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Mallexia
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re: New computer for Mallie!

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Ok all you computer buffs! Ive never built a computer and frankly, not even really entirely sure where to start. Ill be sure to use newegg and other sites to price match, I am probably going to pick most of my parts up at memoryexpress and possibly just pay the 50 bucks for them to assemble it.

I have a couple of questions if anyone has some insight, yiffy gave me some tips in game! thanks yiffy.

Goal - High End Gaming Computer
Budget 1000 - 1500 (the cheaper the better though)
Games to play in the near future - Wow, SC2, Diablo 3, (want to play on max)

Questions.
From what ive read online I5 is typically enough for a price concious build.. or should I go for I7 if I want it to last a long time?

I will be going to an SSD for os and games, and mechanical for storage.

Do I have to worry much about part compatibility nowadays? How do you find that informatino out?

I have a nice set of speakers, should I get a sound card?

I may not be able to run a wire into the room, is there acceptable wireless desktop options for internet?

Is it better do go with a single high end video card or 2 and use SLI?

What to look for in RAM?

Is watercooling worth it? (I dont mind a bit fan noise, but the quieter the better)

Anything else I should know?

Any input is appreciated. Thanks guys Happy
Rildasomia
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re: New computer for Mallie!

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Mal,
Ty and I are probably going to be building my machine up today online and looking for deals. So once we have that we can post the info for you. Basically I am looking at an i7, a top 20 or better Vid card, 8G of ram I think (with room to grow) and all under $1k. Not that hard if you do it yourself.

As for sound card, the on board sound card is usually good enough, unless your REALLY into music and music production on your computer. And since your asking about it, I am guessing you aren't. Save the money for now as you will have sound, and if you want better later, get it then, or for Christmas!

Atrias uses a top end wireless modem on his desktop, he or Laan should be able to tell you which one to use.

The last bit of quick advice is that some cases and pwr sup are not compatible with the motherboards. I forget which manufacturer it was but Turalon got hosed when he was building his up last year and ended up with two cases.

Will put a bug in the ear of Laan and Ty (both IT pro's) that this post is up and open so to drop by.

Tetra


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Rildasomia
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FYI, Ty uses this site for the video card benchmarks: http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

Below is what I'd be looking at for a vid card regardless. Min PS required is 500W so ideally you'd want at least a 600+ if you were to add a bunch of other things or upgrade it in a couple years. At #13 overall on the benchmark tests and by far the cheapest card for the $$, this is your best value. $170-30 rebate= $140

Radeon 6850

Operating System: Win 7 Pro OEM Full $140

Windows 7 Pro

HD - 500GB 6GB/S 7200RPM HD $45

Hard Drive

MB PROCESSOR & RAM KIT: $529

i7 Quad Core MB & 8G RAM

Case: Thermaltake V9 Black Edition $95

Case

PS: Thermaltake 600Watt $45

Power Supply


Total = ~$1000 after rebates before taxes

Plus a DVD drive you can cannibalize from your old rig.


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Belgarion.
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re: New computer for Mallie!

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Just a couple additions. Always go for top chipset you can, i7, and Yiffy even has an inexpensive 6core, though that's not useful in most gaming, WoW in particular.

Video, get the best card/s and most memory on them you can, I generally get one card geration less than bleeding edge for the price break, they change every couple months anyways. There is no SLI or Xfire benefit in WoW, though other games take advantage of their capability.

Water cooling is nice performance-wise, but on my last rig, it was actually considerably louder than fans, was not happy with it at all. Personally, I will never watercool again.

Memory, naturally more is better, and faster is better as well, make sure you know the speed you are getting. Used to be 1333 was good and 1666 top end, not sure if that's still true. Get the largest per stick you can for your cofiguration, ie two 4gig sticks rather than four 2gig sticks, for future expansion.

Power supply, all this stuff, especially graphics, takes juice. 600w seems just barely capable to me. My last desktop had 1200w, though I'd say 800-900w would be fine.

Wireless is fine, though from my same router I notice more 1-2 second lag spikes on wireless vice cat5. Most motherboards actually have it built in, and nibs are cheap regardless. I've looked at the 'game enhanced' ones, and actually had that style router, but never noticed any difference, seems all hype to me, and definitely not necessary. I assume you are not talking 3/4g options from AT&T/sprint/Verizon; while those are definitely fine for the road and I'll use them rather than a hotel conn, gaming doesn't actually use that much of your allowed data, patching and updates will blow through your allowance like tissue paper. Make sure you get the latest capability card/router, ie a/b/g are outdated, N was latest a year or so ago, not sure if there's a new standard yet. That definitely makes a nice difference.

