I am just looking to see if this will work or not and if someone has a suggestion on a pretty good case for it for about 100 bucks or less.
I am also concerned about the actual building of the machine. I would have no idea of things I would need. I mean I can put a hdd or an optical drive or memory in, but I am more concerned with connecting the mobo, psu, and the cpu. Are these difficult tasks? And what else would I need. As I said I have never done anything like this before.
Mainboard: The mainboard from the first post is not designed for dual graphics; don't buy it if you plan is to go crossfire later. The second slot is the slower x8 used by RAID cards and such.
Hard drive: If you are planning to do a lot of HD video, you might fill up that 1TB a lot faster than you think. In terms of gigabyte per dollar, 1.5TB is a better deal.
Memory: Very good quality, but that board will support much faster memory, you might not want to buy old DDR800.
Graphics: It's a nice card, but not worth it, even for high-end CAD or GTA4 that can actualy use it. 2GB is more suited for the 4870x2.
CPU: Get a quad core, for less than $20 more you can get a 2.66 quad core....that's 4.64GHZ faster for $20 more.
Well technically it is. It's not an 8x slot, it's two 16x slots that will run at 8x if both are used, a limitation of the P45 chipset, not the board. As someone that runs Quad crossfire off a P45, I can say that the impact isn't actually that terrible, especially for only two GPUs.
The best value HDDs at the moment tend to be 1TB, the 1.5TB drives seem to be a bit more than 50% more expensive.
As for graphics memory, the HD4870 2GB is unique, the HD4870X2 only has 2GB because it's 1GB per GPU, and this isn't shared, it's fixed. That's the only card that offers 2GB per GPU, but for all bar perhaps GTA4 it's useless.
Measuring quad cores by multiplying the mhz? Tut tut, you don't sell PCs on ebay by any chance do you? That's the only place I see that trick.
