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Well looks like my build is on hold for the moment, just cant fit it into the budget at this time without eating ramen for the next 6 months. As much as I want a new computer...I really don't need one, and once I get my video card back from RMA I will be back in he saddle again. Unless some rich person wants to buy me a new rig, I guess I will be sticking to what I have now.

Well the time has finally arrived, the great upgrade is underway I am only doing a board/proc/memory upgrade, rest will have to wait a bit..otherwise I will be eating ramen for the rest of my life. I ended up going with:

i7 3770K w/CM hyper 212 EVO
Crucial Ballistix 16G ddr3-1866 kit
Gigabyte G1 Sniper 3 mobo

Once I dig my way out of the poorhouse, an SSD is on the menu, prob a samsung 840 pro. Got an extremely good price on the proc and ram at microcenter, only bad thing was they didn't stock the mobo I wanted..prob would have saved more but I ended up getting the board and cooler from newegg.

Starfalcon wrote:

Well the time has finally arrived, the great upgrade is underway I am only doing a board/proc/memory upgrade, rest will have to wait a bit..otherwise I will be eating ramen for the rest of my life. I ended up going with:

i7 3770K w/CM hyper 212 EVO
Crucial Ballistix 16G ddr3-1866 kit
Gigabyte G1 Sniper 3 mobo

Once I dig my way out of the poorhouse, an SSD is on the menu, prob a samsung 840 pro. Got an extremely good price on the proc and ram at microcenter, only bad thing was they didn't stock the mobo I wanted..prob would have saved more but I ended up getting the board and cooler from newegg.

Let us know how it runs once you assemble it. Kinda sad though that so much time has passed since you opened the thread and the choice of hardware for that price budget hasn't changed much, if at all.

Holy nec...oh wait it's the OP. Carry on.

Seriously though, that sounds like a very solid kit that will last you a long time--maybe as much as a decade if my extrapolations are even remotely accurate. The obvious upgrade path for you at this point would presumably be a better display and GPU but if you're running an old CRT you'll need both to make it worthwhile. And maybe a high efficiency power supply, since if you do wind up using it for years and years even a small amount of savings will add up quickly.

I disagree that the hardware slowdown is a bad thing, it just means that the technology has finally matured and the bright minds are moving on to new frontiers like networking and, ahem, 3D printing.

Well I have since upgraded the video card due to the 6950's 2nd untimely death. Currently have a sapphire 7950 OCed model, and for PSU running a PCPaC 750 silencer...both more than fine for my new rig.

Starfalcon wrote:

Well I have since upgraded the video card due to the 6950's 2nd untimely death. Currently have a sapphire 7950 OCed model, and for PSU running a PCPaC 750 silencer...both more than fine for my new rig.

Is the 7950 pushing the beast of a CRT I sold you? If so, how is it holding up?

The 7950 has been happily keeping the Sony well fed. It has been completely problem free and runs like a champ.

CRT? Geh. You have that set to sleep after a relative short time, yeah?

Forge wrote:

CRT? Geh. You have that set to sleep after a relative short time, yeah?

What, for burn-in? Better to just set a moving image on screen (like a screensaver.)

Not burn in, kilowatt/hours. CRTs are brutal on the electric bill.

Yeah its set for sleep mode when I'm not using the computer, but my electric bill is so low it wouldn't really matter much if I did leave it running all the time. My electric bill is around a whopping $30-$35 a month, and that is with leaving my computer running 24/7...so not a very big deal.

Edit

Also forgot to mention I finally got my rig built last night, and it is an amazing difference. Everything is much smoother and the extra ram makes a huge difference. I am extremely pleased with my upgrade, now just got to work on the SSD next to really enjoy things. The oen thing that really was nice though was not having to reinstall windows, a reboot into safe mode, plug in a few new drivers and it handled it all with no issues. The only issue I really ran into was with my sound card not wanting to work, after 2 hours of not being able to get it working, even though it showed up in windows...ended up uninstalling and reinstalling and then it worked fine...

Starfalcon upgrading ?? INCONCEIVABLE !!

I will assume you are going to keep the new rig as the primary instead of resurrecting the old 775 and moving it back into the #1 position ? I had a hard time retiring my 775 build. I think the hardware I bought sat for almost 3 months until I decided to build it and get all the bugs worked out. I kept trying to find a reason to return to the veteran, as it served me well for almost 4 years, but it was time. I sold it a month ago - I do hope its new owner gets some more out of it before it finally loses its smoke.

Okay, my hard drives are getting full again and its been several years since Ive bought one. A SSD is on the plate along with a couple spinning platter drives. I'm looking at a 120-250 GB SSD and a couple of hard drives of the 2+ TB range. Whats good, whats bad, and what has been the best bang for the buck?

Best bangs for the buck are the 0.25 TB Samsung 840 series (or with kit) SSDs and the 3.0 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 hard-drives.

At Newegg:
Hard Drives
SSDs

I am happy with my 256GB plextor SSD (I have an M3S) newer equivalent would be the M5Pro/xtreme (in terms of flash chips)

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storag ... l-ssd.html

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storag ... o-m5s.html

How are the barracudas? I have heard they can tend to be iffy and have longevity issues.

The 250 GB Samsung 840 series for $169½ is a good value. It's not the fastest SSD for writes but the read speed is excellent. Any current-generation SSD is going to be very quick when compared to the hard-drives with which you're familiar.

The 3.0 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 for $110 is just so much cheaper than the 3.0 TB Western Digital Caviar Black for $248 that you can't turn it down. Put two of them in RAID-1 and you've still spent less than a single Western Digital drive costs.

The 3.0 TB Seagate ST3000DM001 Barracuda 7200.14 drive is $110 at Newegg this weekend with code "EMCYTZT3593".
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822148844

Well newegg has the 256 840 non pro on sale, guess Ill bite now, time to toss down and get one and maybe a seagate too...I just don't like all the terrible failures people are posting about in all the reviews. Wish I would have bought a few more of the Samsung 1T drives when they were cheap....