So here's the story. At an early screening of the new Star Trek movie last night for Intel retailers, I had the blessing to win a hefty prize bundle that contained the following: Intel Core i7-940 Nehalem processor Intel Desktop Board DX58SO Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Now, this alone is enough to make the average nerd change his pants: it's got a retail value of $1200, and if I were to take it on Ebay, I could probably get even more than that. So then, why make a thread if I'm only going to gloat about the luck that finally decided to smile on me? It's simple: I'm not sure what to build around it. The i7-940 processor is the second-best Intel chip on the market right now, being only supplanted by the i7-965 from what my research suggests. The Motherboard is equally advanced, though I've already found that it'll need a BIOS upgrade--not too big of a deal. Add in Vista Ultimate (and I'm pretty sure an upgrade to Windows 7 when it's released), the 24" Gateway monitor I've already got, and it's looking to be a pretty freaking awesome machine. Here's where you come in. I'm looking for suggestions of what I can build around this chip and board. My goal with it is to get into video editing and gaming, so I'm thinking 8GB of RAM, 2TB in RAID, video capture, and a BD-ROM drive (if not BD-R, though where I can buy BD-R media or why I'd need it, I don't know off-hand). So assuming a spending cap of about $1,500, what should I put into this machine?
1) Apply poop to your buttcrack. This will help you build ur compooper. 2) Toast sh*t in any toaster oven until its hard, then put a mother chip in it. 3) Find ur mom and rub her breasts on it, which will give it power. 4) Find a ugly girl, have (you know), and put the *** onto the sh*t. She has to be ugly or else it will not work. 5) For the keyboard, you need a testicle for each key. Write the letter or symbol on each one. If you have trouble finding testicles, I can lend you mine. 6) Now the moniter. Rip yo mamas ass off, then put a ***** (yours would work) into it so it'll stand up. 7) Now the final step. Go BUY a computer!
Anyways, your probably better off looking for a tutorial on the interwebs about the best cases/ packages you can get for your stuff, that will help you in the video editing department. I'm not a real genius in this department. Sorry, but I would probably try and either: 1) Sell it, and buy a pre-built one. 2) Sell all of the stuff and stay with the one you have now. 3) Get a Mac.
He said for gaming... Get dominator ram - 8gb. Get a 1TB HDD, its gotta be SATA2. Pick yourself up with an 800 watt PSU and make sure you've got enough SATA's and voltage to hold up this video card, the 285 gtx. That one's 550$, however an excellent cheaper alternative that can run crysis on max with 40fps is the 260 gtx 216 streaming processors. tl;dr = if you get dominator ram, 1tb, and a gtx 285, you should have one pretty sick machine in your hands, and it'll be well under 1,500, of course if all you're planning to purchase is ram, an HDD, and a graphics card. You'll still have money for a BD-R, maybe get a blu-ray player in there with the extra cash. Up to you, though.
800 PSU is alot, you probable only need like 500. What you picked sounds good, i'm not an expert, but it still sounds amazing.
I'm jealous. Now I'm a novice, and have never built a machine (although that is about to change in a few weeks). However, from what I can tell, Corsair Dominator is some of the best RAM on the market right now. I don't know what 1TB drive is best suited for RAID, but if you don't want a RAID set up, the Western Digital Caviar Black seems to be a great 1TB drive. If you're going to spend $550 on a GPU, go for the GTX 295. On newegg, the lowest priced GTX 295 is priced at $530, but I would go with the EVGA card priced at $590. This stuff only adds up to 960. Now you have some money left for a quality PSU, and a killer Full-Tower case. If you don't need a PSU or Case, you have money left for a Blu-Ray drive and a SSD. This PSU calculator is quite handy. I just did a calculation with all the specs listed above, a blu-ray drive, an additional PCI x16 card, and the i7 overclocked to 3.88GHz. It came out to 618W. You should definitely do a calculation yourself though. Hope this helped.
www.tigerdirect.com has quite a bit of good parts for sale cheap. In my opinion i would say wait until the end of the year when windows 7 comes out, because microsoft is abandoning vista. i currently have vista and i cant go 2 weeks without having a malfunction of some kind. so, if you are sticking with vista visit tigerdirect because it has everything you need to build any type of computer cheap, and go there even if you are going to wait for windows 7, but first find out what is compatable with it.