Building My Own PC

[al Roumi]

But i'm not much of an audiophile so possibly its wasted on me

I think audiophiles would be concerned about shielding and interference of audio signals in a noisy PC case, never mind digital processing of sound.

i just like tech-bling, and boy is my PC bling-tastic! :D

Good point! Psyconaut, you have forgotten one essential element of any 'rig': where are Teh Neons?

[Furunculus]

I think audiophiles would be concerned about shielding and interference of audio signals in a noisy PC case, never mind digital processing of sound.

it is a shielded card.

Yes six cores are pretty. But, most apps are barely optimised for two cores, let alone 4 or even 6. I'd rather not shell out an additional $100 for overkill. I'll have to upgrade in 2-3 (4-5 if I'm a cheapskate) years regardless.

It's more than $100 price difference here. I currently don't have any games that'd demand more than what a single 5770 can produce, so again, I'd rather not go overkill. I'm looking for best bang for buck. I am a student after all. I have the money to do so, but I'd rather not and have it for a rainy day/future purchases. When the time comes to upgrade the prices on the 5770 will have dropped and I can get a significant boost for a small outlay.

fair enough, but the difference between 965 and the 1055T is less than twenty percent, a factor that will shrink further with the arrival of the 1045T, and with its Turbo mode it will still run nearly as fast as the 965 on poorly threaded workloads. not to mention awesome overclockability, mine runs at 3.6GHz normal (4GHz Turbo) without ever getting over 43c, and that is without any bios tweaking.

makes sense i guess.

[Tellos Athenaios]

@Furunculus: most of us are like that I suppose. Dedicated audio cards make sense (especially those which tout high Signal to Noise ratios, even more so when you intend to record or do VoIP calls) but if you are an audio-phile your money is probably better spent on having a decent speaker/headphone setup first before buying audio cards.

@Psychonaut: I would choose the hexa-core CPU now and be a cheapskate a little longer, especially if you do not need to pay for a new socket type in addition. Most common type of load (many processes doing almost nothing) will be less burdensome to a hexa-core CPU than to a quad core CPU. And apps that manage to hog a CPU core tend to do that to any CPU core no matter its speed. Plus as Furunculus said the CPU lends itself well to overclocking so that would be having the best of both.

[naut]

but the difference between 965 and the 1055T is less than twenty percent, a factor that will shrink further with the arrival of the 1045T, and with its Turbo mode it will still run nearly as fast as the 965 on poorly threaded workloads. not to mention awesome overclockability, mine runs at 3.6GHz normal (4GHz Turbo) without ever getting over 43c, and that is without any bios tweaking.

makes sense i guess.

They say it comes out Q3 of 2010, and since it is August already, I'll take your advice and play the waiting game. Seems it's not that much more than the Quad currently. I'm not sure how their pricing fluctuates upon a the entry of new models, since this'll be my first AMD powered machine, but no doubt it'll drop $20 at least? I'm just not sure that the pricing will be affected here for even longer than that. Australia is somewhat price resistant as it is a smaller market, with smaller margins.

[Furunculus]

it should be soon. makes even more sense if you fancy ati for the GPU. and having sata 600 is always nice if you go ssd.

[Beskar]

Wouldn't AMD and ATI combination work better than Intel-Nvadia or AMD-Nvadia or Intel-ATI ?

Since AMD and ATI are within the same company, thus should be able to compliment eachother without any conflicts?

[Furunculus]

shouldn't really be a problem, certainly not enough for it to represent a quantifiable difference in reliability or performance.

[Tellos Athenaios]

How well graphics & processor work together matters (most if not) only when you intend to use multiple graphics cards and usually depends more on the motherboard rather than on the specific make of CPU and GPU.