I thought it was hotter when she was connecting wires and hooking up all the equipment. When I had my computer built, it was assembled by a large, smelly guy. She would have been preferable.
I know we had a computer building thread somewhere, but I can't seem to find it. Anyway, as I think I've mentioned before. I have a really annoying virus on my computer that redirects Google searches and occasionally attaches itself to the svchost running my speaker software, so when I close it, I lose my sound. And my computer is now over 8 years old, SO, time to get a new one.
I don't need to go super fancy, so my big question for all the smart folks here is, what processor should I get? Just lookign at Dell.com, they seem to be pushing the Athlon II X2 and the Phenom II X6. Any other advice anyone wants to give is also welcome. My needs are few. I want to watch videos on my computer and play flash games. I'm just gonna keep it simple and get a PC with Windows 7, I think I'll reformat my old computer and try to learn how to use Linux on it.
Ok, I could chatter about this for a long time, but I'll try to keep it short (probably fail). A Phenom II x6 is a 6 core processor. It's basically 6 processors in one. You really don't sound like someone who needs 6 processors. An Athlon II x2 would do well enough for you. 2 cores is enough for basic use and should have enough to handle Flash even if it can be a bit of a processor hog. Of course Intel has a lot of excellent processor options as well in the Pentium and Core i3 range that'd likely perform better. Although Intel should be launching some new processors January 4th if word on the street is correct. These are likely higher end stuff than you need though so I guess that's not a big deal.
AMD does just a little better for the platform in general right now with better USB3 support (if you find a computer that has USB3 at all) and the latest SATA standard that should be better for fast solid state disks coming out in the future. An SSD is going to be a bit much for a lower cost computer right now, but that could change. If you add a SSD some years down the road, that faster SATA standard and/or guaranteed PCIe 2.0 slots would be good to have.
However, big computer OEMs like Dell/HP/Acer often put older stuff in the cheap computers. often the biggest indicator is what the integrated graphics option is. Radeon 4200 (as opposed to 4250 or 4270) is generally a good sign that these latest platform benefits are absent, or at least the newest SATA standard would be missing. On the intel side, the Intel X4500 Graphics Media Accelerator or any such integrated graphics option from intel with "45" in the name is also old. These are sadly not ideal choices but are exactly what the big computer builders will try to push onto you. Radeon 4200 systems are still ok I guess.
That's one of the perks of building your own I guess. Technology that is actually the latest. If you must run with the older stuff, Radeon 4200 type systems are almost certainly a better choice than Intel X4500GMA type systems.
Additionally upgrade pricing on Dell/HP is usually pretty steep. If you can buy and install parts yourself, you could possibly save some money by skipping upgrades and doing them yourself. Warranties are also not really worth it on a desktop.
Thanks again, I'm feeling pretty confident about this now. Here's what I got:
PROCESSOR & GRAPHICS CARD AMD Phenom™ II X4 820 + ATI Radeon HD 5670 1GB
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64Bit, English
MEMORY 4GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz- 2 DIMMs
HARD DRIVE 500GB - 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB Cache
OPTICAL DRIVE 16X DVD+/-RW Drive
MONITOR No Monitor
SOUND CARD THX® TruStudio PC™
SPEAKERS No speakers (Speakers are required to hear audio from your system)
WIRELESS Dell 1525 Wireless-N PCIe Card
KEYBOARD Dell Consumer Multimedia Keyboard
MOUSE Dell Laser Mouse
Dell's price: $744.99
I'm gonna shop around for a better price but, does that look like something that'll last me 7 or 8 years? I figured I'd just go a step or 2 above what I need for the processor, it was only like a $50 upgrade. What does the 3.0 Gb/s mean for the hard drive, is that how fast it can read the info on it? And is there any benefit to having RAM in more or fewer modules?
500GB may or may not be enough depending on use. Adding hard drives isn't overly difficult if there's extra space in the case for it, so no big deal. Failing that, there is such a thing as external drives and those are even easier to deal with.
