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- Shades

Chuck.... I saw.... sob!

Well I guess after 5 years this has been a pretty good rig but it's getting a bit old in the tooth and time to upgrade. I want Windows 7 and enough poop to run Rise Of Flight and Cliffs Of Dover at decent settings, and maybe even FSX maxed out (if thats even possible yet). FS9 and IL2 will be fully tweaked and enjoyable, that's for sure.

Gonna keep my existing case, power supply, DVD drive and sound card (all pretty decent compnents) and go with:


Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) LGA 1155 77W Quad-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 4000

GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-UD3H LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model

Seagate Barracuda ST31000524AS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

SAPPHIRERadeon HD 6850 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit

The jury is still not out yet on the hard drive, I want a 1 terrabyte drive plus the mobo support 6.0Gb/s SATA which I want to take advantage of, but affordable choices there seem to be either Seagate or Western Digital. The Sony drive I've had has been GREAT and I wish they made a competitive 1TB 6.0Gb/sec drive, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Thoughts?

Hey Stoopy,

Z77 excellent choice, alltough I'd go for the Asus brand, seems Gigabite has some production issues lately
CPU get the fastest MoFo you can get yer pawns on 2700K or 3770K
for C drive get a 120 G SSD, Samsung 830 or OCZ Vertex 3
for other drives choices are multiple, just SATA III is a must
8G's RAM Corsair is good
Vidcard IF possible get a 680GTX nVidia based card
PSU get at least 800-1000W 80 plus gold rated
CPU cooler, Corsair H100 hands down
Case CoolerMaster HAF X
OS W7 x64 pro SP1

check my Sig

Not sure I can contribute these days I'm afraid.
I'm so out of date it's embarrassing.
One thing I'd say about the i5;
When I built my last rig (still going strong and listed in sig) I simultaneously built an i5 rig for my old man.
I went for the i7 because I thought it was aimed more toward gamers.
In fact the i5 is an incredible chip and from tests I've done on my Dad's rig, I could have easily used that instead and his is only running at a stock 2.4GHz.
He does have a relatively clear HDD and other good components but they're all similar to mine.

I have several HDD's in my system.
One is a Samsung 1Tb.
When I got this Samsung was just starting to get a good rep. but this has been a good reliable drive for the few years I've had the machine.
I also have a couple of 500Gb Maxtors from my last rig, so they've been going strong for about eight years now.

Thanks guys. I forgot to mention that I'm trying to stay within an "upgrade only" budget of $800 US. Since this is under the guise of a Father's Day gift and I have a son in college now. So not a lot of wiggle room, which is why I'm keeping certain components that are just fine and don't need upgrading (case, power supply, DVD drive, sound card).

So that leaves CPU, Mobo, memory, vid card, storage drive, and O/S to split among the budget. Like $133 per component....good thing memory, drive and O/S are all at or under $100 each.

The i7's are nice but also 50% more expensive, so I'm thinking an i5 Ivy Bridge is about the sweet spot in performance/cost once I add everything else, and after 5 years of solid running I really like the Ultra Durable series of Gigabyte mobos, I have read some of the recent issues and it appears that the latest firmware update took care of everyone (and finding a batch of independent mobo reviews that don't have a negative person or three grousing about something or other is next to impossible).

The board supports an SSD mSATA drive which I am very sold on trying out, however it doesn't appear to be necessary right off the bat so I'm thinking to add it later, although they are cheap enough - it gives me room to get slightly better other stuff right now.. and I can schmooze my way into getting the SSD later. I am also engaged in a project at work where we developed a small dedicated control box using SSD storage and found out the hard way it's not designed well for lots of little writes, reads and overwrites (log and image data in our case) - turns out the drives wear out quickly due to how they allocate and reclaim storage nodes. We built 150 of these boxes and fielded them in a pilot project and then watched them all slowly die after about a month of success....working with the manufacturer we now understand why, but I'm still not in a big hurry to trust one in my home yet. But for an O/S drive where a lot of stuff is written once and just read from, I can see the benefits though.

I'll look at some of the options you mention before pulling the trigger. Are the NVidia boards now that much ahead of ATI? I am still somewhat loyal to ATI chipsets, for whatever reason but will check it out.

Thanks!

- JG300-Stoopy

Thanks guys. I forgot to mention that I'm trying to stay within an "upgrade only" budget of $800 US. Since this is under the guise of a Father's Day gift and I have a son in college now. So not a lot of wiggle room, which is why I'm keeping certain components that are just fine and don't need upgrading (case, power supply, DVD drive, sound card).

This is where a little creative marketing rebranding can come in handy.

Spend $5,000, but explain it's for dad's "proprietary family archival central data facility". Mention something about a lot of encrypted geneological files and such that mustn't be fiddled with. Have about three passwords for log on and a switch encased in a quarter inch steel plate box with a padlock the size of your fist on it.

You may need a bigger monitor to, you know, enlarge those ancient microfisches and Ellis Island records.

- JG300-Ascout

This is where a little creative marketing rebranding can come in handy.

Spend $5,000, but explain it's for dad's "proprietary family archival central data facility". Mention something about a lot of encrypted geneological files and such that mustn't be fiddled with. Have about three passwords for log on and a switch encased in a quarter inch steel plate box with a padlock the size of your fist on it.

You may need a bigger monitor to, you know, enlarge those ancient microfisches and Ellis Island records.

She'd see right through the geneology thing since she's met my family and understands why we moved to the other side of the U.S. to get away from most of 'em.

And actually she's brought up the bigger monitor thing although the one we have now is HUGE. Turns out I'm the cheapskate, but that's because I don't want this eating into my carefully planned V-Strom parts and maintenance budget...I'm gonna need a third set of tires soon.

3 decades of reading budget performance builds in Car Craft magazine have instilled a mind set where I need to research and squeeze every last drop of blood out of every dollar in the interest of performance vs price point. I can't allow myself to just buy the latest & greatest - that's the Hot Rod magazine bubble-package approach. Pheh.

So I pulled the trigger on the above after taking the advice to revisit the video card selection, which was a good thing since the vid card I had selected turned out to have a few known issues with one of the sims (incurable blue lines in Cliffs of Dover). I've changed to an ATI Sapphire 7850 card which is more pricey but has outstanding specs and reviews for the price point. Also changed the drive selection for one with 64MB cache and is still SATA 6.0Gb/sec so it ought to scream. I'll add the newfangeld mSATA SSD drive later to boost O/S and program load times. All being said and done I think it's a good sweet spot for performance for the price. Should definitely handle Rise of Flight and Cliffs of Dover on respectable settings, chew up FSX on maxed settings, and of course run full-out FS9 and IL2 1946 with one hand behind its back.

The stuff is shipping from TN some this time next week we'll have it put together and operational if all goes according to Hoyle...we shall see!

Congarats on the acquisition Stoopy, may it serve you well

Thanks Fled, especially for making me rethink the vid card selection!