So, I was browsing around on Newegg yesterday looking for deals to add to my current system, and my fiancee noticed me looking through some parts. She said, "You should just build a new computer and buy it." I played it off like she was joking, but she wasn't, and said we could afford to splurge a bit on the system. So I put together a rig and pulled the trigger.
I ended up spending more money than I anticipated, but the upside of this system is that I will not need to seriously upgrade any parts for the next 4-5 years other than adding a second 6950 in probably 2014. I can't wait to get this thing in my house and slap it together!
Case:
COOLER MASTER HAF 922
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811119197
Mobo:
ASUS P8H67-M EVO LGA 1155 - 4 RAM slots with a max expandable to 32 gigs of memory, Quad SLI/Crossfire ready.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131689
Processor:
Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost). The Sandy Bridge is the newest architecture from Intel. I almost went with an AMD Hexacore processor here, but upon reviewing the benchmarks, I really couldn't turn down going Intel. They are just better than AMD for processing power now, especially for games. The overclocked i5 will actually outperform i7 in a lot of applications, so it made sense to save money here and go with the cheaper CPU. Plus, my Q6600 has been such a beast of a processor that I kind of feel like it's worth it to stay with Intel in this stage.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819115072
RAM:
8 GB of G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 1600 mhz DDR3 ram.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231311
Video Card:
ATI Radeon 6950 with 2 GB of memory. This thing is awesome for the price. I almost went with a GTX 570, but considering this is $60 cheaper, I could put that $60 toward a crossfire solution in the future. The flashed version of the 6950 makes it a 6970, which offers performance on par with the 570 and actually will outperform it due to the extra memory (2 GB vs 1280mb) at high resolutions.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814150518
(Will be unlocking this to a 6970
)
Brick
Viva
I went overkill here to get a PSU that would support crossfire with no worries.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817139009
Storage hard drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136592
OS boot drive:
From BIOS config to Windows in ~12 seconds. Unbelievable speed. I went overboard here too, I really didn't need a flash drive for my OS but I couldn't resist.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148357
Optical drive and Sound card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827135204
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16829102003
This is my first truly "dream" system since I bought a Dell XPS2 laptop with the 6800 Ultra (a GPU even desktops didn't have at the time). Man, I'm totally stoked about it.
This will also be the first time I've assembled a computer from scratch in quite a while. I'll probably be throwing an aftermarket cooler on the CPU in the near future, but for now I just want it to get here so I can max out Bad Company 2 and pwn some noobs.