You specified system is quite alright. It's not ideal, but the issue is more from having to deal with Dell than anything else as they aren't using the latest chipset in their motherboards from what I've seen on their site. Going with AMD means you still doing fairly well anyway. It won't have USB3 or the latest SATA standard but you don't need those right now anyway.
The processor upgrade isn't a bad idea. Those aren't necessarily simple to upgrade later so going a little overkill is probably better than getting something a bit slow.
The 3.0 Gb/s reference refers to the max speed of the sata bus which is what the hard drives connect to the computer with. I'd compare it to a pipe I guess. You can only push data through it so fast, but it's not really what's determining your actual speed. The latest standard for the sata bus operates at 6 Gb/s, but the drive you have there wouldn't support that speed and would step back to the more common 3Gbps speed. It can't even realistically fill a 3Gb/s speed anyway. No hard drive on the market can. Not even the really fast ones since those put more effort into reducing latencies than increasing peak throughput. Put simply, don't worry about that for now.
There are SSDs (solid state disks) which are fast enough to be held back a bit by the 3Gb/s max speed though. SSDs aren't really a good deal from the likes of Dell (not even offered?), but if you're feeling extra technologically proficient in a couple years it'd be a worthy upgrade to consider. If such a thing happens, sata 6Gb/s would suddenly become important...and I'm fairly certain you don't have that, but you would be guaranteed to have PCIe 2.0 expansion slots which is really the main benefit to the AMD side. You could probably get add-in cards for new stuff. An intel computer would probably have PCIe 1.0 which tops out at half the speed and isn't enough to run SATA 6Gb/s (or USB3) at full speed.
Oh, and the benefit to fewer ram modules is that you'd have empty ram slots to put more ram into later if you want, but ram is usually put in in pairs in most cases.
Yeah, this is very informative. And I'm not worried about the hard drive. I don't like to store a bunch of stuff I don't need on the computer anyway, I have an external hard drive that I use to store all my pictures, video, music, etc. I'll get another one eventually and have a proper back-up. This is getting to be kind of fun. I'm gonna do a little more reading too.
I can't see anything wrong with it, but it seems too cheap. I'll need to get an OS and a new keyboard separate, but I don't think that alone can be the cost difference. Am I missing some fatal flaw? How's the nVIDIA GeForce 7025?
I got a GeForce 7600 back in 2007 and it was pretty low-end even then. I doubt the 7025 is going to be capable of playing any moderately recent games, but it should at least be able to put graphics on the screen.
It just seems wrong to buy a computer as a pre-assembled bundle like that. Real men buy their computers a component at a time and assemble them in their living-room floors! We then proceed to replace one component at a time until not a single piece of the original remains, however as there was never a clear break between one computer and the next it could still be argued that the one you're using is still the same computer as the one you originally bought.
Hell, the computer I'm currently typing this on has a direct lineage to the 386 that my family bought in 1991!
Not a bad deal. Processor is not all that high end, but is a quad core and as such not low end either. Plenty for most gaming situations and ample for anything less demanding. Probably just not ideal for large amounts of 3D rendering or video encoding and such, but few people actually do enough of that to really
The graphics card very new and fairly powerful. It should be a bit faster than Ryan's graphics card actually if I remember right. Definitely better than mine.
The motherboard looks to be running an older 760G chipset instead of a newer 800-series, so that sort of explains the lack of usb 3. It's a little old for it. Still, it has the PCI express 2.0 on the expansion ports in the box, so some add-incards could help you out nicely if you come to need some connectivity updates. I say this because a single lane from pci express 1.0 only offers 256MB/s of bandwidth while USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s would be looking for more like 500-600MB/s for full speed operation. PCI Express 2.0 doubles up to 512MB/s which is about enough to squeeze almost full speed out of such upgrades.
That said these are only if you ever come to need them and it's possible that may not happen. Just know that these are options, so you aren't necessarily out of luck if you find something that actually needs these things.
