Upgrade finally coming!

I have been lurking here at AVA for quite awhile before configuring a system. I hope to be buying within the next couple of weeks. I appreciate the info that is shared here and done so in a professional manner. I am computer literate enough to be somewhat dangerous, but still get lost in some of the component specs.

I am embarrassed to say that I am upgrading from a Pentium III system. My goal is to build a robust system and future proof myself at least for a little while. Although I am not a big game player, mainly because of my current PC, I am interested in some games. Mostly, though, the PC will be used for common desktop tasks and photo and video editing.

Here is what I came up with. I am right around my price point.

COOLER MASTER HAF XM (RC-922XM-KKN1) Black Mid-Tower Case, EATX, 8 slots, No PSU, Steel/Plastic
ANTEC EarthWatts EA 750 Green, 80 PLUS® Bronze, 750W, 24-pin ATX12V 2.3 EPS12V, Four 8/6-pin PCIe, Retail
ASUS P8Z77-V PRO, LGA1155, Intel® Z77, DDR3-2600 (O.C.) 32GB /4, PCIe x16 SLI CF /1+1*, SATA 6Gb/s RAID 5 /4, 3Gb/s /4, DP + HDMI, USB 3.0 /8, HDA, GbLAN, Wi-Fi, ATX, Retail
INTEL Core™ i5-3570K Quad-Core 3.4 - 3.8GHz TB, HD Graphics 4000, LGA1155, 6MB L3 Cache, 22nm, 77W, EM64T EIST VT-x XD, Retail
COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 Plus CPU Cooler, Socket 1155/1156/1366/775/AM3/AM2, Copper/Aluminum, Retail
PROLIMATECH Thermal Compound, 5 g
CRUCIAL 16GB (4 x 4GB) Ballistix Tactical PC3-14900 DDR3 1866MHz CL9 (9-9-9-27) 1.5V SDRAM DIMM, Non-ECC
MSI N560GTX-Ti 448 Twin Frozr III PE/OC, GeForce® GTX 560 Ti 448 750MHz, 1280MB GDDR5 3900MHz, PCIe x16 SLI, 2x DVI + mini-HDMI, Retail
CRUCIAL 256GB M4 SSD w/ Data Transfer Kit, MLC Marvell 88SS9174, 500/260 MB/s, 2.5-Inch, SATA 6 Gb/s, Retail
WESTERN DIGITAL 1TB WD Caviar® Black™ (WD1002FAEX), SATA 6 Gb/s, 7200 RPM, 64MB Cache
RAID No RAID, Independent HDD Drives
LITE-ON iHDS118 Black 18x48x DVD-ROM Drive, SATA, OEM
SONY AD-7280S Black 24x DVD±R/RW Dual-Layer Burner, SATA, OEM
SABRENT CRW-UINB Black 65-in-1 Card Reader/Writer Drive, 3.5" Bay, Internal USB
MICROSOFT Windows 7 Professional 64-bit Edition w/ SP1, OEM
WARRANTY Silver Warranty Package (3 Year Limited Parts, 3 Year Labor Warranty)

I am looking for comments about this configuration. I always welcome suggestions on how to get more bang for my buck. A couple of questions that I have:

Lots of confusion about the many offerings for motherboards and graphics cards. I am more questioning my choice for graphics. It seems that the 560TI-448 is getting to be an old card. Yet it seems to still show up favorably on graphics hierarchy charts. Is there something newer that would be more advantageous? I do not have a preference for AMD or Nvidia.

Should I assume that when you build a PC that you update every component driver to the latest revision?

Do you ship the component manuals with the PC?

I live within about 2 hours of Twinsburg so I would be willing to pick up in the store to save shipping costs and of course ensure a safe delivery.

Thanks for any input that you can give. I really appreciate it.

How lucky you are that you can pick system up yourself :). I wish I could do the same :(. I've had good luck with shipping.  Really nice rig.

Originally posted by Tesseract Thanks for the comments and additional info. I thought the HAF XM was a midtower although it is roomy and a little heavy. But, I am not carrying it anywhere once it goes into my home office. I will look into what is available that may be a bit smaller. I just don't want to jam things into it. I looked at the GTX 670 but that added almost $150 to the build. That won't kill me but I don't know if I really need it. Any of the Radeon cards look like they may be a performance improvement without substantial cost increase?

Edited by crypt - 03 Aug 2012 at 6:00pm

Hello Tesseract,

Hello Tesseract,

Joe, any comment on the optional CM 912 and 922 cases that appear on Cooler Master's website but not on yours? I think the 912 Advanced is probably the way that I am leaning right now.

