October 22, 2010

• My Dream PC

  Since I started working nights again, I’ve spent the bulk of my free time surfing Newegg.com. I’ve “built” countless PC’s (and by that I mean I’ve created several wish lists) over the past few months, and in my browsing I’ve found a few really great parts that I added to my “Dream PC” wish list. The list is now complete, and I’d like to share it with you.

   Antec Lanboy Air Computer Case – This thing is absolutely beautiful. It’s really expensive (almost $200), and it hurts knowing I can’t afford it right now. There are all kinds of pictures and videos of this thing out there, check them out. You will be amazed (even if you’re not into nerd-porn).

  Corsair HX Series 750W PSU – This power supply is a fantastic deal. It’s modular, but the 20+4 pin board power (I really don’t know why they still do the 20+4, I’ve never even seen a board that uses only 20 pins), and the 8 pin CPU power cable are, umm…..not modular. It’s also 80 Plus Silver certified, automatically adjusts to the input voltage/amperage, and has four 8-pin (6+2) PCI-E plugs for SLI and Crossfire support.

  Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3 ATX Motherboard – This is a really great board. It’s got 2 PCI-E x1 slots, 2 PCI-E x16 slots (one running at x16, one running at x4), 3 PCI slots (PCI is old school, if not obselete, but there’s a fair amount of cards out there that don’t require the high bandwidth of PCI-E), and my favorite part, the SATA III ports. Most boards with SATA III ports on them have 6 SATA II ports and 2 SATA III ports. This board has the opposite! Six SATA III ports, and two SATA II ports! Talk about future proof! It also has the AMD 870 chipset, which has everything I need without the frills. The AMD 890 chipset supports dual gigabit LAN, which is really nice to have if you’ve got an Xbox, or some other network-ready peripheral device that isn’t worth sharing over the network, or a crossover CAT5 cable for no-lag one-on-one multiplayer games.

  AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition – A six-core processor that comes running at 3.2GHz out of the box for under $300. That, my friends, cannot be beat.

  G.Skill Ripjaws 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1333 (PC 10666) – The other day I was downloading the most recent season of Criminal Minds (the best show on network television since The Pretender) in the background (iTunes) and I popped in a DVD. A message came up saying that I had insufficient memory to perform the task! I’ve got 4GB’s of DDR3 1333, how could that possibly not be enough? Well, my dream PC will not have that problem. Double it!

  Crucial RealSSD 128GB SSD – This thing is fantastic. I have been looking at SSD’s (solid state disks) virtually since they came out, and this one definitely takes the cake. 355MB/s read speed, 140MB/s write speed, SATA III interface, 2.5″ form factor, 128GB capacity, for roughly $270. 128GB’s should be enough to install windows and a few commonly used programs without overloading the drive. I’ve heard that some SSD’s, when full, will erase data at one end to make room on the other end. Who’s idea was that?

  2 x Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB SATA HDD’s – Now, SSD’s are awesome, especially that one, but 128GB’s is nowhere close to enough total space for any computer, unless you only use it to check your email, surf facebook, and watch videos on YouTube. As you might venture to guess, I do a little more than that with my PC. On a past build, I used two of these in RAID 0 as the only hard disk space on the computer, and I haven’t done that since. The reason for that is that sometimes a RAID array can kick out, and if you’re using it as your boot drive when it kicks out, it’s a pain in the butt to get it back the way it should be. Using RAID strictly for data purposes, rather than as a boot drive, will make any problems that arise painless to fix.

  Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 – For some reason the Radeon HD 5000 series graphics cards trump the HD 6000 series cards. This one’s core clock runs at 875Mhz, and the HD 6850 runs at only 725Mhz. The 6000 series cards are PCI-E x16 2.1, though, and the 5000 series cards are PCI-E x16 2.0. I haven’t really read into the differences between the two yet, but I can surely venture to guess that 2.1 is better. The 6000 series cards are also half the price of the 5000 series, so….well frankly I’m a bit confused. Anyway, this card runs a core clock 275MHz faster than my current card, and has 1GB of GDDR5 1200 RAM. With any luck, it’ll run Crysis 2 (due March 2011!!!)

  Windows 7 Home Premium – I see a LOT of “super nerds” (wannabes) out there who pay the extra $70-$100 for Windows 7 Ultimate because they’re just that hardcore. News flash, idiots, the Ultimate version has two or three features more than the Professional version, which has 5 or 6 additional features to the Home Premium version, ALL of which none of you will EVER use. I say this because I bought the ultimate version when Windows 7 came out (because I love playing around with all those additional features) and I found that all the features I was playing around with, also came with the Home Premium version! I checked the Microsoft website for the differences between the versions, and the Professional and Ultimate versions had a few extra features that meant something to somebody, nothing to me. I am currently running Windows 7 Home Premium, and it’s everything I’ll ever need and more. And for those of you who don’t already have Windows 7, FOR GOD SAKE GET IT!!! Windows XP is now two generations behind the times. Get with the program!

  LG DVD Burner SATA – Nothing too special about this, but I wanted to give it a shout out, if you will. There was a time I had stacks of CD and DVD drives of all shapes and sizes laying around, and when one didn’t work I’d try another, and another, and another, and so on. This LG burner has been plug-and-play on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. On many occasions it has been a frustration- (if not life-) saver for me, and it has outlasted and outperformed any other optical drive I’ve ever used. Thanks LG, you rock.

  Have you ever built a computer before? What’s in your dream pc?

  • 5:08 pm
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