Yeah, I think it's better than mine. I have an ATI Radeon HD4890. I can push it pretty hard if I run WoW on the highest graphics specs at 1680x1050 resolution in Org during high times. But besides that, it has been more than enough power. Yours should keep you happy for a long time, Adam.
So I'm looking into buying a new computer, but I've never been good at picking out a decent Graphic's Card, I was hoping I could get a few suggestions. I don't really need anything really top end, just something that will run modern graphics (Without lag. GOD I hate lag.) on medium/low settings would probably be good.
Edit: Feel free to suggest anything else I should probably put into this computer. Just a halfway decent Gaming PC is all I need, I rarely play any really recent games (Unfortunately the transfer to Vista and 7 broke most my older games), but I still play a few of the newer ones.
Current graphics card market is such that a Geforce GTX 460 from nVidia or a Radeon 6850/6870 from AMD would get the job done very well. AMD and nVidia don't actually make the cards though so you have to choose carefully from the various card-makers' products. I usually just look for something that seems like it'd have a good quiet heatsink+fan.
AMD finally killed the ATi brand if you must know about that.
As for other stuff, well Intel is launching some new stuff in the first week of January on the processors and motherboards front. Considering they got ahead of themselves in Malaysia and already started selling some of the parts there, I can say it'd likely be worth waiting a few weeks. Should be some good stuff worth considering if you're building your own system.
I also am a fan of fast storage. If you can spare an extra $100+ and have Windows 7, a small ssd can be a nice thing to install Windows and maybe some other frequently used apps on. If you're on a tighter budget...well you can live without one of these.
More specific advice I don't know since you didn't specifically say what you are doing, be this an upgrade of a current system or a new system, or what.
It's gotta be a new one, the one I've got now is a laptop, and a tablet laptop at that. Little small to have an effective heat sink and the processor just runs too hot. The fact that the heat sink is next to the graphics card doesn't particularly help either. But it's not too bad a laptop, it's just not something I can play any games with.
I was thinking about a SSD. But, I'll have to check the prices and such.
I see. Well, I don't know how much you're looking to spend, but I know at least one other person looking to build a computer fairly soon. In that other case my advice has been to wait for the new Intel processors. They have graphics integrated into the processor that should be competitive with current bottom-level discrete graphics if a preview I've seen is correct. Knowing this I'd have him just run his computer on integrated graphics for like a year and then pick up something from the next generation of graphics from AMD or nVidia. He, like me and apparently you doesn't run anything all that major right now, you see, so he could deal with it.
Now the big part of this thinking has a lot to do with the current semiconductor manufacturing market. You see, current graphics from both AMD and nVidia are built on a now mature 40nm process from TSMC. The issue with this is that they were originally intended to be on a 32nm process, but TSMC canceled that in favor of putting more resources into their 28nm process. Manufacturing updates aren't exactly getting cheaper and 40nm had a lot of teething troubles and history was looking to repeat itself with the 32nm, so they just cut that and are doubling down on 28nm to make sure that one goes off better. Now there's a new dog on the manufacturing market in the form of Global Foundries and they also had a 32nm bulk process planned, but the story there is the same. Dropped in favor of keeping the 28nm on track. Global Foundries still will have a 32nm SOI process, but this is to be used for AMD processors later in 2011. Now the point of all this is to note that the current generation of graphics had to be dumbed down practically at the last minute and have seen little advancement, especially in AMD's case since they are running the new stuff on the same process as the last generation. nVidia's Geforce GTX 580 has seen more improvement simply because the 480 left so much more room for architectural improvement. This low advancement is also why the 460 is still pretty competitive. It's based a a different chip than the 480 and 470 and is more refined already, so it remains competitive against AMD's new stuff.
Ultimately, when the next generation hits it will be on a substantially more advanced manufacturing process, be it from TSMC or the newcomer Global Foundries. You can bet there will be some quite significant improvements. If you can tolerate non-exceptional graphics for a while, you could benefit from waiting a while to purchase a graphics card.
