Maximum PC

At work, I use a Dell Optiplex 9010 with the I7-3770 - and I'm really happy with the peppy performance.

At home I have two old boxes...a refurb'd Optiplex 745 and an Intel Conroe w/EVGA512 that I built several years ago.
(say what you will about Dell, the Optiplex business line takes a licking and keeps on ticking - outlasting my custom build)

The 745 is gettin' real slow and I want something faster at home. I was ready to just lay down 1100-1200 bucks for new Optiplex9010 w/I7-3770 and call it good, but then I started playing with ibuypower and cyperpower sites and notice I could get a much higher quality system for close to the same price as the Dell...

Then I started to FURTHER research and found I could build my own (with similar parts) for about 2 Benjamins less than the aforementioned sites...(and have more fun doing it).

Anyway, could you please check out the following link and give me any recommendations/opinions?
I'm not a huge gamer although I REALLY liked playing BF2(on the Conroe) and would like to play BF3 with decent speeds. Other than that, I would his box for DVD/Music Rips/Burns, Surfing and Quicken.

I get my WIN7 or 8 OS for free via my work Site License and I have both a 22' and 24' monitors at home that are still in very good shape. SO I'm saving money there.

I'm not an overclocker, but could see myself tinkering in that area in the future, so I opted for the 3770k.
As well, i've not WC'd before, and the ease of a self-contained system like the Corsair seems best. I probably don't need to WC since I may not OC, but I'm under the impression that a cooler CPU will last much longer!!

I know the Corsair Case is expensive, but I REALLY like that their are no windows and fancy lights in this case...I just want a basic black case with good cable routing and air flow...other thoughts?

Is the $300 660 Ti enough card for BF3? Too much? Can I go lower?

Here is what I'm looking at...could someone take a gander and make some recommendations or opinions? I'd like to stay in the $1200 range.

Thanks for your replies...

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/CFtp

Thanks!! No...I haven't read the benchmarks - thanks for the links...

Saw some vids on the Kraken...looks good, I'll upgrade!! Thanks for the recommendation.


YOU SAID, "For the money you can do much better with some 1.35v magic ram or some Blacklines," Not sure what this is, could you elaborate?

And yes, I am an HT illiterate....LOL...thanks for the small insult.

So I researched a bit, please correct me if I'm wrong....if you're gaming, then HT doesn't matter, you'll be using one thread anyways.

However, if you're running multiple applications at the same time then clearly HT is beneficial....I'm presuming that is why I find my work 3770 so snappy while having many applications open at the same time. As well, the 8M L3 cache would significantly speed up those applications using those threads.


I've also been researching the H20 AIO's as well....it seems the X40 is better than the H60, which I've learned (as well as you stating) is crap. The H55 is better, and the H80 even better....

The H80 seemed to cool much better than the X40 on the sites that I saw...

Well, don't want to burst your bubble, but this isn't how HyperThreading works. Hyperthreading is faking multiple cores. Basically if there's some unused portion of the core, the processor may put it to work. In practice though, this doesn't benefit anything but the most highly threaded of tasks, and even then, programs may have to be aware that the processor has Hyperthreading to even take advantage of it. It didn't help the Pentium 4 when it was introduced, it won't help the Core i7, not that it needs help.

Chances are as well, that most of the programs you're running are I/O bound. They'll be sitting around waiting for something to happen, so a faster processor won't help these tasks either.


Unless you are really overclocking the processor, you don't need a water cooling setup. A "high end" air cooler will keep the processor cool even under moderate overclocks.