After building my first PC way back in 2000, decided to jump back into it since my Gateway laptop is slowly dying a slow death and the old PC died back in 07. I mostly game on my Xbox so I wanted to keep this build on a budget of $1000 or so and resuse as much as I could, like the keyboard, mouse and an ancient Cambridge Soundworks 5.1 speaker setup. Thus, here's what I started with:
Intel Core i5-2400 Sandy Bridge @ 3.1 GHz
Gigabyte GA-P67A-U03-B3
8GB of Patriot Viper Extreme Division 2 RAM
Sapphire Radeon HD6790 1GB
Western Digital SATA3 HDD 1TB
Rosewill RX750-S-B 750W PSU
Lite-On DVD Burner
Windows 7 64-bit
CoolerMaster Storm Enforcer case
I stuck with the older P67 chipset since it still has some capability I'm not utilizing and it had the best bang for the buck as far as future expansion on the motherboard goes. The hard drive is more than enough for now, especially since my Cavalry external USB HDD is also 1TB and is only about 25% full accounting for all my music, pictures and video.
Amazed at how easily everything went together. The Enforcer case has loads of room and plenty of extra bays for more drives and such. I missed two generations of SATA cables and not having to fold up flat ribbon cables in a cramped case was a relief!
My old grey box case had a bunch of holes dremeled in it for extra fans since that old Athlon T-Bird was OC'd to within an inch of its life so I never bothered with a window. This one looks cool and has extra fan locations already, got me thinking about some extra, unecessary lighting for the case.
Interior lighting from the PSU's first power-on, was not expecting that to be honest!
Big 200mm intake fan on the front that came with the case.
After borrowing a 17" hand-me-down LCD from a buddy for a few months, I picked up a nice 24" Samsung LED from Worst Buy for about $250, looks great and I finally have a display that the GPU doesn't get bored with! Not including the monitor and the fact that I plan on getting a new keyboard and maybe one of those fancy RAT mice, the computer hit my wallet for ~$925, under budget! Runs like a champ too, just wish my computer at work was this fast, I spend a lot of time watching Catia load models and crashing when I load too many models.