Now, as for the ssd issue, there may be some next gen flash controllers coming out in the next few months to enable some substantial speed improvements and actual usage of the new sata standard, but there's not much word on any dates for that. No sense waiting on something that could happen in the next month or the next 6 months, so it's better to consider what's out there now if you decide to spring for one. Of course if you don't you could possibly add one later and later the options will only be better. Down side is doing so later would likely be more hassle what with having to deal with transferring an OS install.
Other considerations are less prone to rapid developments thankfully.
I will also say that I feel like the first step is to decide what size of a case you are looking to put your stuff in. A big box leaves your options very open and can be a little cheaper or very expensive depending on what you do with it. A smaller generic mATX type tower cuts off hope of ridiculous high end stuff, but would still pretty easy to make a basic system with. Then there is SFF. The rabbit hole. It can be a bit of a challenge and takes just a bit of madness to try and see how much potency you can squeeze in a small space. Naturally I'm a fan of SFF builds, but maybe you're not looking for silly and possibly expensive challenges.
Well that's enough mostly directionless rambling for now. Feel free to keep asking questions. Specific question are more likely to get meaningful answers.
Yeah sorry about that, I have no idea where to start when it comes to the hardware front.
I've got a fairly sizable amount of cash to work with, so as long as it's not totally unreasonable I could probably get it, but I'd like to be able to use some of said money on other things too, so I'm not gonna go super extravagant.
I was talking to my brother about that SSD (He's a hardware person as well.) and he pointed out that I might be able to get a... I think it was 64 GB USB Flash Drive, which would be essentially a SSD (Or rather is a SSD), but that's quite a bit cheaper then a 30 GB traditional SSD Hard drive. He says there shouldn't be a problem with it, but I figure the most opinions I can get the better; That seem like it would work decently to you?
I've yet to do a lot of much needed research into the matter as of yet, I'll post more when I've got some ideas of what I want.
USB drives certainly use flash memory and are technically solid state disks, but they are very much not the same thing as what I'm talking about. They are built to be cheap. USB 2.0 doesn't allow for much speed, and the little drives don't leave room for proper controller or cache chips.
Proper SSD's of today use controllers which have multiple channels internally. They are basically like a 8-10 drive RAID 0 of the USB drives all in a neat little package that function like a single normal drive. Actually they are better than that in many respects. Suffice to say, please do not use a USB drive like a proper SSD. They are solid state disks technically, but just using flash memory does not automatically make a drive fast and trying to use a USB drive like that won't end well.
This is one of those things where you pretty much gotta go all-in or go home. If you don't get one of the top choices, then just don't bother at all. These are a luxury item. They will not allow your computer to do anything it couldn't otherwise do and will not extend the life of your computer. If anything they will endeavor to shorten it. They have limited write cycles and will die someday depending on how much you use them.
www.anandtech.com is a good site for info on modern ssd stuffs. If you really want to know all the dirt I'd have to dig up some links that start a couple years back with the launch of Intel's drives, and the launches of drives with controllers from Indilinx and Sandforce.
Honestly I don't really know the speed difference. I have an SSD of moderate quality and that's what I put Windows 7 on. I don't know how long it takes to boot on a normal hard drive. I do know that despite time lost to having to select an OS and having to log in I could go from a totally off computer to loading a web page in the browser of my choice in under 45 seconds in windows 7. As soon as the desktop is visible it's basically ready to go and responsive. My Vista install on my Velociraptor drive is pretty quick too, so I don't really have a slow reference.
I will probably make a parts list as if I was building myself a new comp in another 2 or 3 weeks as a reference for my bro-in-law who will be building a computer. My tastes can be spendy but usually not without fair value. It'd still be a pie-in-the-sky reference though. I will help him sort out alternatives and make other changes so it fit his needs better. If you like I can post my part list here then and you can look it over as well.
Edit: I'm thinking of getting this case, but it doesn't come with a power supply. Should I worry about that now or pick everything else and get a power supply after I figure out everything else in the computer?
Comments
Mine doesn't use batteries.
But now you went and made me remember something. This is probably a bit NSFW.
