I have been wanting to build a new PC for a while now, and after seeing Chaud's builds for this month I have some questions:
1. Why is Amazon always used for the parts? I am sure there are a lot of great deals on Newegg and TigerDirect he could take advantage of.
2. Would the Puppy/Dolphin builds fulfill these requirements? (A few of these I am almost certain it will work, like the hard drives and monitors, but I want to make sure.)
A. Plays WoW:MoP, Skyrim, AC3 on high/max settings?
B. Be able to handle games in requirement 1 while having multiple (3-10) Chrome tabs open and possibly one other application (like MS Word/Excel)
C. Allows multiple Hard Drives (2-4), with a mix between SSD and HDD
D. Allow at least 2 monitors?
Also, I don't keep up with the technology, it seems like just yesterday the 8800GT was the best card on the market. So I have a few questions you guys might be able to answer:
I. I have read that Ivy bridge processors are slightly faster and use less power than Sandy bridge. Will the differences matter to an average user like me, or is this more of an argument for overclockers?
II. Are Solid State drives worth it? Will I see noticably better performance in gaming and multitasking (could care less about boot times, care more about seek time)
III. What are the strengths/weaknesses of the Puppy/Dolphin builds? Are they using close to obsolete technology? Are they slow with multi-tasking? Etc.
This is my current setup. I cannot post links or I would, but you can easily copy/paste each into Newegg to see their full specs:
Case: Antec Mini P180 case
MoBo: P5Q-EM Mini-ATX Motherboard
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 896-P3-1255-AR Video Card
Memory: G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
PSU: Antec EarthWatts EA750 750W
CPU: I got this handed down from a friend, so I don't have the exact specs right now (at work), but its a low end Dual Core 775 socket, somewhere around 2.0GHz
I am pretty sure the processor is my big bottleneck, the thing tops out easily