2012-09-24, 10:04 PM
XTOTHEL Wrote:I see places where you can shave $$$
SSD: only get one, 256GB and get Crucial M4 or an Intel one for reliability. I personally have a OCZ Vertex 4, 5 year warranty...why not.
HDD: get a western green, you don't need black for storage. Also note important data (photos, docs, etc) should be backed up, not just stored on a large harddrive, it should usually be used for downloaded movies/music easily replaceable things in case of failure.
Never used a aftermarket CPU cooler, never had the need to.
You can probably find better deal for mouse and keyboard if they were purchased together or at a local store. For gaming though, steels series make some nice stuff.
The reason I got 2 SSD's is because I intended to put one of them in my existing desktop that didn't have one and I didn't feel like doing a separate order. I'm not set on Mushkin in particular, but I heard they were a good buy and they're considerably cheaper than any other drives of their speed/size. Assuming that one and the Intel one even out in price again, I'll go with Intel in spite of the difference on benchmarks for the security that they probably aren't gonna send me a dead drive. That was sort of the same reasoning behind a caviar black, but if you think a caviar green is just as likely to arrive on my doorstep without bad sectors/DOA, I can certainly go with that instead.
I probably don't need a fancy CPU heatsink, but the i7 in my desktop idles in the mid 40s at base clock and idles mid 60s when overclocked to 3.8ghz even with the fancy liquid cooling heatsink I've got in it. My current desktop is still pretty capable of running everything I throw at it, I just can't deal with how hot it makes my room when it does; that's a big reason behind the video card I chose, too. I also don't know if I'm going to need to overclock the processor or not, but I figure I'll get more performance out of overclocking with a $45 heatsink than I would with paying an extra $100 for a processor.
The mouse and keyboard is just me being a Logitech fanboy. I wanted a MX518, but I guess that's been discontinued.
Pretty much exactly what happened with me last time when I wanted a g5 and that got replaced with the g500 (which is the current mouse I'm using with my desktop). If I'm feeling adventurous I could shave off $10 or so by replacing the G500 with a G400 (the new MX518 replacement).