I don't need to go super fancy, so my big question for all the smart folks here is, what processor should I get? Just lookign at Dell.com, they seem to be pushing the Athlon II X2 and the Phenom II X6. Any other advice anyone wants to give is also welcome. My needs are few. I want to watch videos on my computer and play flash games. I'm just gonna keep it simple and get a PC with Windows 7, I think I'll reformat my old computer and try to learn how to use Linux on it.
AMD does just a little better for the platform in general right now with better USB3 support (if you find a computer that has USB3 at all) and the latest SATA standard that should be better for fast solid state disks coming out in the future. An SSD is going to be a bit much for a lower cost computer right now, but that could change. If you add a SSD some years down the road, that faster SATA standard and/or guaranteed PCIe 2.0 slots would be good to have.
However, big computer OEMs like Dell/HP/Acer often put older stuff in the cheap computers. often the biggest indicator is what the integrated graphics option is. Radeon 4200 (as opposed to 4250 or 4270) is generally a good sign that these latest platform benefits are absent, or at least the newest SATA standard would be missing. On the intel side, the Intel X4500 Graphics Media Accelerator or any such integrated graphics option from intel with "45" in the name is also old. These are sadly not ideal choices but are exactly what the big computer builders will try to push onto you. Radeon 4200 systems are still ok I guess.
That's one of the perks of building your own I guess. Technology that is actually the latest. If you must run with the older stuff, Radeon 4200 type systems are almost certainly a better choice than Intel X4500GMA type systems.
Additionally upgrade pricing on Dell/HP is usually pretty steep. If you can buy and install parts yourself, you could possibly save some money by skipping upgrades and doing them yourself. Warranties are also not really worth it on a desktop.
PROCESSOR & GRAPHICS CARD AMD Phenom™ II X4 820 + ATI Radeon HD 5670 1GB
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64Bit, English
MEMORY 4GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz- 2 DIMMs
HARD DRIVE 500GB - 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB Cache
OPTICAL DRIVE 16X DVD+/-RW Drive
MONITOR No Monitor
SOUND CARD THX® TruStudio PC™
SPEAKERS No speakers (Speakers are required to hear audio from your system)
WIRELESS Dell 1525 Wireless-N PCIe Card
KEYBOARD Dell Consumer Multimedia Keyboard
MOUSE Dell Laser Mouse
Dell's price: $744.99
I'm gonna shop around for a better price but, does that look like something that'll last me 7 or 8 years? I figured I'd just go a step or 2 above what I need for the processor, it was only like a $50 upgrade. What does the 3.0 Gb/s mean for the hard drive, is that how fast it can read the info on it? And is there any benefit to having RAM in more or fewer modules?
You specified system is quite alright. It's not ideal, but the issue is more from having to deal with Dell than anything else as they aren't using the latest chipset in their motherboards from what I've seen on their site. Going with AMD means you still doing fairly well anyway. It won't have USB3 or the latest SATA standard but you don't need those right now anyway.
The processor upgrade isn't a bad idea. Those aren't necessarily simple to upgrade later so going a little overkill is probably better than getting something a bit slow.
The 3.0 Gb/s reference refers to the max speed of the sata bus which is what the hard drives connect to the computer with. I'd compare it to a pipe I guess. You can only push data through it so fast, but it's not really what's determining your actual speed. The latest standard for the sata bus operates at 6 Gb/s, but the drive you have there wouldn't support that speed and would step back to the more common 3Gbps speed. It can't even realistically fill a 3Gb/s speed anyway. No hard drive on the market can. Not even the really fast ones since those put more effort into reducing latencies than increasing peak throughput. Put simply, don't worry about that for now.
There are SSDs (solid state disks) which are fast enough to be held back a bit by the 3Gb/s max speed though. SSDs aren't really a good deal from the likes of Dell (not even offered?), but if you're feeling extra technologically proficient in a couple years it'd be a worthy upgrade to consider. If such a thing happens, sata 6Gb/s would suddenly become important...and I'm fairly certain you don't have that, but you would be guaranteed to have PCIe 2.0 expansion slots which is really the main benefit to the AMD side. You could probably get add-in cards for new stuff. An intel computer would probably have PCIe 1.0 which tops out at half the speed and isn't enough to run SATA 6Gb/s (or USB3) at full speed.
