I guess it only really matters if you use your PC for gaming, but I'm intentionally holding off on a new PC build until more details regarding Steam machines is released. May be a waste of time, but as a Linux lover but also a gamer, SteamOS holds a lot of appeal for me.
My current computer freezes about 3-5 times a day depending on usage. It takes literally 5 minutes to hardboot and turn back on. I’m used to that crap by now. I went over to a friends house to work on a group project, turned on his desktop with Win 8 and an SSD, blinked and just stared in shock as it was up and ready in under 10 seconds. Ridiculously worth the extra money even if you only turn it on once a day.
i wanted to throw my last computer out the window because it would take so long to boot and reinstalling windows was like pushing a rock up a hill, these days when i see other people waiting for their computer to boot i feel sorry for them.
The first computer I built myself was an AMD 386 40 MHz clone in 1990-ish with a 20 MB hard drive, and I’ve built all my desktops since then. My current work computer has a couple year old Phenom II 6 core CPU with 16 GB of DDR3 memory, a pair of Samsung SSDs and a pair of 2TB Samsung hard drives. My two software development machines are virtual machines and each has its own SSD. I can boot both Windows 7 VMs at the same time in under 10 seconds all without glitching the YouTube video I’m watching on the host machine with my morning coffee. Hardware has come a long way since the days when you come back to your desk in the morning with coffee and the computer still isn’t done booting
At some stage I’m going to be swapping one into my laptop, I’m finding that since I bought my present laptop a couple of years ago, HP G62 with a Core i5 M460 on Windows 7 home premium 64bit, (I know it’s outclassed now) that I can do everything that I need to do on it including lots of Photoshop (Elements 9) while on the net with 5 or 6 tabs open (Firefox) without any slowdown. The start-up time has got longer despite all the “housekeeping” clearing unused programs and running virus scans, spybot and adblock etc. I’ve been really impressed with SSD’s performance and want one but there’s lights and knives to buy.
For those of you who still boot have you heard of suspend to ram and turning off the hybrid sleep mode (which is useless and just wastes your time and ssd and is unbearable with a lot of ram)?
Good choice, I was going to add a +42 on that one… It beats any CPU upgrade.
Personally I would go for an Intel CPU and mainboard, as they are pretty far ahead of AMD at the moment. Although it might be a bit more expensive.
Not sure about the 27 inch 1920x1080 monitor. The resolution is rather low for 27 inch. And I would strongly recomment an IPS screen, for a lot better enjoyment of your nice new Deft-X beam shots :). I prefer the extra height of my 24 inch 1920x1200 screen.
The current generation of nVIDIA graphics cards is very good and a bit more power efficient and quiet than AMD. But AMD 7870 is not a bad choice.
If you want a really good power supply, I can recommend Seasonic. They even have fanless ones that are really efficient and don’t get warm at all. But they are expensive. They have several models listed and tested here: http://www.silentpcreview.com/Recommended_PSUs . The Corsair is probably pretty good already, at least some of them are made by Seasonic, not quite sure about the model you picked.
thanks for the info - if for some reason the monitor is crummy i can return for free to amazon and just buy another one… the monitor is actually coming tomorrow, so i can try it with my laptop