What's this system for? Just gaming?
If so, I'd avoid i7. Prices here are ridiculous for Nehalem but not so much so for Phenom II, and unless you're doing a lot of heavy encoding work or virtual machine stuff you'll see no benefit, certainly no in-game benefit, from Nehalem compared to PhII. Depending on which state you're in, a PhII 955BE will run you around $320-30. Complement that with a nice set of low-latency DDR3 - a decent 4GB kit of DDR3-1600 CAS-7 will run you about $250, again depending on which state - and a high-end 790FX board, which again depending on state will run you around $280-300, which will run you a total of around $900 including shipping.
PSU I'd look at replacing, not because you're going to need more power but because those Kingswin units aren't exactly top-notch. If we go top-notch, an HX-1000 will run you around $350 and will be strong and silent for years to come.
That leaves us with, what, $1,800 or thereabouts? First thing I'd look at upgrading out of that would be storage subsystem. A total of 750GB over two HDDs with no redundancy is not great, even if you're not storing much. Unless you have backups you're not telling us about, if either of those drives dies you're going to lose everything. I'd get a decent but cheap hardware RAID controller, something like an Adaptec 3405, which can be found down here for around $500, and four 1TB drives (around $120ea) and run them in RAID-1, which will give you around 2TB worth of storage space but with complete redundancy (meaning any two drives could fail and you wouldn't lose any data), as well as significantly faster speeds than your current drives. If you want more space, you could run those four drives in RAID-5 instead, which would give you around 3TB total space, but less redundancy, as only one drive could fail before you'd be at risk of data loss. RAID-5 would also be slower.
Assuming that leaves us with around $800 left, I'd definitely look into getting a SSD for your OS drive. However, the SSD market is going to change dramatically in the coming months, with Intel launching their refresh generation of their X25 drives - which will be faster and cheaper. I'd hold off getting any drives until those filter down here - no point buying just yet.
Also, I'd fill in your location field or at least make it a bit more obvious in your post that we're talking $AU here, not $USD
Bookmarks