Oh, and the benefit to fewer ram modules is that you'd have empty ram slots to put more ram into later if you want, but ram is usually put in in pairs in most cases.
Just because YOU filled up your Hard Drive rather quickly, because you never delete anything and have a zillion games. -_-
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=6946912&sku=B69-0265
I can't see anything wrong with it, but it seems too cheap. I'll need to get an OS and a new keyboard separate, but I don't think that alone can be the cost difference. Am I missing some fatal flaw? How's the nVIDIA GeForce 7025?
I don't need the game, but this had everything else I wanted except usb 3.0 for under a grand. This should serve me well enough for the next decade. Thanks again for the help, everybody.
Hell, the computer I'm currently typing this on has a direct lineage to the 386 that my family bought in 1991!
The graphics card very new and fairly powerful. It should be a bit faster than Ryan's graphics card actually if I remember right. Definitely better than mine.
The motherboard looks to be running an older 760G chipset instead of a newer 800-series, so that sort of explains the lack of usb 3. It's a little old for it. Still, it has the PCI express 2.0 on the expansion ports in the box, so some add-in cards could help you out nicely if you come to need some connectivity updates. I say this because a single lane from pci express 1.0 only offers 256MB/s of bandwidth while USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s would be looking for more like 500-600MB/s for full speed operation. PCI Express 2.0 doubles up to 512MB/s which is about enough to squeeze almost full speed out of such upgrades.
That said these are only if you ever come to need them and it's possible that may not happen. Just know that these are options, so you aren't necessarily out of luck if you find something that actually needs these things.
Edit: Feel free to suggest anything else I should probably put into this computer. Just a halfway decent Gaming PC is all I need, I rarely play any really recent games (Unfortunately the transfer to Vista and 7 broke most my older games), but I still play a few of the newer ones.
AMD finally killed the ATi brand if you must know about that.
As for other stuff, well Intel is launching some new stuff in the first week of January on the processors and motherboards front. Considering they got ahead of themselves in Malaysia and already started selling some of the parts there, I can say it'd likely be worth waiting a few weeks. Should be some good stuff worth considering if you're building your own system.
I also am a fan of fast storage. If you can spare an extra $100+ and have Windows 7, a small ssd can be a nice thing to install Windows and maybe some other frequently used apps on. If you're on a tighter budget...well you can live without one of these.
More specific advice I don't know since you didn't specifically say what you are doing, be this an upgrade of a current system or a new system, or what.
I was thinking about a SSD. But, I'll have to check the prices and such.
Thanks for the help!
Now the big part of this thinking has a lot to do with the current semiconductor manufacturing market. You see, current graphics from both AMD and nVidia are built on a now mature 40nm process from TSMC. The issue with this is that they were originally intended to be on a 32nm process, but TSMC canceled that in favor of putting more resources into their 28nm process. Manufacturing updates aren't exactly getting cheaper and 40nm had a lot of teething troubles and history was looking to repeat itself with the 32nm, so they just cut that and are doubling down on 28nm to make sure that one goes off better. Now there's a new dog on the manufacturing market in the form of Global Foundries and they also had a 32nm bulk process planned, but the story there is the same. Dropped in favor of keeping the 28nm on track. Global Foundries still will have a 32nm SOI process, but this is to be used for AMD processors later in 2011. Now the point of all this is to note that the current generation of graphics had to be dumbed down practically at the last minute and have seen little advancement, especially in AMD's case since they are running the new stuff on the same process as the last generation. nVidia's Geforce GTX 580 has seen more improvement simply because the 480 left so much more room for architectural improvement. This low advancement is also why the 460 is still pretty competitive. It's based a a different chip than the 480 and 470 and is more refined already, so it remains competitive against AMD's new stuff.
