Building a new System

[Arsenal]

Hi All,

Yeah, like others here I'm going to upgrade- present system is a P4 3.0GHZ and have been out of touch with hardware for sometime now

But, I'm very excited about getting back into building a system again. I've done a lot of reading over the last few days and here's what I've come up with so far

core i5 2.6 - decided this over quad core for performance and architecture upgradation and over i7 for price.

LGA 1156 - just in case I want to upgrade to an i7 down the road. I saw that i7's come in 2 different chip sets. Am I ok here?
Asus -7p55d and Gigabyte GAA-p55M are the 2 I'm interested in for the price and performance. They also have some good ratings on Newegg. Thoughts? I'm thinking the Asus because my present one is an Asus and has been trouble free for well over 5 years.

ddr3 1600 is memory for price and performance mix,. I'm thinking GSKILL 4GB (2x2). I have crucial and that has given me a couple of issues but largely trouble free.

I'm undecided over graphics card. I have an ATI now but before that used to have NVIDIA. I know this is a very broad question and one that will open up a can of works. I'm thinking ATI. Any recommendations? Sapphire seems to have a lt of cards. I have a Diamond now.

Have plenty of hard drives that I can reuse, so won't buy any

I am planning on reusing my SB Audigy2 Platinum Ex for now. Mobo has PCI slot I can use. Maybe an upgrade down the road

Also, can anyone recommend a heatsink+fan for cpu? I am leaning away from thermaltake. Returned 2 a few years ago because of noise.

Any recommendations for a cabinet? I can't believe how many cabinets there are out there. Newegg has a LARGE selection.

Thanks for any suggestions and lending me your ears

 

[Ritwik7]

It would help if you could give us a rough estimate of how much you're willing to spend on this system.

 

[Arsenal]

Thanks for your reply.
I'm open to budget, but I would prefer that it be done within $600-700. Of course, I don't want to save $50 here and there and find out 2 months later that something I bought is well on the way to becoming obsolete (although of course, technology and obsolete always go hand in hand for technical and marketing purposes).

 

[Ritwik7]

A decent Core i5 system will cost you well over $800 if you want a high end graphics card considering you want a CPU cooler and cabinet. Are you open to an AMD build?

 

[Ritwik7]

Here's a decent build:

Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield 2.66GHz - $199.99
ASUS P7P55D LGA 1156 - $149.99
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 2 x 2GB DDR3 1600 - $89.99
OCZ ModXStream Pro 700W - $99.99
SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 5770 (Juniper XT) 1GB - $159.99
COOLER MASTER RC-690 - $69.99
ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro - $33.98

Total - $803.92 (without optical drive)

Note - I'm not very sure of how good the CPU cooler is. For the LGA 1156 socket it's difficult to find inexpensive ones. However the Scythe Ninja Mini is a very good choice if it fits the case. Check its form factor and clearance before you buy so that you don't run into issues if it covers any of the memory slots on the mobo.

 

[Arsenal]

Ritwik, that looks like a great config, especially mobo and ram.
I see that the graphics card is also the new budget 5770 that I read about on techspot the other day.
The heatsink+fan is also what I had looked at and roughly decided upon although I was apprehensive about the size creating issues

seeing the price there in black and white though throws me off a bit. Didn't think it would be almost 800$ - you did warn about it though.

Any suggestions on what I can do to shave off the price a little bit? The PSU's nearly $100 for example. The case is almost 70. Hmm, wonder if there's something there that can be saved.

But I guess there isn't much wiggle room for what I would need.