So I am looking to build/buy a new computer. But I have not been following hardware improvements for the last 4 years and I know next to nothing about what is on the market. Went here to start with a custom CyberPower to compare to what I could get at NewEgg and was just overwhelmed. Gonna start reading up on all the parts but was wondering if any of you had any strong opinions one way or another. Thank you for any help!
The i920 is a great place to start for a gaming PC. You'll definitely want to bump up the Power Supply especially if you plan on going X-Fire or SLI. 6 GB's of DDR 3 RAM and whatever else you need for your particular setup.
If your building the comp from scratch and have an idea of your money range I can help ya with hardware selection. I'm partial to Intel though just heads up
700-1000 ideally. I don't need top of the line, last years best should be more then enough, quiet and cool is a must though. Just the tower also.
Here are my comps specs, I built it for about $1,200 a yr ago. You could probably find the parts for alot cheaper nowadays Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem CPU Vigor Monsoon III LT CPU Cooler Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P Motherboard 6GB OCZ Platinum DDR3 1600 (7-7-7-24) Triple Channel RAM EVGA 896mb GeForce GTX 260 (596mhz/1998mhz) 2x WD Caviar Black 1TB 32mb Cache Hard Drives in raid 0 1x WD Caviar 750GB 16mb Cache Hard Drive (External Backup) Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 Stacker 830 Evolution Case (Silver/Black) 700 Watt OCZ GameXStream Power Supply One thing I would suggest though is getting a better gfx card and a 1000 watt power supply since their cheaper now then when I got the ones im currently using. This build should give you some basic ideas of a layout to build. For motherboards I highly suggest Gigabyte or Asus but Asus tends to be on the expensive side ($250+ for the good boards) which was why I went with Gigabyte. Gigabyte has really good build quality, probably better then Asus but thats like trying to decide between Honda (Gigabyte) and Asus (Toyota) (just an example). Some of the newer motherboards today also have hybrid technology not found on the board im using (mine only has a 6 phase power design to reduce power consumption). OCZ, Corsair, and Crucial are the big names in RAM but I tend to use either OCZ or Corsair. For video cards I used to prefer ATI but ever since AMD scooped them up they have lagged behind nVidia in benchmark results, although their video cards say their DX10.1 and DX11 compatible we wont see any DX11 games for a very long time and by that time the current video cards on the market wont be of any use. Nvidia Cards are less quirky and generally have better performance in games.
The i860 is superior to the i920 and they cost about the same. It uses less power (less heat output) and performs better. It uses an 1156 board rather than 1366, but is still an i7 processor.