It's finally time for me to upgrade my system from 2005. I'm giving that tower away and starting fresh. I have been spending more time lately gaming, work/productivity, media, etc. and think I picked out a suitable setup. I wanted a fairly strong PC all around.
I have most of the parts in my possession already and have ordered the rest. Everything came from Newegg and MicroCenter. Nothing has been opened yet so I'm open to comments/suggestions if I need to exchange anything. Thanks guys.
I would swap that mainboard...newegg will charge you for this, but it is still worth it. Asus boards are headaches when they work correctly...and then they die a day after the warranty expires....it is as if they put high precision timers into their devices, except that the boards often fail long before the warranty is up, so that you have to wait forever without a PC while they RMA your mainboard.
If you had not already ordered the DVD drive, I would say to change that too...but the restocking and shipping fees would add up to most of the cost of the drive...and you can keep working with a bad DVD drive while a replacement/RMA is on the way.
As for the GPU, you should know that it will probably only last about 2 years. It will be outdated and useless by then, but I just thought you should know.
Mobo: 4/10 - Asus stuff is unreliable as Killerbug has mentioned. Swap it for a Gigabyte X58A-UD3R.
CPU: 10/10 - Cheap and super fast, but overkill for a gaming machine - A Core i5 quad core on LGA1156 is just as good for gaming and a cheaper offer, as well as more energy efficient.
RAM: 10/10
GPU: 6/10 - EVGA aren't the highest quality brand, but they're one of the few nvidia brands left. Avoid superclocked cards as they're particularly unreliable, and hardly any faster.
HDD: 10/10 - Caviar Blacks are solid, fast and good value
ODD: unknown - not much experience with Asus burners, but if they're like other Asus products they'll be dire. I recommend LGs, they seem pretty reliable.
Case: 10/10 - The only low cost case I ever specify
PSU: 10/10 if you go SLI, about as cheap a unit as you can get with 4 PCIe connectors on it, that will still do the job well.
Cooler: 4/10 - CM coolers are cheap and weak. Either go for a proper high-end cooler like a Noctua, a watercooler like a corsair H70/CoolIT Eco, or don't bother. You only need a big heatsink to overclock, and that is where the coolermaster will fail.
It's worth mentioning that again, as Killerbug said, geforce cards have a relatively short life expectancy, if you want this system to last several years, whether or not you think they're good value, you should switch to a Radeon card. The HD5830 is analagous to the 768MB GTX460 in every respect. If you buy one of those (you can crossfire them in much the same way as you would SLI 460s, and the PSU is still adequate for this), I'd recommend XFX.