Sound, on board sound is totally fine, and sound cards or USB devices are very cheap regardless.

Hard drives, not a big deal, pretty cheap regardless. You'll use at least two, one for system/games and one for storage. On the smaller system drive, get the fastest rotation they have (probably 10k) or a solid state if price is right, and use it for nothing but windows, your games, and drivers. Smaller drive size means smaller clusters and quicker/more efficient data retrieval. All data, productivity, not-graphics-or-load-screen-intensive games and such go on the much larger data drive, keep the game drive clean. I'd go with something like a 128/256g ss or 250-500g 10krpm for game drive, and as large a data drive as is reasonably priced, one to three terabits is pretty reasonable and you can never have too much storage, heh.

I'd talk to Yiffy as well, he has a very nice Falcon rig with overkill fps in the several hundreds. Falcon is waay to pricy, but he said he looked a duplicating his machine via Newegg, and was able to do it for around a thousand bucks..

Tired of typing, good luck. Now if we can just get Uel's wife on board . . .

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Mallexia
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re: New computer for Mallie!

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Wow. Thanks guys! That definitely helps. I think Im going to be picking it up next week. All this info will be super helpful.

And your right, Im not using cell phone wifi, just wifi from my shaw internet. The router is only 15 ft away but there is no way to hide a cable and Im renting so I dont want to install anything. Ill look for a motherboard that has it or maybe just add a wireless pci card.

another question, whats the difference between windows 7 home and pro?
Mallexia
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re: New computer for Mallie!

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Ok

I had to change a few parts but for the most part I think Ive got a good set up.

ThermalTake V9 BlacX Edition Case
$109.99 (88.99 price match)

Intel Core™ i7-2600K Processor, 3.40GHz w/ 8MB Cache
$304.99

Asus P8P67 LE Rev 3.0 w/ DualDDR3 1600, 7.1 Audio, Gigabit Lan, 1394, CrossFireX
$134.99 (124.99 price match)

Corsair Force Series 3 Solid State Drive SATA III, 120GB
$179.99 (149.99 price match)

Seagate 3TB Barracuda XT SATA III w/ NCQ, 64MB Cache
$179.99 (169.99 price match)

LG Super-Multi Security 22x DVD Writer, IDE w/ Lightscribe, Black (OEM)
$14.99 (need one)

HIS Radeon HD 6850 1GB GDDR5 PCI-E w/ Dual DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort
$169.99 (couldn't find the xfx version at memory express)

Asus PCE-N13 Wireless N PCI-E Adapter
$29.99 (need one)

ThermalTake TR2 600W Power Supply
$59.99 (39.99 price match)

Microsoft Windows 7 Professional x64 (64-bit) SP1 DVD - OEM
$149.99 (129.99 price match)

Corsair Vengeance 8GB DDR3 1600MHz CL8 Dual Channel Kit (2 x 4GB)
$79.99

=$1303.89

Little more expensive then the one suggested, but the difference is really just in the hard drives, cause Id like to go with the SSD + Mechanical HD set up. Could maybe go with a smaller then 120GB.

Which works out cause I have $250 in gift cards, so really itll be just about 1100 for me after taxes. Still might go with the $50 set up, Im thinking itll be worth it rather then mess around with it myself.

Anyways, Im going to pick everything up next weekend. Let me know what you guys think Happy
Belgarion.
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re: New computer for Mallie!

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Sounds like a 3-5kdps increase to me. woot!

Belgarion
Ekard12379
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re: New computer for Mallie!

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Looks good. I didn't go solid state for Tetra as it would have put the $$ above the $1k max that had been set. Likewise, the PS will more than handle things for a while but a bigger one was about twice the cost.

Windows 7 Pro gives you a couple potentially important things:

"In addition to full-system Backup and Restore found in all editions, you can back up to a home or business network." So you can actually have a backup if your HD dies. Not a big deal if you have a solid state, but for everyone else....

Connect to company networks easily and more securely with Domain Join. Depends on how crazy you are at home, but I know too many people that actually run a home domain at this point to keep their kids off stuff.

And now the potential biggie....

