much. Also expensive. Yes it is simpler. I'm beginin' to like the way you think........

How significant is the write times between the 40 Gb Intell and the 80 Gb Intell? Would I really notice it? Would having the OS on the slower drive also affect the game speed on the faster drive? Also I kind of like the idea of a separate HD for gaming; if I lose the OS from corrupted data (a common MS issue), It won't affect saved game data on a separate disk, if I have to reinstall Windows. Photoshop and Blender saves will be on the Caviar HD, thus unaffected.

There is not a huge difference between the 40GB and 80GB Intels, biggest difference is the lower sequential write speeds on the 40GB, but random read/write speeds of small 4k files are virtually identical on the two.

Keep in mind a lot of games don't store save game data where they are installed, but rather save to the Users folder on the OS drive.

Bang Per Buck I believe is the 80GB intel.....or so most people here seem to think.

You can save a lot of money on the case, if you insist on the over priced assassin, then I don't see how to get you down that $300 not to mention shipping costs.

I would go with a single 160GB rather than 2 80GB if it were me...aside from the case the only cost cutting I can see doing is going with a single GTX 570 card and adding a second one later if you need it......your Original post doesnt indicate any heavy duty gaming...

Listen to MagiK and drop the Assassin, you don't need to disable any os services, it makes no difference to apps/games.

I missed it but why a 160GB and not a 80GB ssd for HDD1?

Since I don't consider myself to be an 'extreme' gamer. I think 1 570 gpu is satisfactory. I can pick up another later, if so inclined. I can pick up 1 or 2 Caviar 1 Tb HDD's at NewEgg for under $80 apice.

There are other cases with 3 x 230mm fans, in short there are cases with better airflow. trust me if it was worth it, we would be recommending it, but we have no reason to do so when there are cases with better airflow and price.

don't limit your oc either, with Noctua you should be good to go, if you want better cooling then the u12 then go with the d14.( 2 x 140mm)

Heat shouldn't be an issue on the Noctua cooler, even at 3.9GHz. 

Edited by venom - 18 Dec 2010 at 5:09am

One thing that really needs to be stressed about your case consideration.
It's your system, pick the one you like even if the reason is "just because"  The Assassin is a nice case, but since you specified a budget, thats an easy place to save some $$$   but ultimately YOU are the one who has to look at it, if you like it and can get it without sacrificing too much performance....go for it.

Originally posted by venom Originally posted by Dragoonseal Originally posted by steamboateng I thought you guys recommend Intell SSd's. I don't see a 120 Gb Intell in config options. There's a Corsair 120 Gb SSD. How's that compare to Intell? A 120 Gb SSD is more than enough for me. 160 Gb is too much. Also expensive. Yes it is simpler. I'm beginin' to like the way you think........ Different controllers, that 120GB Corsair is a SandForce drive. Stick with a 40/80/160GB Intel SSD, much better steady state performance and reliability. There is a 120GB Intel SSD, but DS does not carry it, so 80GB or 160GB. I don't see any reason why not to get a Corsair Force drive, at only +$63 for a 120GB over the Intel 80GB, sound like a win to me.   http://www.anandtech.com/show/3656/corsairs-force-ssd-reviewed-sf1200-is-very-good/6   I would like to see the "steady state performance" (?) and "reliability" backed up with some sort of data though.

Reliability:
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/810-6/taux-pannes-composants.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/10/flash_fails_more_than_hdd/

Steady state performance:
This is the non-peak performance an SSD will settle into after a time, as a SSD's automatic maintenance works against the performance degrading effects of dirty blocks and fragmentation. TRIM assists in this, but it is still up to the SSD controller how it goes utilizing it and how proactive it is with maintenance, too much and write amplification gets driven up and the drive's NAND gets worn out quicker.

Some SSDs like Intel have noticeably better steady state performance, they can handle heavy work loads, highly random work loads, and even the absence of TRIM very well and lose little performance almost no matter what you throw at it. However SandForce SSDs on the other hand do not.

First off you gotta cover that SandForce SSD performance numbers are bogus even from the start anyway. SandForce drives use compression to write less to the NAND so it gets worn out slower, it was made to be able to get the most out of lower quality NAND. Unfortunately this means you tend to benchmark its compression algorithms instead of the drive's actual performance if your benchmark uses easily compressible data (i.e. all 0s or 1s). Give it actual random data though and you don't get anywhere near advertised values. Examples: Random data, highly compressible data (all 0s).

Now keep in mind this is only factory fresh out of the box peak performance. SandForce drives have a nasty secret, give them a day or two for it to develop a garbage collection map and the DuraClass kicks it to literately and intentionally throttle back performance for the sake of making the NAND last longer. The more the drive is used and the more incompressible data is written the more it is throttled. Give a read through of this thread on the OCZ forum, the staff give a good amount of info on it. End result is that they settle into a steady state with performance vastly lower than peak (which in itself is never up to advertised levels), and peak performance will never be achieved again. You could Secure Erase one to clear the GC map and start fresh with peak performance again, but it'd only last a day or two.

SandForce drives need big "Results may vary" and "Actual product may differ" stickers, there is a lot of deception with them. Unless you can find some on sale with vastly cheaper GB/$ prices and don't mind the lower performance and greater chance of failure, I would never recommend one over an Intel, they are just not up to snuff.