It's okay, I appreciate the thought you put in to your posts, so I'll deal with the word count.

I have taken some of your suggestions and am putting together another computer at the moment but I have a few questions.

I meant to put 8gb of ram and a 1tb hard drive, however I was tired so I must have chosen 16 and 2tb by accident, I am listening . However, after your advice on the hard drive I think I'll just go with a 500gb, since I already have 500gb on my laptop and a 1tb external.

ram
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product...82E16820231314
hard drive
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product...82E16822145299

you also mentioned that you noticed newegg canada didn't have as many options for ssds and that the crucial is a good bet. I didn't understand what you meant by... "They come a little faster but nothing you're really notice and the reviews speak for themselves. Very safe bet." What would you choose as far as an ssd goes, again this is another component I am new to, and have no idea what to look for.

lastly, any idea if I can order from the US newegg store? or is there another cdn store that offers more selection and/or better prices?

SSDs are a little tricky to choose but the important thing to keep in mind is that all of the modern SATA 6gb/s are hard to notice much difference between because they're all really fast. You should definitely read this page.

If I were buying an SSD today I would go for the Samsung 830 256GB (with SSDs, capacity often affects speed... it's just how they're built). It's priced right. The only question is the firmware... a lot of drives use it and it's had some problems in the past with giving people BSODs. They seem to have worked it out though. This drive also has a certain feature that stands out.

The Crucial M4 uses Marvell firmware. It's not quite as fast as most of the others here, but extremely popular, and after a few early teething issues it has turned into one of the more reliable drives. I just mean that it you benchmark it against the top drives out it's a bit slower.

Plextor M3 is pretty good too, uses the same controller as the Crucial M4. Faster in most ways and good reviews.

The OCZ Vertex 4 is interesting because they bought their own firmware company. However, it has meh customer feedback and OCZ is probably the most unreliable maker of drives and has been for a while. Too risky for me, but if you get a good one you'd be happy with it.

The Intel 520 is similar to the Samsung, and Intel SSDs in the past have been exceptionally reliable and that's their selling point. But it's horribly overpriced. (I own the 510 though which was a different controller and love it). If it were the same as the Samsung 830s price I would want this one.

The Intel 320 is more a mass-market product and noticeably slower that the rest, and you don't get a price cut for it. Not worth buying.

There are lots of others, by Kingston, Corsair, Mushkin and so on. For the most part the drives that run on the SF-2281 controller will perform roughly the same (see "details" when browsing an SSD on NewEgg), and are usually faster as the drive capacity increases.

Even this one looks pretty good, esp for the price.

Also you'll need one of these (some drives include them).

I can't seem to find the samsung on newegg, how much does it cost? Also, you linked the ADATA 120gb, what is the real difference between 120gb and 256gb. I mean obviously the size, but how will this affect me in real world performance.

Thanks for the link, basically what I got from the article is that there isn't that mmuch real world difference in terms of different ssd's. You suggest the samsung, just wondering why you would choose that one (I guess wondering what you use it for) and whether poker is the type of application where the differences between ssd's will be noticeable.

bsod = blue screen of death? does this mean my computers toast? how likely is it to happen?

What I'm getting at is the differences between the newer breed of SSDs aren't that big a deal. I'd worry more about getting a decent price (below $1 per GB is good) and one with very good feedback over a decent sample of NewEgg reviews.

256GB vs 120GB... see the chart on the link I gave you before. For whatever reason larger capacity drives just tend to be faster than their smaller versions, I can't remember why.

I'd choose the Samsung today 830 because so far it's proven to be pretty reliable, it's one of the top performers, and it's been showing up on sale here at good prices. But I wouldn't lose any sleep going with another model. So long as they work they're all very good.

BSODs were an issue with some SSDs, particularly the first round of drives with the popular Sandforce 2 controller. The drives had/have excellent speed but people would just kind of randomly crash here and there, which obviously sucks. Seems like the very newest Sandforce 2 drives have worked it out.

Will you notice the difference between an M4 and the Samsung or even a model from last year, while playing poker? Not really. If you were making a graph in HEM of a huge number of hands and timed it how long it took to generate, then you might see a difference.

Do you know if I can get the samsung 830 256gb in canada? I looked on amazon and newegg.ca and couldn't find it. I see it on newegg.com for 299, more than 1$ a gb, but I know you mentioned you had seen it when it was on sale.

From what I can read that looks like the best drive going, cant find anything bad about it so for the 100 or so more, I'd be willing to pay it if it means better peformance in the long run.

Also, what do you think of the hard drive I linked above? As far as I could see, hard drives seemed to be priced all over the place.

No idea about availability in Canada. I usually run through about 5 different US shops for any given part I buy, and check Slickdeals for special offers regularly.

As far as better performance in the long run I can't speak to that. To some extent they're all a gamble because by the time you hit the long run, there are newer/faster drives out on the market. I really wouldn't go out of your way to import the Samsung 830 or whatever.

Have you checked out TigerDirect.ca or Amazon.ca to compare prices? Or other shops? TD has the M4 256 for $210, and they do have the Samsung 830 in stock (but at $300, which is a clear no). They have 120-128GB drives too.

Ok, I wasn't aware of any other shops but thanks for directing me to tigerdirect,ca.

I was thinking 256gb because thats what the samsung appeared to be, however would 120-128 be more than enough for poker? or is it important to have a ton of free space on the ssd to make it run faster?

thanks agian, your help is much appreciated!

You'll have to decide for yourself how much room you'll need, and with SSDs it's preferable to have some space open. As a general guide, Windows plus poker and a handful of common programs should put you at somewhere around 30GB. Your hands will take up something like 1GB per 150,000 hands if I recall right. Then you've got your mp3s, photos, games, and whatever else you have going on.

I have a Windows 8 test build with a 120GB drive (which is really 110GB usable). It has a large number of Adobe programs, MS Office and so on. No poker stuff or mp3s on it. Right now I have 38GB free, and I have other things to populate this with that are stored elsewhere.





Really you just have to take inventory of what you need and then factor in a bit for expansion. My Mom gets by with a 40GB SSD on Windows 7, while I will probably need more capacity before too much longer (I'm probably going to wait until the 400GB-500GBs become reasonable as I'm doing okay for now). Best way for you to get an idea is to go to My Computer and see what you're actually using today. I'd say if it's a general use-poker computer a 120GB is fine, that gives plenty of room for hands and music and things people tend to do... if you start getting crazy with heavy files like 10GB-sized games you'd have to rethink things in a hurry. And you can always add a 2nd drive later, which will probably be a lot cheaper.

Lots of SSD deals going on though. NewEgg in the US has the 128GB Samsung for $90 on sale today. I'm sure your TigerDirect or somebody will come off their $144 CAN price with some sales before long.

Okay I'll look around for some deals. Thanks again for all the help and I'll post back if I have anymore questions!

motherboard
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product...82E16813131837

just want to make sure this supports dual monitors through vga, aswell as display port.

VGA isn't usually desirable to use but okay in a pinch, if the display also has DVI that's preferred. What are the resolutions of the two displays? That could affect things somewhat on the video end

Gonso, what do you think of using sites like cpubenchmark.net to guide processor buying decisions?

The second display is a samsung 21.6 inch, it has vga and dvi. The samsung is a 1650 x 1080 I believe and the U3011 is 2560 x 1600

Not familiar with it. I usually stick to the bigger names like Anandtech, Toms Hardware, etc. They dig into them and test pretty thoroughly.

Once you narrow it down to a price range it's usually not too difficult to do yourself if you know what you're looking at and what you plan to do with it.