Run many Windows XP business programs in Windows XP Mode (separate download). Don't know what you were running before, but this helps with a lot of otherwise "broken" programs.


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re: New computer for Mallie!

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I'm working on educating myself on this subject - and have a few questions. Ideally I think I want to put my money in the v card with the most efficient chip for the job. I also need to consider upgrades.

I think there are 2 intel sockets that support the i7 - the LGA-1366 and the LGA 1155 - there may be more but these are the ones im seeing. The 1366 is probably going to support the i9 chip down the road, and the 1155 may not. Is it worth worrying about that?

I'm thinking of using an i5-2500 chip because Im reading that the performance difference in gaming isn't worth the cost to go to an i7. The caveat being that i can upgrade down the road when the i7 becomes 2nd generation. Thoughts?

The boot drive should have how much space? is 128gb too much? 64gb seems like it should hold all i need... Was leaning towards 64gb ssd for this job.

Lemme know what u think - I'll probably have more questions as i work thru this stuff.
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So I've been trying to put together a rig that is <$1000.

The 1366 socket/i7 is probably out of reach at this price point unless I sacrifice a bit on the V-card. I think the biggest bang for my performance dollar will be on the v-card.

I need some help shopping - I can't find Mallie's prices. Are these USD?

So far - here is what I have:

Case: COOLER MASTER HAF 912 RC-912-KKN1 Black SECC/ ABS Plastic ATX Mid Tower Computer Case $60

Processor:
Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost) 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor $220

Motherboard:
GIGABYTE GA-Z68A-D3H-B3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard $114

RAM:
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) Desktop Memory Model F3-8500CL7D-8GBRL $43

Video Card:
HIS H695FN2G2M Radeon HD 6950 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card with Eyefinity $260

Power Supply:
Thermaltake TR2 600W Power Supply $70

Boot Drive:
Corsair Force Series 3 CSSD-F90GB3-BK 2.5" 90GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) $160

OS:
Windows 7 Pro for $140

Any issues with re-using my old 120gb hard drive for the secondary internal drive? I have an external 1tb drive for storage.

If this works Im at $1067 - gotta do a little shopping to make it work.

Maybe I should go the i7 /1155 route with a mechanical drive? Not sure which would impact performance more.

EDIT: Have gone with this setup but increased SSD to 120gb and the PS to 750W - able to find it all for $1160. Gonna order it all tomorrow.
Rildasomia
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I personally would save somewhere else vs going with the i5. You will get more longevity out of the i7 with Hyperthreading since that is where programs are going now.


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re: New computer for Mallie!

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Uelander wrote:
So I've been trying to put together a rig that is <$1000.

The 1366 socket/i7 is probably out of reach at this price point unless I sacrifice a bit on the V-card. I think the biggest bang for my performance dollar will be on the v-card.

I need some help shopping - I can't find Mallie's prices. Are these USD?

So far - here is what I have:

Case: COOLER MASTER HAF 912 RC-912-KKN1 Black SECC/ ABS Plastic ATX Mid Tower Computer Case $60

Processor:
Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost) 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor $220

Motherboard:
GIGABYTE GA-Z68A-D3H-B3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard $114

RAM:
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) Desktop Memory Model F3-8500CL7D-8GBRL $43

Video Card:
HIS H695FN2G2M Radeon HD 6950 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card with Eyefinity $260

Power Supply:
Thermaltake TR2 600W Power Supply $70

Boot Drive:
Corsair Force Series 3 CSSD-F90GB3-BK 2.5" 90GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) $160

OS:
Windows 7 Pro for $140

Any issues with re-using my old 120gb hard drive for the secondary internal drive? I have an external 1tb drive for storage.

If this works Im at $1067 - gotta do a little shopping to make it work.

Maybe I should go the i7 /1155 route with a mechanical drive? Not sure which would impact performance more.

EDIT: Have gone with this setup but increased SSD to 120gb and the PS to 750W - able to find it all for $1160. Gonna order it all tomorrow.


Uggh....hoping that you see this before you order.....

1st To answer your couple questions:
1) I know that all of Tetra's pricing is USD from Tigerdirect. From your pricing and looking, it looks like you prefer NewEgg. Doesn't really matter which one, though NewEgg I've found is typically more expensive.

2) Normally no, there should be no problem slaving your existing 120GB HD to the new box, but you must have enough IDE conrollers on the MB and the one you selected has 0. This is potentially a pitfall for all of the MB you would be looking at. The thing to remember with a data drive is that you don't run WOW (or whatever your main game(s) are) from it and make sure it's pinsetting is slave and not master or cable-select.

3) For an OS partition, 60GB is plenty. There is a difference between Drive size and Partition size though. Drive is the physical capacity of the disk. You never want to exceed half full or you'll lose a ton of speed on physical disks. Partition size is the portion of the HD that you allocate to call C, D, etc. Technically speaking you can have a one 4GB HD with partitions that show up in the OS as drives A-Z with tiny tiny total drive capacities. You would ideally want at least a 60, preferably an 80-120GB HD for your OS drive and a large capacity (over 500GB) for storage drives that can have slower RPM and data transfer speeds.

On to the some explanation/recommendation of things:

At the risk of sounding like I'm ripping your choices to pieces.....here goes...

Typically the biggest bottleneck on your computer is a combination of your ram (including speed not just amount!) / processor (previously called the front side bus, not just the total Ghz speed + number of cores / and video card capabilites in terms of ram amount + speed of ram on card and speed of graphics card processor. Nowadays you also need to take into account the speed of the HD as that has become the bigger bottleneck.

HD:

A SSD HD does operate faster and have a much lower failure / better reliability vs a mechanical one, but at a ton more cost ($40 vs $140 or more for a lot less size capacity and same speed). The thing you need to look at here is the interface speed and weigh that and reliability against your cost. Make sure it's SATA 6Gbps and not SATA 3Gbps or you've cut your throughput from the HD in half! This is more a case of peace of mind and budget vs $$ and almost nothing else.

RAM:
The ram that you're ordering is the slowest supported ram for the MB 1066Mhz. You generally want middle of the road to gain max speed. In this case, as is the case with Tetra's pc, that's 1600Mhz. Otherwise you're bottle-necking yourself with the RAM at 600Mhz slower!!!!!! Can't stress this one enough! For $10 more this RAM kit is SOOO worth it: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=40739&CatId=4534 (Just make sure the RAM TIMING matches that of your MB!! I couldn't find the timing for the MB on either newegg or tigerdirect's website.)

CASE:
Tetra's case while $40 more has two 200mm fans preinstalled which allows for the use of the stock processor heatsink and fan. The case that you ordered only has room for a 120mm fan on the side and a 200 on the top - neither of which is preinstalled. Both cases use the PS (power supply) mounted with airflow from underneath and the 120mm fans at the front to cool the HD's and back above to cool the internal air. After costing those 2 fans, you're at 1 smaller/noisier fan and only $5 cheaper! You'll also most likely have to purchase a different processor heat sync and fan making it more expensive! Also, though less of an issue, you have to remove half your hd storage in order to fit the video cards we're looking at into that case.

Processor / MB:
Both processor's have 4-cores. Both are the 1155 socket (And No, it's not worth worrying about the i9 right now). 3.3 Ghz vs 3.4Ghz is not that much of a difference and WOW specifically will not take advantage of the extra cores. That said, any new games WILL start to take advantage of the extra cores.

Here's where it gets a little tricky. You used to have FSB notation on the processors which was the main bottleneck and "actual" speed on them. With the i-series, intel has essentially eliminated that and you now need to pay attention to the L2 Cache (1MB vs 1MB - the same) and L3 Cache (6MB vs 8MB - i7 is faster b/c it can handle that much more info faster!!) and Bus Speed: Both at 5.0 GT/s. Both of these processors are already 2nd gen intel i-Series processors.

VIDEO CARD:

Yes and No. Yes, usually your biggest bang for your buck is in the video card...so long as you have the throughput to take advantage of it. When you get into the top 15 graphics cards, there usually is not a ton of difference, except cost. I purchased the number 12 video card 2+ years ago and it's still top 50.
Primary difference between the 2 cards: About $100 and 25Mhz. In this case, it is not worth the extra cost on this card vs spending it on better RAM/Processor.

PS:
So long as you have the 2 PCI-E 6-pin connectors and a couple SATA and IDE connectors, one 600W PS vs another doesn't really matter.

Bottom line: You're spending way too much $$ for way less performance because the pc isn't going to provide the throughput that you could get from the video card. The HD is a peace of mind/reliability issue vs cost. If I had the extra 100 for it, I'd put it in the SSD HD vs the video card. Tetrasomia's rig before taxes is $995.

