Upgrading..

[JumpittyCricket]

Ideas:
eVGA Geforce 7900 GT $319.00
Is it worth replacing my 6800 GS, or should I just wait for the G80 and DX10 next January? Or should I just change it then too? I need to get eVGA this time for the warrenty. After all I want to change the cooler, who wants to keep the dinky stock one? :rolleyes:

WD Raptor 74 Gig $155.00
Is this really worth it? I would like a really fast drive for booting but will It be that much faster... My plan would be to give my sister my 80 gig SATA and take my 250 Ultra ATA for storage and boot with the raptor. Another option would be to buy a nice big SATA 2 drive with a 16mb Cache for storage, and keep my 80 gig SATA1 for booting.

Soundblaster X-fi $121.99
I know it will sound alot better, and has a crystalizer, and actually makes games run a few FPS faster, but is it worth $121.99 to those who own it?

OCZ Copper BGA Ramsinks $10.50
We all know the stock zalman ones are ugly alluminum, but are these worth $10?

Opteron 165 $327.00
Is a dual core really worth it now, or should I just wait for the AMD K8L next year? I just want to hit 2.8GHz stable on this, I don't need the big 3.0.
PC P&C 510 Watt SLI $176
I have a 450 Watt FSP (fortron) now, but i'm not sure if it will be able to handle 2 hard drives, an X-fi, another DVD drive, a new gfx card, and more fans and This thing peaks at 650 Watts, and has 38 amps peak on its 12v rail.

DVD Burner $46
I need a burner drive as mine burnt out, but should i get one or just wait for Blue-ray and HD-DVD?

Definants:

Zalman VF900 $49.99
GPU cooler, for my 6800 GS or 7900 GT. Who likes dinky stock coolers? Especially the 7900 GTs'.

Sennheiser PC150 Headset $39.99
I need a headset, and i bought a $2 Logitech headset before, and it broke 3 weeks later. FOr this reason I want to get a good one that will optimze the Soundcard I am contemplating.

Azenx Blitztorm Slot Cooler $19.99
Common, I have to keep my GPu nice and cool if I want to compete i benchies :dave:

If I get it all, it comes to $1,265.46. That is alot..
I will be working this summer, making minimum wage which is $7.50 in my state. I will be working about 5 hours a day, 5 days a week. TRhat comes to $187 a week, and there are about 12 weeks in the summer vacation. Thats $2250. I need to take into consideration that I have to buy a painball gun and stuff, and I will be playing all summer so take $400 for the gun, air and paintballs. That leaves me with $1850. Now if I buy all these parts, I'll have $584.54 to save for pocket money and to put a way for a car. I have $1400 and I need around $5k for next summer, but I can save all my christmas money and wait till the end of next summer to buy a car, but at the same time I'll want to buy more computer upgrades, damn this habit is expensive. Help me deside :)

 

[Marcus_X]

That videocard is really good, but considering that there are already games being developed which'll support DX10 like Crysis it might not be such a good investement, but it really depends on what kind of games you'll want to play with it. If you just want blazing fast visuals on games of today it'll do very well.

Can't say much about drives, I think you should stick with either ATA or S-ATA, not both.

Soundblasters X-fi extreme music won't improve fps unless you really plan to play them with all audio settings maxed, it'll maintain better fps than the previous audigy series when you have EAX enabled, expect no significant improvement when just playing on regular sound settings. And the X-fi extreme music card only significantly improves the quality of mp3's, the more expensive models don't cost $ 121,99 I'm afraid. Don't they just promise performance increase only on those X-fi Fatality and Fatality FPS models?

RAM sinks are always good, copper conduct heat better than aluminium doesn't it? Then go for the copper ones.

More and more games are starting to support dual core technology, although I can't confirm performance; Quake 4 and Call of Duty 2 provide patches which are said to improve benefit the use of a dual core cpu. They'll only become more and more populair in the near future.

Blue Ray and HD DVD won't be cheap when it'll hit the mainstream market. A set of DVD burners will be good enough for now. I currently have only one DVD Burner installed and I wish I had 2, that's why I advise you to buy 2 if you're planning to do some copying.

At the Las Vegas CES 2006, "companies backing HD DVD said that nearly 200 titles would be available for the format by the end of the year." [3] On March 31, 2006, Toshiba released their first HD DVD player in Japan at ¥110,000 ($934) [4] HD DVD was released in United States on April 18, 2006.[5]

I've also got a Zalman VF700 CU GPU cooler installed, but aren't really happy with it's performance, although it keeps my gpu temperatures in the green it doesn't lower it's temps below 50 degrees. You might wan't to reconsider that cooler. There must be better ones out there

Sennheiser is always good, the cheapest model X-fi card already supports headset surround so it'll probably sound unbelievably good.

I used to have a slot cooler before, I found it to be very noisy. I don't think it'll perform better than a good intake - outtake fan setup. Fot my cpu I use a Zalman cooler for my cpu (Zalman CNPS 7700-Cu) which dropped my cpu temps from around 50~60 degrees with stock cooling to 30 idle and still below 40 degrees when stressed. I'm very happy with that cooler. (30 degrees idle with Cool 'n Quiet enabled on my AMD 64 4000+)

I hope this helps, the info I provided on X-fi cards came from various computer store employees since I've asked around for them a lot before.

Greetings,

Marcus_X

 

[Exfoliate]

I say wait for it. AMD will have it's AM2 socket out soon enough and you'll really want a Direct X 10 card come this fall with Unreal Tournament 2007 and Crysis etc. If you can afford the X-fi yeah I guess you could do that but I think most people feel it sounds better just because they're trying to make themselves think they're $120-300 was worth it.
You'll probably be best off with a 150 gig Raptor, sure they're not cheap but it's large enough that you can do with the single drive. Anyone who owns one can tell you that the speed increase is totally worth it.
Opterons are nice, they do tend to score better in most benchmarks than AMD X2's, they also overclock well as you've apparently read up on so you'll have quite the proc if all goes well. Granted Intel's new Core Duo chips are showing excellent performance, especially when overclocked, beating AMD's FX 60 in FEAR, which is kind of scary but these days games are way more gpu intensive so don't worry about the proc so much.
At any rate my main advise for you is, save up your money, and wait for the DX 10 lineup.