Originally posted by Vegetto91: is this a good setup?
No
The mainboard is a piece of crap (Asus has terrible quality), and was probably returned because of DOA (Newegg resells DOA products as "Open Box" because they can charge restocking fees over and over).
The memory isn't bad, but is isn't great either. The CPU is kinda a ripoff if you are not going to be doing video processing...a i5 overclocked to 2.8 would probably have identical performance in most games/desktop apps.
I would not recommend OCZ flash memory...I just don't trust the stuff.
Once you do find a working parts list, I still would recommend against newegg...after shipping, amazon usually matches or beats the newegg price, and amazon is much nicer to their customers (for instance, if you change your mind about your order after you get it, you can return it for free (they will send you a shipping label)...there is no restocking fee, and they even refund the original shipping! Because of this, it is not profitable for them to repeatedly resell broken parts...so they don't.)
The ram should be good...but I can't really say since I have not purchased G-Skill in a while. Personally, I would go with the kit below...it is faster, and it comes from a better brand, plus the price is the same after the rebate.
While I disagree with Killer on the Newegg debate, I could agree more with his statements. When buying a high priced electronic I would NEVER purchase an open box item, regardless of who it came from. Im not against buying used parts by any means, but when your spending $500+ your asking for troubles.
On the G.Skill, I just had a pair of there Ripjaw series fail on me, and a tech had told me that he had seen alot of failures in the ripjaw series. Im not sure if the quality issues applies to there more value based ram like the ones you mentioned, but I would go with the corsair sticks Killer linked to, or maybe some Patriot ram. Patriot served me well in the past, G.Skill to though, so take that for what its worth..
Corsair is expensive, but the quality is simply unmatched...others may make one item that can match one corsair item...but Corsair makes great stuff all the time...and their specs are always understated.
