Hey guys and gals, I am a TR devotee and regular reader. That being said, when I do browse the forums, it's usually just to lurk. This might be a long post so buckle your seatbelts. I just got married in April of this year and am loving every minute of it. My wife is not what I would consider a geek, but she's got enough of the tendencies that I think I can at least sway her, to some degree She's had her HP minitower PC (Athlon X2 based) for a few years now. To give you an idea of its age, it originally came installed with Vista and was slow as molasses in January. Fortunately, it already had 4GB of DDR2 so it helped a great deal when I did a clean install of Win7. It has a basic nVidia card in it that is good for low-end games (can't remember right now but it's several years old and at least supports DX9, maybe 10). We've been playing League of Legends for several months now and she just loves it, and can't wait to play (never thought my wife would be a gamer!) But it's frustrating to the both of us when we either have to wait for her machine to boot or to load the game. Plus, I notice more than she does, but the graphics could use an upgrade, too. Also in other everyday tasks, she is much more likely to use her laptop because this computer takes so long to boot up - even with regular maintenance such as clearing temp files and defragging. So, I've been amassing some parts over the past several weeks in the hopes of building her a new machine to sort of bring her up at least a semi-modern build, and definitely something she should be more happy with. I thought I'd bounce it off the SBA forum for any insight you all might have. I'll go through the parts one by one and list any comments or ideas I might have.
Important note: this was a pretty budget-conscious build, for two reasons: #1, because I am not really sure how much to invest in a build that she might not use for much more than casual gaming (League of Legends-esque system requirements, which aren't much) and #2, because she has some significant credit debt that we are both working hard to pay off so that we might live a more comfortable lifestyle in the next few years.
CPU:
Core i3 2120 (3.3GHz) - ordered this off eBay for $99. Ordinarily I would order a CPU new but I saved at least $25 on this build by getting the CPU used. My main machine has a Q9650 that I also got used from eBay, and it's never had a problem. So, I'm not too worried about those sorts of issues.
Memory:
8GB G.SKILL DDR3 1333 - basic, no-frills memory, JEDEC standard, 1.5v, I could go on and on but you get the point. Memory is so cheap now that I felt dumb putting only 4GB in there. She's also hinted that she wants to learn how to edit photos later on her machine (I am a photographer on the side), and I figured it wouldn't hurt to go with more RAM. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231422
Motherboard:
ECS H61H2-M2 - This is where I had a little hesitation in my choice, and what really jump-started this whole upgrade scramble. The other day on a deal-watcher site I saw that Newegg was going to be selling an LGA1155 mobo for $15AR. I said to myself, shoot, for $15 AR, even if it craps out early, it's not much to lose by trying it out, and it'd be a whole lot better than what she has now. It's an ECS H61H2-M2. Again, no frills, only SATA 3Gbit/s, H61 chipset, basic, basic, basic. But, it should do the trick. It's got a PCI-E x16 slot for whatever GPU we want to put in there, and should accept the 8GB of RAM I have to feed it with no complaints. Looks like I could cram it with up to 16GB if I wanted to. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813135288
Case:
NZXT Source 220 - I was willing to wait for the right budget-minded case to come along, since she wasn't going to be doing work in it anyway, it would be unlikely that it would be opened very often. She also isn't likely to have a fat, blazing hot video card in there either so airflow won't be the biggest issue to face with this build. But, since I was willing to wait, I could see where the sales took me. I noticed this case pop up on maybe a deal of the day shell shocker or just a sale, can't remember, but it was $35 AR with free shipping. Not bad for a modern case with good airflow and USB3. It also has toolless drive installation and great cable routing capabilities, not to mention a CPU cutout! http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811146083
PSU:
Antec True Power Trio TP3-550 550W - This one was an easier decision for me. This is actually the PSU out of my current system. I elected to get a beefier, modular SeaSonic 620w unit for myself, (since I have a Radeon 6950, and may upgrade later to something more demanding, etc etc) and put the Antec in her new build. No sweat. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371002
Storage:
Kingston SSDNow V+100 SVP100S2/96G - Another recycled part, but way better than what she has now. I bought this about a year ago on Amazon during another super slick sale, for less than $120 (which was a GREAT price at the time!), but it's been sitting around for some time now because I already have Intel SSDs in my desktop and laptop. I actually tried putting this in her old Athlon system shortly after I determined I didn't have much use for it, but the performance gain was so incremental due to the rest of her system being the bottleneck, that I determined I'd save the write cycles for a future system build if I didn't end up selling it outright. So here we are. This will be her boot drive. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139408
(I will also throw an old SATA drive in there for mass storage, probably in the range of 320GB or so. Depends on what I have laying around)
GPU:
Now here's where it gets a little tricky. Since the i3 has a built-in GPU (HD 2000), I wanted to try and see how powerful it was for basic gaming needs. I have been reading reviews all over the internet on this, and while they say that the HD 3000 is a little better, I didn't want to spring the extra $50 on a top of the line i3 when I knew that I would end up putting a more powerful discrete card in this system eventually. So anyway, I am hoping this integrated GPU can run League of Legends on low to medium settings with at least 30fps. If not, I will put her existing geforce card in this system to get by until I can afford to dump around $100 on a decent low-end GPU for her. Very curious about these possibilities, but of course I'm prepared to be disappointed, since after all it is integrated graphics, and intel integrated has never been that good. So if it's crappy, we'll just put her old card in and I'll consult the trusty System Guide™ at a later date.
Monitor:
We'll be recycling her monitor as well. Nothing new in this area.
So to recap, I've spent probably slightly less than $300 (Win7 Pro license included!) after rebates - not bad, not bad at all IMO. So, what do you guys think? The parts have already been ordered and I'm just waiting on the CPU now before I can start - (it was signature-required from USPS so it's sitting in the post office - grr!) so I can't really change much now, but I was just hoping to get your guys' general impressions on the build, likes, dislikes, mentions of anything I have missed here. I'm not planning on installing an optical drive in this system - these days you hardly need such a thing and if she ever really does, she can share one of mine over the network or I can get her a $30 USB powered external DVDRW. I'm not interested in buying one now because it just sits there and sucks power while mostly doing nothing.
Thoughts? Praise? Criticism? Feel free to chime in.
<edited for punctuation>