Hopefully you find this helpful vs hurtful because it's meant to be helpful!!!


Last edited by Ekard12379 on 2011/09/30 15:26 pm; edited 2 times in total


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Uelander
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re: New computer for Mallie!

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Thanks Ty - and I appreciate the help.

I guess I need to do a bit more research - or just copy tetra's build.

The components i listed were based almost entirely on a budget gaming build contest winner from Toms software - so i guess i assumed they had nerded thru all the compatibility details. I was hoping to avoid cluttering my feeble noggin with learning all of the fine print. So much for short cuts. I am an old dude and still havent learned that EVERY time i take a shortcut i get burned.

As for pricing - ya the original estimates were all newegg - but ive found the parts at various different sites since then for about 1k.

I havent purchased anything yet and this is exactly what i wanted to hear. Thanks for the time/effort it took to give me such detailed and valuable feedback.
Uelander
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Here is what Im learning so far...

I thought the i7 had 6 cores? This, a slightly faster clock and a larger L3 Cache are the advantages of the i7 v i5.

So the cpu attempts to execute the program from the info in the cache residing on the chip- primarily this is the L1 and L2 cache (although the LGA-1155 socket only supports 2-channels- so L2 and L3) If it "misses" it has to go back to memory - involving the FSB speed and the speed of the memory to retrieve the information necessary to complete the calculations. Because the time it takes to access memory is sooo long relative to processing from the cache, the chip is designed to make additional calculations to keep busy while the bus is bringing info back to the cache. This way- the impact of "misses" on processing time is minimized. The speed of the memory is involved when this happens as well (i thought i had picked the faster memory - doah).

The type of information stored in each cache is not the same - the L3 stores indexing information rather than executable stuff. It is much less subject to "misses" so the impact of 6 v 8 mb in that cache isnt quite as great as saying "bigger bites= faster processing".

Anyway- because the processing is intended to be done on the chip - the events that slow things are - misses, memory access and HD access at times. There is latency associated with pushing info thru the wire to the card (i think the peripheral controllers are on the chip too) as well as across the MB. Greater memory on the vcard can minimize that as much as the app will allow (wow is limited to 512k right?) but once the info is on the card, speed=speed.

The bigger limit, from what I've learned is the 1155 socket doesn't support the highest end crossfire (16x16) or Sli technology - which will limit extreme video performance long before CPUs effective processing speed does. From what I'm reading - i thought the video processing speed of even the best single card (or 8x8 Xfire) are going to be slower than what the i5- with all of it's relative inefficiencies - will be able to push to it. So - i invest it the fastest card I can get. Or I get a better cpu/mb and make 2 cards do the work to keep up. Obviously, this option blows the whole budget - but it would really cook.

So the i7 is without question better (faster clock, more cores, bigger L3) but its advantage is very limited until we run into apps using 6 v 4 core multi threading.
In any event - 12 months from now i could prolly pop an i7 in there for $100 when/if I run into that game that uses 6 cores.

I think im just gonna buy tetra's case. The extra cooling looks soo worth it and like I did zero research into physical set up.

Im not 100% sure I've got all of this right - Im not being defensive. Feel free to rebut - Im not married to this design - in fact - ima give u a call... this is outgrowing the forums.
Mallexia
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re: oh my!

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Goodness. All this crazyness going on around here. Im glad I wasnt the only one with problems wrapping my head around this stuff Uel!

Anyways, I grabbed mine on friday, heres what I ended up doing (oh and all my prices were CAD cause its more expensive up here Happy

Motherboard - Asus P8Z68-V Pro
Processor - i7 2600k
Ram - Gskill 1600Mhz 2x4 GB
Video - Asus Radeon 6950 2GB
Case - Thermaltake v9 BlacX
Power Supply - Thermaltake 600W
SSD - Corsair Force Series 3 120 GB
2nd HD - Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB
Network - Asus Wireless N Adapter
OS - Windows Home Premium

Albeit a bit more then I wanted to pay. Cost came to about $1508 after tax. I took $250 in gift cards, $80 in price matching and $50 in mail in rebates, so total cost to be was about $1128 CAD so not bad. I built it on friday but Ive been working all weekend so havnt even had a chance to enjoy it. Cant wait to Raid on it tomorrow evening. Anyways, hope you get a good one to Uel.
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