My new PC

My old desktop PC died when I moved house. I spent a whole day trying to figure out what went wrong with it. The motherboard had been acting up for a while. I put new DDR2 memory in it a while back and it caused a loud screeching sound on the audio output. I couldn't use my Creative X-Fi  sound card after a while(back in the days when sound cards were necessary for a nice sound). The card is probably still in good nick too. The built in audio on motherboards these days is just so good, it makes sound cards an option only for those recording their own music and need super high quality equipment. I'll have to upload the specs of my now dead system, just for a comparison of my move up in the world.

Anyways, onwards and upwards, my new baby is going to be a beauty. I wanted to keep it as low as possible, but I can't seem to keep it lower than €868.51 at the moment from Dabs.ie. I wish I more to  spend, but this years been an expensive year, buying house, fixing house, getting engaged and many holidays, now I'm supposed to be saving for a wedding. I figure this is my present for my 30th :)

Here's the setup:
Processor: i5-3570K S1155, 3.4GHz, 6MB cache
Processor Fan: Akasa Nero 3 premier CPU cooler (will be replaced at later date)
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H S1155, Intel Z77 chipset, DDR3, PCIe3.0 (I love the 2oz copper plane for power and ground, improves cooling, noise reduction and all round better design :D )
Memory: Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4) DDR3 1600MHz, CL9 XMP
Graphics Card: Gigabyte ATI Radeon 7870 HD, 1100MHz, 2GB, PCIe3.0
PSU: 750W OCZ Technology Fatal1ty Series High Performance PSU
Case: Gigabyte Luxo X10 Gaming case (Front USB3.0 and Side LED fans)

I've got a bit of a Gigabyte theme going on here. I have to admit, I'm impressed with some of their stuff and I figure they'll complement each other in this system. I originally picked the EVGA nVidia Geforce GTX 650, but a good friend recommended against it as it would seriously impede this system. AnandTech's GPU product benchmark comparison tool is a great site for comparing GPU's against each other. The performance of the GTX 650 compares only a little better against the older GDDR3 PCIe2.0 cards. If I'm going to build a new system I want to use the latest technology.

I know what you're thinking, where's the SSD's, where's the monitor, what about liquid cooling? These are future updates. My old systems old SATA drives are still operational and my old monitor will have to do until I can afford a nice one. My current SATA drives may be slow and small (1 x 500GB and 1 x 1TB) and will certainly be the bottleneck in the system until they're replaced, but they'll have to wait. The same goes for the monitor, it's a VGA input only monitor measuring 21inches (was big when I got it), but I'll be wanting something larger, say 24 to 27inches with a refresh rate of about 2ms, full HDMI and more. I've yet to look into these. Any larger than 27inches and I'll have to get shares in SpecSavers, am blind enough as is.

I'll have one more crack tonight at my dead old PC to see whats working in it so I can gauge how much I can reduce the above costs. Unfortunately I'd be wary about any hardware in the old system as it was in a bad way, but if I can verify the PSU is in good nick, that could save me a €100. The power supply I've picked above is well above what I need. I used ThermalTake's PSU Wattage Calculator to calculate my systems power consumption and I got a result of 352W running at 85% TDP, so my 750W is excessive. I figure if my old PSU is good, I can keep that and leave out the new one. Even if I add a number of SSDs, SLI graphics card, I'm still under the 500W mark.

I'll sleep on it all tonight and I'll buy it tomorrow. Hopefully there will be a Friday deal that cuts my cost down again.