Building a gaming rig

Quantum_Man

New Member
Since I'm not pursuing audio engineering anymore, which was my primary motivation behind going with Apple, I am gonna sell my Mac and build a PC. I've listed the main components below and wanted your feedback on them, if you know of any cheaper alternatives that are of equal or better quality, please let me know. Of course I'll be playing WoW on this PC, but I also want to play Crysis, which pushes even the most cutting-edge hardware to the max with max settings, not that I need to play on max settings. So without further ado, here are my choices:

Case - Lian Li PC65B Aluminum ATX Mid Tower $129

Power supply - Antec 500W, 80plus certified $89

MOBO - Gilgabyte P35-DS3L $94

CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 2.66GHz $189

RAM - Corsair XMS2 2GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) $68

Vid Card - EVGA 8800GT 512MB $249

HDD - Western Digital 320GB SATA $79

Optical Drive - LiteON DVD Burner $30

For speakers I have a pair of Dynaudio BM 5As, which I purchased a few years back for audio mixing. I am able to listen to music and get game sounds out of them, so that's what I'll be using for sound.

I would appreciate your feedback on this as I would like to get the ball rolling ASAP. :D Thanks!
 
only thing i would do change the hdd to seagate(5 year warranty for seagate vs 3 for WD) otherwise looks good.
 
you should set up a photo blog detailing each step or maybe a live streaming webcam as you build it. Perhaps we can arrange DKP depending on how many attempts it takes you to down the boss "HomebrewPC" for the first time.

Oh and if Hescomingsoon gave his thumbs up, you might as well move the items to the shopping cart and check out. Thats all the feedback you need.
 
how quiet do you want it to be? go with the antec phantom and asus silent knight power supply / cpu fan and it'll be nearly dead silent :)
 
for that matter...i may actually have spare parts (i think i have a mobo and a good power supply layign around) i could sell for less :D
 
loosing 400mhz of cpu frequency for $60 is not worth the performance drop IMO. Not everything is multi-threaded so maximizing single thread performance is still highly important.
 
The last machine i build was in a plexi glass case, with a water cooler. I ended up selling it to mastablasta, and he's still using it! This was the only pic i could find of it.

In the lower right you'll see a server the size of a dish washer. It was an old SGI Onyx machine ($100K new!) i gutted and put 4 P4 systems in. Lan party in a box.

You can also see some of my old servers/networking gear in the middle from back in my lan party days!

Linky
 
The last machine i build was in a plexi glass case, with a water cooler. I ended up selling it to mastablasta, and he's still using it! This was the only pic i could find of it.

In the lower right you'll see a server the size of a dish washer. It was an old SGI Onyx machine ($100K new!) i gutted and put 4 P4 systems in. Lan party in a box.

You can also see some of my old servers/networking gear in the middle from back in my lan party days!

Linky

Wow, thats crazy and thats old :P
 
I went ahead with my purchase and should be getting all the pieces by Wednesday/Thursday. I haven't been this excited in a long time lol.
 
I haven't been this excited in a long time lol.

It's like getting a Shadoweave set for IRL!!!

Wow thats a low priced Lian Li case. I looked at them when I was building this (my 3rd home-built) computer, went with this instead. My friends want me to get a mirrored one to put beside mine and make them into a refrigerator.
 
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I would appreciate your feedback on this as I would like to get the ball rolling ASAP. :D Thanks!
I built this computer two years ago and have absolutely no qualms with it, other than its random video problems (refracting or something like that... I can't think of the correct word) and restarting it self... randomly. Restarting itself is a fairly new issue. Thats because my mobo is one of the last Mobo's Soyo built before they stopped building them, it was a rushed, unfinished product. My mobo has SATA inputs for it, yet the chipset doesn't support it. I have flashed the Bios atleast 10 times trying to get my 250GB hard drive to work, but every time, it fails. My computer performs fairly well, despite its schizophrenia, and despite having WINDOWS 2000 on it!

Nevi, please don't faint.

Gigabyte, Corsair and Nvidia are all great brands to buy from and they've all been around for a while. I think when I build my next gaming computer, it will have a Gigabyte mobo in it.

Another upside to building your own computer, is that most of the parts are recyclable. You can reuse the case and the sound card, and sometimes the RAM, you can also reuse the cooling apparatus, depending on if you buy another Intel (I would have bought an AMD... :D). Another upside to building your own is most everything is a personal choice, nVidia vs ATI or AMD vs Intel, and you have total control over what goes in your box.

The only thing that matters is that you've done your research.
 
Nice Computer there Q-Man. The only thing that I would have changed is the DVD burner but I am one of those people that will spend extra money for the DVD burner that performs right to the burn speed specs or as close as possible in the real world. i.e. I am a big fan of Plextor drives they do cost more but I have had very little problems with those drives dieing or having errors 3 - 5 years or 30k to 100k burns. Yes I burn that many CDs and DVDs.
 
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