Ultimately, when the next generation hits it will be on a substantially more advanced manufacturing process, be it from TSMC or the newcomer Global Foundries. You can bet there will be some quite significant improvements. If you can tolerate non-exceptional graphics for a while, you could benefit from waiting a while to purchase a graphics card.
Now, as for the ssd issue, there may be some next gen flash controllers coming out in the next few months to enable some substantial speed improvements and actual usage of the new sata standard, but there's not much word on any dates for that. No sense waiting on something that could happen in the next month or the next 6 months, so it's better to consider what's out there now if you decide to spring for one. Of course if you don't you could possibly add one later and later the options will only be better. Down side is doing so later would likely be more hassle what with having to deal with transferring an OS install.
Other considerations are less prone to rapid developments thankfully.
I will also say that I feel like the first step is to decide what size of a case you are looking to put your stuff in. A big box leaves your options very open and can be a little cheaper or very expensive depending on what you do with it. A smaller generic mATX type tower cuts off hope of ridiculous high end stuff, but would still pretty easy to make a basic system with. Then there is SFF. The rabbit hole. It can be a bit of a challenge and takes just a bit of madness to try and see how much potency you can squeeze in a small space. Naturally I'm a fan of SFF builds, but maybe you're not looking for silly and possibly expensive challenges.
Well that's enough mostly directionless rambling for now. Feel free to keep asking questions. Specific question are more likely to get meaningful answers.
I've got a fairly sizable amount of cash to work with, so as long as it's not totally unreasonable I could probably get it, but I'd like to be able to use some of said money on other things too, so I'm not gonna go super extravagant.
I was talking to my brother about that SSD (He's a hardware person as well.) and he pointed out that I might be able to get a... I think it was 64 GB USB Flash Drive, which would be essentially a SSD (Or rather is a SSD), but that's quite a bit cheaper then a 30 GB traditional SSD Hard drive. He says there shouldn't be a problem with it, but I figure the most opinions I can get the better; That seem like it would work decently to you?
I've yet to do a lot of much needed research into the matter as of yet, I'll post more when I've got some ideas of what I want.
Proper SSD's of today use controllers which have multiple channels internally. They are basically like a 8-10 drive RAID 0 of the USB drives all in a neat little package that function like a single normal drive. Actually they are better than that in many respects. Suffice to say, please do not use a USB drive like a proper SSD. They are solid state disks technically, but just using flash memory does not automatically make a drive fast and trying to use a USB drive like that won't end well.
This is one of those things where you pretty much gotta go all-in or go home. If you don't get one of the top choices, then just don't bother at all. These are a luxury item. They will not allow your computer to do anything it couldn't otherwise do and will not extend the life of your computer. If anything they will endeavor to shorten it. They have limited write cycles and will die someday depending on how much you use them.
www.anandtech.com is a good site for info on modern ssd stuffs. If you really want to know all the dirt I'd have to dig up some links that start a couple years back with the launch of Intel's drives, and the launches of drives with controllers from Indilinx and Sandforce.
What's the aproximate change in boot time for Windows 7 (or any other program for that matter) on a SSD compared to a hard disk drive (HDD?) anyhow?
I will probably make a parts list as if I was building myself a new comp in another 2 or 3 weeks as a reference for my bro-in-law who will be building a computer. My tastes can be spendy but usually not without fair value. It'd still be a pie-in-the-sky reference though. I will help him sort out alternatives and make other changes so it fit his needs better. If you like I can post my part list here then and you can look it over as well.
Edit: I'm thinking of getting this case, but it doesn't come with a power supply. Should I worry about that now or pick everything else and get a power supply after I figure out everything else in the computer?
I'm a bit conflicted between two Graphics cards.
From the looks of it, this one is a bit faster.
But this one runs a TON cooler, is a bit smaller, and I just feel better about it for some unexplainable reason.
Edit: About how much RAM should I have in this? (Gonna run 64 bit Windows 7 Professional)