Honestly, based on your technical acumen and apparent skillset, do not build your own machine. Pick up a cheap PC and slap in a video card. For example - Dell Inspiron 570 desktop - Athlon II X2 2.8GHz, 3GB RAM, 500GB HDD - $299 w/ FS + FWCB (11/29 only) Windows 7 Home Premium 64Bit AMD Athlon™ II X2 Processor 240 2.8GHz 3GB DDR3 SDRAM 500GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) Integrated ATI Radeon HD4200 Graphics Dell USB Entry Keyboard and Optical Mouse 16X DVD+/-RW Drive Dell 19 in 1 Media Card Reader Integrated 10/100/1000 Ethernet No Monitor $300 Deal is expired, but they pop up fairly often. Slap in an ATI 5770 for $120, and you have a quick rig for around 420. And all you need is a monitor, no moving Hard Drives, or DVD drives. The big thing is, you also have a warrantied, supported PC. You are not a tech, which means you dont know what to do if something goes wrong. Having technical support, restoration DVD's, and a legit OS can be a life saver. Obviously you will do what you want to do, but don't overlook the idea of taking a Dell/HP/Asus or whatever, and using it as the foundation. The days of proprietary connections, power supplies, riser cards etc are long gone. I have a dell inspirion 530 on my desk, and every single part was available from newegg when I purchased it.
I am against software piracy. If its something as major as an operating system especially. I mean you are going to be using an OS every moment you are using your computer so why not pay for it. At least one full copy. If you were just "trying it out" I wouldn't think twice about something pirated, but if its something you stick with pay for it. I mean it is less than $100 for an operating system Newegg.com - Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit 1-Pack for System Builders - Operating Systems
You could do yourself a favor and go on newegg.com and get a couple Solid State Drives and put them in a RAID for very very very fast data transfer. A good example is this: I had two 80gb HD's in a raid and it took win 7 about 30 sec to load from the little balls spiraling to the window image. Ok - so once I installed the SSD's with a RAID it takes 7 seconds. I have a 3.3 ghz 4 core processor from intel, dont have specs in front of me, with 8gb of ddr3 1333 ram. All that costs about 250-300 bucks. That right there is going to prevent bottlenecking. The only thing left for you to do in my opinion is a decent video card. Newegg has GTX 460's on sale for 109 plus u get a 35 buck mail in rebate... best card for the money IMO. Good luck. I've been where u are before. Do your research, smart posting on here, a lot of geeks with a lot of input. good stuff... (for the geeks - im one too... so no flaming)
this is exactly what i was talking about.. it's more of a headache for most ppl to use a pirated OS. Save yourself alot of trouble and buy your OS.
For all of you concerned with me building my own comp, when i say build, i just mean order the parts, i have a 3rd party going to physically build it for me, and put Windows 7 on it for free. I like the idea of richreid of just getting a pre-built then upgrading some parts. Also, when all you guys say just browse around and look for good deals, i have literally no clue of what is a good piece of equipment and what is compatible with the motherboard etc. So i cant really look for stuff on my own, that's why i'm posting here in the first place. I figured you guys know your stuff and most likely have pretty decent computers since a lot of you guys run multiple bots at one time. If you guys could find some good/cheap pre-built comps i can order, then just upgrade a few parts that would be wonderful as well as separately ordering each part then building the computer from scratch.
Wip Currently WIP most of the parts are under the tree the rest is scheduled to finish built middle of January. Corsair Obsidian 800d Asus X58 Sabertooth Intel I7 970 (6core) 24GB DDR3 1333 2xGeforce GTX460 2xIntel x25-m 80GB Raid0 3xAsus 27" MT276HE NV Surround gaming Custom Liquid Cooling Solution Cost out of my pocket estimated $800. thank you Intel.REP, and Santa. GOAL: I want to be able to have 9 bots up and still be able to Vsync 60hz maxed out to 3 27" displays in surround gaming.
Okay, i'm going to go with Codename's build, any suggestions(with links) what i should upgrade the CPU/video card up too?
You could get an I7 and 4-6 gbs of ram for $800 on tigerdirect. $299 for cpu $100 for mobo $100 for video card, $70 for power supply, $70 for case, $40 for hard drive and $140 for ram and get a cheap monitor for $30. Or just use the hdtv you already have (if you have one). and the skys the limit to how many accounts you can run on that computer. 10-15+
I don't need that many wows, like i keep saying, it just needs to be able to run WoW w/o many issues.
Jesus Get an i5 760 and a Ati 6850 there like 200 a pop do everything you want no prob. Close the thread...
What should i upgrade the Video card too? I plan on building the comp real soon and would like to get this wrapped up. I also plan on just using my current harddrive on the new computer and i have a monitor to use so don't worry about that.
Not quite sure the best way to phrase this, but multi core processors do not have a total speed of all the cores added together. A 6 core 3.2GHz processor isn't 19.2GHz, it is as advertised, 3.2GHz. If people can post prior to researching, then I can post prior to reading the full topic.
I have an Asus mobo the M4N98TD with an Nvidia chipset and I'm running a MSI N250GTS Twin Frozr Graphics Card, I run WoW in raids at over 100 fps so it works good for me.
Thanks everyone for the posts but all i need now is links to good video cards that will keep the current price under $800, Look @ post #76 for current parts. Codename says to just upgrade video card and i should be good with his build.