One of my New Year's resolutions is an upgrade to my Windoze (gaming) platform.

I'm waiting for the new Radion HD 7000's to hit retail, as well as the new AMD chips. Then probably going the route Steve did with the OCZ solid-state drives for OS and apps to replace my HDD's. I'd go Fusion-io but they are priced too high for my wallet. My case is a ten-year old server tower that currently holds eight internal Western Digital 500GB SATA drives and has five front-loaded bays for CD/DVD etc. Both OS and apps are running RAID5 with the OS RAID on the motherboard and the apps RAID powered by an Adaptec 2405Q Storage Controller. I'll prolly pick up another Adaptec controller and move the OS drives off the MB when I buy my SSD's.

Power supply is a Thermaltake TP-1350M in the cable-management series.

Screens are two Samsung Syncmaster 23".

New Mobo is still in research stage, but it will definitely be AMD-based and probably another ASUS. It's amazing what can be had for under $250 right now. :tup:

Also considering an iMac upgrade to the new 27" model, which is incredible.

I wanted to do an AMD build for the $/performance ratio but I really couldn't justify it considering how well Sandy Bridge performs relative to the new Bulldozers in everything I am interested in.

Thanks to the holiday sales, I picked up my 2600k for $269.99 and got $50 off my ASUS board at Microcenter over the weekend... so those deals really pushed me over the edge. I only ended up spending maybe $20-40 more than I would have with an FX8120/8150 and I get better performance plus the option to upgrade to Ivy Bridge. Works for me.

Also to note... I've had Gigabyte, MSI, and now ASUS boards. Without a doubt the ASUS is the nicest one I have ever handled. Very well done!

That said, I still love AMD for the true budget builds. I am going to put together a Phenom II X4 option for Kaien when I get home. And it will give him the option to go Bulldozer in the future if he needs to. :tup:

:happydance::happydance:

http://www.the370z.com/members/jeffb...70-photo-1.jpg

http://www.the370z.com/members/jeffb...77-photo-3.jpg

http://www.the370z.com/members/jeffb...79-photo-5.jpg

here is the new beast.

http://www.christophersmith-op.com/w...1/10320571.jpg

i overclocked the transistor :|

That's some bad stuff you got there jeff...

curious what you use your current rig for
they are sick, but a totally different animal

Would i still be able to use my cd/dvd player/burner in a newly built computer?

Yeah if you have a 5.5" drive that you want to port over you can do that. But new CD/DVD burners are like $20.

:tup:

I've always wanted to build my own rig. Far too lazy and knowing me, I'd blow my budget buying the expensive stuff. If my Dell XPS craps out, I'll definately know where to go for advice.

I used to have an XPS 420 that I modded a bit.

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-P...0/CIMG3932.jpg

IIRC it had a Q6600 2.4Ghz quad core, 8GB ram, and a 896mb GeForce GTX260 Core216. It was pretty fast back in the day. I remember the only way you could overclock the processor because of the locked bios was by putting a strip of electrical tape over one of the processor pins. It would bump the clock up to 3ghz, but since you couldn't adjust voltages and the stock cooler wasn't that great it would get very unstable. :icon17:

Mad scientist....

The one i have now is an xps 600 but it's at the end of it's days.

What's your budget again? And how many monitors are you wanting to run...

1k-1500-ish....I've only got the one 24" lcd that came with my xps so i'll probably still with that one.

OK, one monitor makes it a lot easier to build a budget gaming rig. :tup: