Cyber Monday

[Mags]

Took advantage of cyber monday and ordered new system stuffs. Curious what you guys think.

http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX36820
  - Case, got it for $140 hopefully thanks to price matching
  - $50 bucks off
http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX38854
   - Memory, just always had best luck with kingston so
  - $20 bucks off
http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX38982
  - CPU, best you can afford I suppose
  -  $60 bucks off
http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX24569
  - PSU, Great bang for the buck I think
  - $60 bucks off
http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX38188
  - MoBo, Still an Asus fan, but still was tough. Hope I got the right one.
  - $15 bucks off
and a standard burner

- No hard-drive yet, they had wicked deals on Seagates, but sold out of them all
- Using old vid card, 560ti still doing everything I want it to

So, yeah let me know what you guys think.

[Mr. Analog]

That kicks ass man, makes me wish I had done the same though.

[Tom]

That kicks ass man, makes me wish I had done the same though.

Boxing Day?

[Mr. Analog]

Exactly.

Mags, what kind of vid card you going for? A 680 or something?

[Thorin]

Sweet Zombies, forty bucks for 8GB of RAM...

[Mr. Analog]

I know right?

I did some Christmas shopping online today, hopefully shipping isn't retarded like last year.

[Melbosa]

Nice build I'd say for the $$$.  Hope it treats you well!

[Thorin]

That kicks ass man, makes me wish I had done the same though.

You need to listen when I tell you to do something

[Mags]

Exactly.

Mags, what kind of vid card you going for? A 680 or something?

Just going to stick with the 560ti for now. Don't think it's worth the jump yet. Maybe the 700's, we'll see.

[Mr. Analog]

Yarg, going to TRY to get to MemEx today...

[Tom]

Oh, I picked up a GF 640 GT recently for my media box! And I have 8GB of ram coming in as well. Currently that machine has 2GB ram, and had only a 780G based Radeon HD 3200. It worked for basic stuff, but not for gaming or flash for that matter (trying to full screen a flash video on it was painful).

What was more painful I think was that this machine is DDR2 based so that 8GB ram I got was about $130 (shipped). 4x2GB. I was /tempted/ to max the machine out with 16GB ram, but each pair of 4GB sticks was over $150 each before shipping and tax. I decided that if I wanted that much ram in that machine, it'd bet a much better idea to just build a new mini-itx or mATX box with a nice dual core i3 and a @%&# load of dirt cheap DDR3 than to spend $300-400 on DDR2. I could build a really decent media box for $400 (especially since I have the gpu already).

But hey, its a nice little box now. And I think that the gpu is actually keeping the machine cooler, since its a 65W card (max) and xbmc is happily decoding video via VDPAU instead of using up a couple cpu cores to do it in software. So the cpu is clocked way down, and the card is using dedicated video decoding hw rather than its cuda cores, so thats likely clocked way down, and woo. Cooler, and faster system. Win-Win.

If you're looking for an inexpensive but really decent card, get the GT 640 2G, or something in the family. It plays minecraft at 100-200fps, decodes video flawlessly, and supposedly plays most modern AAA games at decent framerates at high settings. I got it for $100 shipped. so it was a pretty damn good deal.

link: http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=72041

[Mr. Analog]

I just bought an MSI GTX 680 with 4GB of DDR5

After Christmas I'll update my board and RAM I think

Uninstalling drivers as I speak

[Mr. Analog]

Nice setup Tom! Looks like a big step up

[Tom]

Nice setup Tom! Looks like a big step up

The new card is something like 4 times faster

And thats with optimal drivers... I was using the linux radeon drivers before since the fglrx drivers /suuuuccckkkkeeeedddd/ for that card. It was better sacrificing a lot of performance for proper vsync control and no shearing.

[Mr. Analog]

Man, I know that feel, going from a GeForce 470 to a 680 was like... huge