How much is the memory? Just curious.

80 I think, seemed to be what all the 2x4Gb packs were, roughly

Have fun building yo, such a satisfying / enjoyable thing (except the CPU paste, I don't like the CPU paste).

I ended up going with the MSI r9 280x OC Twin Frozr GPU for $299 + $10 rebate at Fry's. They match newegg or Amazon so it's kinda worth it to just go, if it's convenient.

Card is pretty awesome.

i cant stand radeons tho, so there's not much choice for me. just never had a good experience with one

i don't mind the paste really. Saw a video of a guy replacing a laptop cpu the other day and he GLOBBED the **** on. eventually he had to turn off comments on the video because so many nerds could *wait* to tell him how wrong he had done it

I sort of get a sick thrill about trying to get the interior just so the temperature is as low as possible. Best part of it for me. Dude who made that video said his temp went down a couple ticks after he cleaned it up.

Know this, it might be surprising to learn that I've never dabbled with water cooling. I know they have some tight systems these days, but I really can't stop worry about what happens if you have a leak.

I sort of agree with you in that I'd have preferred an nvidia card (I really like EVGA a lot) but the GTX 760 isn't close to the 280x and the 770, which still loses most tests to the 280x, costs way more. Hard to go with either one at the current price points.

Edit

Nvm, I got a 750 ti, explains the price I was thinking of

Changing of the Guard:

So jelly.

Not sure why you would use two SSD drives. Once the game is started your 16GB of memory should mean there is hardly any disk IO left because the OS will cache the game in memory. Just have your OS on the SSD for quick boot times and any applications that do read/write to disk a lot.

i'd heard it's better to have a separate boot drive, but that may have only been for specific apps like pro-tools. if that's not the case for gaming and such i could take back that drive and get another 8gb of memory to have 16 total.. wonder if that's worth it

Video and audio editing have their own requirements and I have no experience with that. I could definitely see reasons why they would like two SSD drives where one small SSD drive holds the OS and the other the application and whatever you are editing. Especially if the raw files you are editing are really big.

I run games from an external SATA drive sometimes and that drive has hardly any activity while I play so for games a single SSD should be enough. If you run into a game that doesn't run well from a slower drive then you can always move it. Or find out what it is writing to disk and see if you can move only that part to the SDD.

all computer parts arriving today...

insanity wolf it, hold them together with your bare hands !

**** my airflow!

just do this

we have long-hair dogs tho

Isn't that SOP for everyone already? Esp. with the backplate mounted honking air cpu coolers I use, putting everything in and then having to take it all back out again if something goes wrong is not fun. I would definitely run like that for a day if I just had to wait for the case :>

video card: delivered
case that shouldn't be here for 2-3 more days: delivered
cpu & local purchases: in hand
motherboard: Who the **** knows?

assembled and running as we speak. putting it together was a bit of a pain, mostly because i futzed around with cable management. the case i picked is incredibly quiet, more so than a sonata, but also stays really cool and has sick cable management options. was very surprised that i only had to power it on once and it was up and running, no going back cuz i'd messed up connections or anything like that, yay!

very excited to try putting it thru its paces once everything is installed and updated

Pictures or it didn't happen!

Actually did take pics cuz I'm that nerdy. When I wake up and am not on a cell phone I'll post em.

the innards:



the, uh, outtards:



all 'dem wires just ended up pressed into that small recess, making the somewhat flimsy back side panel bulge out a bit

Not sure where else to put this, but I've posted my old gaming laptop on eBay and much to my surprise it's already been bid about $100 dollars more than I was asking locally on craigslist.

I've never been sure where to start auctions or if I should use reserve prices or not. Until I happened across a Facebook blog post from a guy arguing you should never use reserve pricing, and you should start bidding near what you want the final price to be.

Must say I completely agree with him at this point. I was super worried I wouldn't get very much for this laptop, but I'm already about the point where it's covering the cost of the new desktop I built.

Literally had one message from craigslist over the course of about a month, and now thanks to dudes advice my wildest price expectations have been exceeded.

selling a laptop for more than the cost of that desktop is a pretty good deal iyam