HowDee all,
I'm new here and not nearly as tech savy as most of you seem to be, I've added hardware to upgrade my rig but never built one myself before. I stumbled upon this site while reaserching about building a gaming computer and read through Caldezar's thread about his $2500 machine. I spoke with Caldezar to make sure he didn't mind me "borrowing" a lot of his build as I have read, re-read and researched a lot about the hardware he posted and everyones comments and made some slight adjustments and was hoping for some feedback.
I'm a gamer, not hard core but constantly playing something, and plan on joining SWTOR as well when it comes out, but also mutlitask while playing almost everything. So while the machine will primarily be for gaming it will be used for general use as well; hense why Caldezar's hard work in his build appealed to me so much, as he was doing similar things.
Now $2200 is not a hard cap, but I don't really want to spend 3-4k on a computer, so this price range and parts that I picked all are good value from the reviews I've read and are fairly priced from NCIX, haven't done any PM as yet.
Silverstone Fortress FT02B -
$250 XFX 850W Black Edition - PM -
$140 Gigabyte 890FXA-UD5 - PM -
$180 AMD Phenom II X6 1055T - PM -
$200 2x Corsair XMS3 4GB DDR3 2X2GB DDR3-1600 - PM -
$200 2x Diamond Radeon HD 5850 725MHZ 1GB - PM -
$640 2x Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA3 6GB/S -
$200 Scythe Mugen 2 REV.B. - $45 + $7 for Bracket
Very simply what I changed was the 2 video cards to 5850's and the cooling fan. The reviews I read about the 5850's showed they were very good cards for the price and when OC they were compareable to the 5870's... not to mention saved me about $300. The cooling fan I choose had good reviews and was also cheaper, and since the case already comes with 3 fans and nose absorbtion, it will fend off the noisy video cards.
Any advice or feedback is welcome, I know you've already looked over Caldezar's, so this is just a couple minor tweaks to what he already did.
Thanx for your hard work Caldezar,
Kamyn