Yeah, I agree with vikoinc, Tesseract; the advanced is way overpriced for the simplicity. If you're willing to do some of the work yourself, you can save $60+ dollars. I watched vikonic's system progress as he modded it. It took some work, but it's definitely possible.

Hello Tesseract,

I wouldn't say it's a waste of time, per say. It's completely necessary, when looking into the purchase of a custom desktop PC, that you ensure you do adequate research to not only make sure you're headed in the right direction, but that you will also be satisfied with the end-result of your build. There are not enough individuals out there that are willing to do the research, and prefer others do so for them, which is fine. However, there's a certain sense of understanding that cannot be done for anyone, so I'm confident that there's an increased level of understanding that comes along with the territory of analysis.

I think you are on the right tracking with your memory selection, at least when it comes to speed. There are a hundred of reviews, available for your disposable, then will analyze the performance differences between RAM speeds and timings to develop a more in-depth understanding about their benefits. Truly, from my own experience and research, RAM timings and speeds make very little difference above 1600Mhz. At least, there are not enough applications out there that take advantage of these small differences between RAM speeds and timings, so it's nothing you really have to concerns yourself with at the time being.

There is on concern I have, based on your memory kit decision. Since you chose a kit that will take up four DIMM slots, and a large CPU Cooler (COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 EVO CPU Cooler) you need to make sure the RAM is low-profile. By low-profile, I mean the RAM has form fitting heatsinks on the sticks, rather than tall fins like the G SKILL 16GB (4 x 4GB) Ripjaws. You could always switch to a 2x8GB kit, however that will limit you to 16GB and prevent you from installing an additional two sticks in the future. My recommendation would be to switch to a kit, such as the Corsair Vengeance LP kit, G. SKill Ares, or Crucial Ballistix Sport RAM kit. Either of those three kits would work out perfectly for you, and eliminate any physical issues with the RAM kit and CPU fan combo.

This is more of a suggestion, rather than an issue, but I'm glad to see that you selected the CRUCIAL 256GB M4 SSD over others. That being said, Crucial is the first manufacturer to offer official RAID 0 support. For the same price, you could opt for two CRUCIAL 128GB M4 SSD SSDs and set them in RAID 0. The benefit of doing so would be the increase of read/write performance. So, that 500/260 MB/s rating would be more like 1000/520 MB/s. The write performance created, out of doing so, has been done before by other manufacturers, but at the cost of stability. (OCZ, Corsair, ADATA) - all from the Sandforce controller's unreliable performance. The read performance, however, is typically something you have to pay thousands of dollars to achieve by choosing one of OCZs PCI-E SSD solutions...just something to consider, not necessarily a recommendation or an issue. :-)

Feel free to post additional questions!

 

Hello Tesseract,

No problem, it's a pleasure to assist you in any way possible!

I'm happy to hear you appreciate the learning curve. I try to include as much valuable information as possible, moving forward, so you can make a well-informed decision and ultimately be happy with your configuration. That's on of the key goals of AVADirect!

Of course, and we don't expect you to know about physical limitations involved with building custom desktop PCs; that's what we're here for.

When it comes down to is, a single Crucial M4 SSD will be more than enough for you. I used a single M4 SSD for a while and was more than pleased with the results. The only reason I opted for a RAID 0 setup was to increase capacity (cut myself short with a 128GB SSD) not to improve performance, that was just a plus.

There's no redundancy, should a RAID 0 array go down, but that's more of a concern for hard disks. The more a hard disk is powered on, the more prone it is to failure. It's the exact opposite for an SSD; you can have it powered on for all eternity. If it's not going through a large amount of read/write processes then it will continue to operate as expected. What's excellent about the RAID 0 support for Crucial M4 SSDs is the fact that it can actually improve the lifetime of the SSD. RAID 0 splits the read/write load between disks, so if you have two Crucial M4 SSDs in RAID 0 then they will only undergo half of the normal read/write processes they go though as an independent disk...make sense? It's actually an awesome solution, if you think about it, but if you're still concerned I completely understand. A single disk should still exceed your performance expectations.

I recommend using Acronis for creating backup images; it works excellent. You can create an image of the SSD, and store the image on a secondary hard disk. Should it fail (or one out of two SSDs, should you decide to use RAID 0) you can reload the image on a temporary partition until your system is up and running at it's fullest.

Tesseract,