Quote Originally Posted by perkam View Post
There is a system you can make, with your budget, that will allow you to blow 980X systems out of the water.

The question is, are you interested in such a system

Perkam
My budget is $7011 total. I've spent $2206 for three 30" NEC monitors. If you can get a better deal than that for displays, I would be surprised. Plus, that's the setup I want. So let's go with that.

That leaves $4805.

I wanted a Blu-Ray burner so that I can back up photos and such to Blu-Ray. I chose the Panasonic because it can do dual layer disks, which the LG couldn't do. That was $190, leaving $4615.

I wanted a relatively future-proof power supply that could handle multiple graphics cards, even three or four fermi's. So I went with the Silverstone Strider ST-1500, which got decent reviews on jonnyguru.com. I probably could have gone with a Corsair 1000HX and saved some money, but I didn't. I like the fully modular power supply better than the mostly modular one as well. Hopefully, this power supply will be "future proof" and I'll never need to buy another one no matter what builds I do in the future. So that's $400, leaving $4215.

I want a fast boot drive. Intel 160GB X25-M G2 SSD at $470 seemed like a decent pick. Would you have done different? That leaves $3745.

I don't need a ton of storage -- 1TB should be more than adequate. I'm a bit more concerned with speed than with energy usage, so I went with the Caviar Black due to it's large cache and decent rotational speed. For $108 each, I'm tempted to get a pair of them and do RAID-1 for easy backup, but I'll see how much I have left after I finish my build. I'd rather not go below 1TB for my data drive, and I don't really need more, so this seemed like a good pick. That leaves $3637.

I wanted Windows 7 Pro because I like the option of running Windows XP to play some of my older collection of games that don't run on Vista or 7. And 64-bit so that it supports more than 3GB of memory. That's $134, leaving $3503.

I was looking for a large full tower case that was fairly noob friendly to build with for my first build. Corsair Obsidian 800D seemed like a decent pick. $295 down leaves $3208.

I splurged a bit on the processor and went with a core i7 980X for $1072. Probably could have gone with a core i7 930 for $199 plus tax. Don't really need more than six cores, I would think, but if it can fit into the budget, sure. I'm down to $2136 unspent in my budget.

Currently thinking about $1248 for a pair of ATI Radeon HD 5970's. That would leave me with $888.

Thinking about an EVGA Classified motherboard for $355. That would leave me with $533. Considering some Corsair Dominator GT memory for $439, which would leave $94, just about right for some MDPC-X sleeving.

I'll add some water cooling and a sound card as I get more cash over the next few months, or maybe just charge it and hope the wife doesn't notice *grin*. but the basics would be done and on budget with the picks I've got going so far. I think it'd be tough to get a better cpu than the 980X or more powerful graphics cards than the twin 5970's -- at least as far as things that are currently actually available in stores.

What would you have done differently with the same budget? My preference would be to get the basics right in order to get a functional high end system and then add in small things to improve the build over time as I get more funds. So in other words... leave out things that aren't critical to the initial operation of the system (sound card) rather than add them in and skimp on things that are tougher to upgrade later without wasting money (cpu, gpu).

I'd love to see your approach to a system with this budget. See what you can do.