It's a toss up if too little RAM or the HDD is the bottleneck IMO

Upgrading the RAM and the OS drive to a SSD both provide substantial performance increases from my experience.

Memory and PSU both look fine, though I normally prefer a modular PSU in this day and age, but for the price (and expect it to take 8-12 weeks to receive that mail-in rebate) it seems to be a good buy

lol sorry vpc, reading comprehension fail :facepalm:

Any reason to go straight to 16GB? Unless you need it, just by 8GB now, and 8GB more at some point in the future if you find you need it.

Unless you are doing some heavy stuff, 8GB is going to be plenty. What you picked out is a good deal, but unless you need all 16GB today, I would go with 8.

Haha, no problem. I edited my post to make sure I didn't sound like an ahole, because that certainly wasn't my intent. just wanted to make sure there wasn't some magical memory out there haha.

I though about going 8 now and 16 later, but for the price I think I'll just go straight 16. Should be fine for the life of this build (and possibly future builds) and I won't have to worry about it. Should be cheaper (or at least about equal) in the long run too

Uh, I doubt it. Unless you expect the price of cheap 1333 DDR3 RAM to go up, it will always be cheaper to expand when you need it. Unless you think you will go to 32GB in the future, just get 2x4GB sticks now, and 2 more when you need it. At least that's what I am doing.

If you can't think of a valid reason why you would need more than 8gb, you are probably better off spending the $30 on tires!

FWIW this is what I got: Newegg.com - G.SKILL Value Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Desktop Memory Model F3-10600CL9D-8GBNT

While it's true that an SSD can improve performance in areas which are disk-intensive (eg: bootup, application load), increasing the size of RAM tends to improve the performance of the machine during interactive operations, such as opening browser tabs or switching from one application to another.

An SSD will improve the speed of page read/write operations, but increasing the size of RAM will reduce or even eliminate the need for paging in the first place.



Agreed that 8 GB is plenty right now. But RAM is so cheap at the moment that you might as well upgrade while you still can.

While it is true that the cost-per-gigabyte in general tends to decrease over time, this holds true ONLY for whatever physical form-factor is in current production, remembering that new memory is NOT backwards-compatible with old motherboards.

Right now, DDR3 RAM is dirt-cheap. But the DDR4 spec has already been finalized, and will be hitting the market by the end of the year. Over the next year or two, the manufacturers will be gradually converting their production lines away from DDR3, and once that happens, the price of DDR3 will start to rise.

For instance, I can get a 4GB stick of DDR3 from Newegg for $16.99 but the cheapest 4GB DDR2 stick has now risen to $70, and will continue to climb as they become more scarce.

Joe, that's really not true. As long as you have 4-8gb of ram, it's not a bottleneck. (for most people this is enough, obviously there are exceptions) For these people, an SSD will make a vastly larger improvement to their everyday computer experience than 4-8gb more ram would.

Hard drives are (this is a fact) the biggest bottlenecks in a modern computer system. Not ram. SSDs are not just used for their high sustained read/write speeds, infact for your average consumer, that's the least beneficial part of an ssd. What you notice most is the insane seek speeds and the 4k IOPS (very small file transfer speeds). This is why SSDs are still so good even on old pentium 4 desktops that are limited to sata1.

DDR4 won't be available for some time still. There are no chipsets on the market yet that can handle ddr4, and there won't be for some time. Don't expect consumer grade DDR4 parts until 2014.

Windows 7 is currently $85 at newegg with this code: EMCYTZT2467

What do you guys think the chances are of it possibly being cheaper at some point this month? I realize it doesn't go on sale much, but with windows 8 out I figured there might be a chance.

Also, I found an old Inno3d Ti4200 8x 128mb graphics card that one of my roommates had. He said I could have it. Would this card offer anything over intel hd 4000 graphics? Also does anybody know what interface it uses? I'm trying to find it online but I'm not having much luck

Judging by the passmark scores, the integrated HD4000 GPU performs about twice as well as that Ti4200.

Which is just as well, since it wouldn't work in a modern computer anyway.

That card is ten years old, and PCIexpress didn't exist in 2002. The Inno3d card, as the name implies (the 8x suffix) uses the AGP bus, and it's been pretty much impossible to buy a motherboard with an AGP slot for many years.

You guys are bastards. Now I have to build a new desktop.

Thanks Joe. That's what I figured, but just wanted to check

Yeah, no worries.

The late 90s / early 2000s sucked in terms of bus standards. Within a period of maybe 8 years, we went through ISA, VESA, EISA, PCI, PCI-X, four different flavors of AGP, and finally, PCIe.

I used to have a box full of expansion cards that worked perfectly well except for the fact that I had nothing to plug them into any more.

Just found this deal: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Seagate-Barr...item19d67bf92e

Pretty crazy. Took a chance and bought it. If there's any problems, between PayPal an my bank I should be fine. Also I figured out I can get windows for free through a program at my school. Things are shaping up nicely

Too good to be true deal looks like it is indeed too good to be true. Seems like it was a hacked eBay account. My order will probably get canceled. Ah, no worries

Am I correct in saying that this graphics card would be complete overkill for any free games out there? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...D=3938566&SID=

Seems like a good deal and I've been toying around with getting a graphics card of the price was right, but I was trying to stay on the lower end of the $100 range. That's Toms pick for the $200 range though

That video card is overkill for a lot of stuff. :D

If by "free games" you mean farmville, then yes.

If you mean things like TF2, then it's definitely at the upper end of the spectrum, but not insanely so.

I mean more along the lines of TF2. What do you think the chances of selling the games that come with it are? Even for like half of the value quoted. I'm not particularly interested in any of them. But if I sold them all for about $80 now the card costs me around $100

Price went up on the card above. Looking at this one now: Newegg.com - XFX CORE Edition FX-777A-ZNF4 Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card
Seems like a decent deal and should be perfectly fine for anything I want to do. May be able to sell the games that come with it. If not, still a decent deal.

Also gonna pick up a CPU cooler so I can play around with overclocking. Nothing ridiculous though. Newegg.com - COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 EVO RR-212E-20PK-R2 Continuous Direct Contact 120mm Sleeve CPU Cooler Compatible with latest Intel 2011/1366/1155 and AMD FM1/FM2/AM3+

And finally some thermal compound: Newegg.com - COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 EVO RR-212E-20PK-R2 Continuous Direct Contact 120mm Sleeve CPU Cooler Compatible with latest Intel 2011/1366/1155 and AMD FM1/FM2/AM3+
With a $11 MIR I found I'll get paid to buy it haha

That gpu is more than sufficient for your needs.

The cpu cooler is plenty for even a high overclock on a 3570k, they're very efficient.

You messed up the link for the TIM (thermal interface material). I really like Noctua NT-H1, but really, between all the good TIM brands there isn't much difference in performance.