My College Rig (Edited!) July 28, 2008

Started buying the parts for my college desktop. I’m planning on using a niceass desktop for most of my stuff and then carrying around a cheaper netbook. (MSI Wind or something comparable. Not buying this until just before i go to college since the prices are dropping like mad since the market is getting saturated) I’m also probably going to get a 24″ monitor for the desktop. (also buying later since prices will drop and I already have a nice monitor at home. Or maybe i’ll even buy the monitor after i get to college so i don’t hafta lug one there.)

Here’s my shopping list at the moment (Hopefully i can get all the parts soon so i can finish building for this school year):

Antec P180b Case – $80 $40
4gigs 800MHz DDR2 RAM (Cruzer Ballistix and OCZ Recon) – $55
500gigs Samsung Spinpoint 7200 RPM SATA HD – $70
Intel Core2Duo E8400 and Arctic Freezer Pro 7 CPU Fan – $180
ATI 4850 ~ $140-150
Still undecided on the motherboard, most likely getting something with a P45 chipset ~ $95-125
Creative Labs X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty PCI Sound Card (The old version) – $50
Whichever Dvd drives happen to be on sale – $20 $24
OCZ 600W GameXStream PSU – $65 $55

Total ~ $690-730 Somewhere around $700(If you account for some money on taxes shipping and handeling, it goes as high as $750)

Ok, there are tons of reasons for each of these components. I should probably list them here before i forget. (And to make Sam jealous, of course). The Antec case was an easy choice. It’s a classy design with topoftheline noise isolation and very good airflow. Also, i got it at a great bargain (MSRP is 150ish, although it is a somewhat old case. the new version has only a few minor improvements)  The RAM is DDR2 because DDR3 isn’t mature enough and provides a very small performance improvement for a significant price increase. I’m staying with dual core because too few apps at this point can utilize four cores, so i’d prefer the increased gaming performance from the dual core processor instead.

I was originally quite adamant about using an Nvidia GPU, but since i recently saw the benchmarks for the 48xx series, and saw the 4850 on sale for $140, I’m going with ATI this time. Getting a P45 mobo because my options are relatively limited if i want a mobo that supports 45nm intel cpu’s. Crossfire support isn’t too important to me though. Dedicated sound card so i can be a wannabe audiophile. Well also because I’m a picky little bastard when it comes to audio quality. I’m most likely only going to get one DVD drive initially for this desktop. Reasoning? Blu-ray prices are dropping like a rock. They’re already getting into the range of $100. As soon as Blu Ray drives hit $50 or $60, i’ll throw a Bluray drive into my rig. The PSU was another obvious choice. It offered the best price-performance ratio within my price range. Also, it’s very energy efficient and the highish wattage gives me some headroom to make upgrades. O yeah, it’s also a quiet PSU, so in conjunction with the good case and good hard drive, my desktop should be close to silent.

I’m planning on triple booting Vista 64-bit Home Premium, OSX Leopard, and Ubuntu. Still looking up stuff on the osx86 site to figure out how the hell i’m going to install osx. There’s a large community though, so i should be able to get help if i fuck up somehow.

I’m tired of posting now, so i’ll elaborate on the rest of my life tmw or someday soon. Also will probably edit this post as i make some changes to the plans for my desktop

*edit: I changed the prices above. I forgot that i had gotten a $40 rebate on my case. Also, since the last post, I bought all of the parts i need except for the graphics card. I also forgot to account for the fact that i would need to buy thermal compound since i’m using an CPU cooler. (well it does come with compound, but it’s not very good, and it only costs $5 to get very good compound, so $5 is well worth it to lower my CPU temps by 5 Celsius)

I had wanted to reconsider my CPU choice and spend 20$ more for the E8500. However, the guys on hardforums feel that the $20 is not worth it since the only difference between 8400 and 8500 is .5 on the multiplier. Hence, the speed difference will be more than made up by a bit of overclocking

I will probably just build the rig as soon as the parts come in (over the weekend of course) and then just add the graphics card in as soon as i can order the 4850 for a good price (140$ or below).

Future upgrade plans? I won’t change the CPU and mobo for at least 4 years if at all. (unless quad-core performance goes wayyy up and prices go wayy down). The graphics card will probably be upgraded in 3-4 years. The case will probably survive a hurricane, so no worries. The PSU will not be replaced unless it fries on me. The memory will probably stay since the mobo i’m getting doesn’t support DDR3 as far as I know. Sound card will stay forever. Music isn’t all of a suddenly start sounding better. Although i guess i might need a new sound card if 24.1 speaker setups become the standard. (They won’t, but more than 7.1 might happen within 5-8 years) (then again, hardly anyone even uses 7.1)

I’ll post about the unimportant non-pc related details of my life tmw.