Slowly but surely

It has been over 6 years since I've done a major upgrade/rebuild of my desktop system.  Moving, getting married and all the financial priorities that come with that shifted my priorities.  So, I'm off my every 24 month upgrade schedule.  So, I finally decided to make up for lost time by doing a complete new system from scratch.  To afford this, I've been purchasing one component per pay period.  So for the last two months this is what I have so far:

Edited by StormyKnight - 24 September 2011 at 2:47pm

After reading some reviews of  AMD's FX8150 cpu, I've decided to finally jump ship to Intel.  Been a big AMD fanboy since my first build with an AthlonXP.  Now they've gone the way of the P4 'Willamette' with dreadful performance.  Now I have to research and look at some Sandy/Ivybridge offerings in a high-end i5 or medium to low-end i7.  Hopefully AMD can make a turn around with Piledriver.  If not, they'll be going the way of VIA...

Have you looked at the specs for the FX8150?  It's well behind Sandy Bridge in everything that's not heavily hyperthreaded.

I would really suggest going the Intel route at the moment.

EDIT: Well, guess this is why replying to threads after leaving them open for a while doesn't work well.

I'm currently waiting on my Hyper 212+ and Arctic Silver so I can overclock my i5-2500K, but as far as gaming goes you'll be fine with an i3-2100.  I literally never went above 60% load on my i3-2100 even on relatively CPU-intensive games like ArmA II.

I wouldn't suggest getting an i7-2600K unless you are doing seriously CPU-intensive tasks, like movie editing, folding@home, or engineering simulation.  As far as gaming goes, you'll see literally no use for it before you replace it.


Edited by ParielIsBack - 07 November 2011 at 12:55pm

ParielIsBack wrote: Have you looked at the specs for the FX8150?  It's well behind Sandy Bridge in everything that's not heavily hyperthreaded. I would really suggest going the Intel route at the moment. EDIT: Well, guess this is why replying to threads after leaving them open for a while doesn't work well. I'm currently waiting on my Hyper 212+ and Arctic Silver so I can overclock my i5-2500K, but as far as gaming goes you'll be fine with an i3-2100.  I literally never went above 60% load on my i3-2100 even on relatively CPU-intensive games like ArmA II. I wouldn't suggest getting an i7-2600K unless you are doing seriously CPU-intensive tasks, like movie editing, folding@home, or engineering simulation.  As far as gaming goes, you'll see literally no use for it before you replace it.

If possible invest in a solid state drive. Have the OS boot on the SSD, and store games, media, and everything else on the 2TB drive. 

Mehs wrote: If possible invest in a solid state drive. Have the OS boot on the SSD, and store games, media, and everything else on the 2TB drive.  You'll notice a huge performance boost; including boot time, program launch time, and more. Its crazy the difference an SSD can make.

I can't imagine being without a computer for more than a couple of days before I would become a seething computer seeking zombie....

can I have all of your old junk?

Sounds like a good setup Stormy. I'm thinking about getting something similar soon as the old desktop we have now is 6 years old and slower than cold molasses running up-hill in January.