After some more looking around, I'm going with a 5850, instead. Decided on ati after looking at benchmarks and feature set (Yes, I will actually use Eyefinity), and the size & cost of the 5870 are pretty big drawbacks. I don't have the time to wait for the Fermi-based price drop that everyone's hoping for, so 5850, it is.

Added a heatsink & fan & ordered.

I guess I may have underestimated my budget a bit.

quote:

Originally posted by KiNeTiC ENeRgY The i5 750 is faster and cheaper than the 920, though u are going LGA 1366 which the next gen's will utilize. So if u only want to upgrade CPU that's a good setup. I like to go ahead and upgrade mobo, ram, and cpu so there are no bottlenecks. As far as HDD's, OCZ has a good SSD out now if u have another drive as storage. My other suggestion is a 150gb Raptor, or one of the WD Green 1TB 64mb cache drives which are blazing fast for 7200rpm.

Yeah, the future upgrades are a big selling point for going the i7 route imo. I don't want to have to do this again (at least not all at once) for a while. $200 here and there is much easier to swallow.

I have a Raptor already (the aforementioned drive that may or may not have just died). I'm leaning toward doing a Caviar Black (or two), rather than SSD. The case only houses two storage drives, so doing SSD would mean no RAID, unless I wanted to spend $600 for 160gb of space, which I don't.

___________________

> S u s h i p u n k . P h o t o g r a p h y <

This thing is awesome.

___________________

> S u s h i p u n k . P h o t o g r a p h y <

quote:

Originally posted by shaw This thing is awesome.

I went with the 5870. Just finished building mine today, and am up and running on my new hardware. Love it. Worth every penny.

quote:

Originally posted by KiNeTiC ENeRgY I went with the 5870. Just finished building mine today, and am up and running on my new hardware. Love it. Worth every penny.

Got back home at about 6:30 last night & started opening up boxes. Had it all put together and up & running at about 11:00. I was a little anxious...

I had the resolution pretty far down with the old pc, was disabling all sorts of enhancements, lowering detail, & was still running stuff pretty poorly. Now, 1080p on 2 displays with everything maxed out still runs perfectly. TF2 & ME2 on a 50" Elite, anyone?

I was planning on going with a GTX260, so the 5850 was already enough of a step up, but I'm definitely glad I did it. Thought about the 70, but I still want a SSD and need a new optical drive (the eject button doesn't line up and this thing is louder than everything else in the case combined).

___________________

> S u s h i p u n k . P h o t o g r a p h y <

Last edited by shaw on Feb-06-2010 at 02:12

quote:

Originally posted by shaw Got back home at about 6:30 last night & started opening up boxes. Had it all put together and up & running at about 11:00. I was a little anxious... I had the resolution pretty far down with the old pc, was disabling all sorts of enhancements, lowering detail, & was still running stuff pretty poorly. Now, 1080p on 2 displays with everything maxed out still runs perfectly. TF2 & ME2 on a 50" Elite, anyone? I was planning on going with a GTX260, so the 5850 was already enough of a step up, but I'm definitely glad I did it. Thought about the 70, but I still want a SSD and need a new optical drive (the eject button doesn't line up and this thing is louder than everything else in the case combined).

very nice. I'm on a new 23" widescreen Samsung 2048x1152 resolution. I picked up the Sony Optiarc drive from Newegg for around $30 and it's super quiet. Also burns DL discs at 6-8x which is really nice. I recommend that one for sure. I kept my 2 raptor drives for now as they still work fine running them in raid 0. Probably in about 6 months I'll go ahead and drop in 2 SSD's in raid.

quote:

Originally posted by KiNeTiC ENeRgY very nice. I'm on a new 23" widescreen Samsung 2048x1152 resolution. I picked up the Sony Optiarc drive from Newegg for around $30 and it's super quiet. Also burns DL discs at 6-8x which is really nice. I recommend that one for sure. I kept my 2 raptor drives for now as they still work fine running them in raid 0. Probably in about 6 months I'll go ahead and drop in 2 SSD's in raid.

I'll try it out.

___________________

> S u s h i p u n k . P h o t o g r a p h y <