You can find it on amazon at pretty low prices. I heard someone in the forums saying he got a student discount at college and he paid 80usd for W7 Premium 64 bits(!).

Generally you'll find the cheapest prices for Windows 7 at your university. If you have access to MSDNAA you can get it for free, otherwise seriously discounted depending on your major, or at least a good discount.

Before choosing your school's discount, call MS directly and see if you can get a better student discount (1-877-696-7786) -- the Student discount online only applies to the upgrade version, so you have to call for details on full version discounts.

Otherwise the cheapest copy of retail Windows 7 is around $180. Sometimes you can find it as low as $150

That's... expensive. I may have t enroll in a university just to build myself a computer. Although I need to do that anyway. :dry:

Without being a student, the cheapest will always be OEM install.

Well darn, you may have just forced me to get an edumacation.

By the way, what site is that even from anyway?

Without the GPU it's a pretty good deal. Where is the Motherboard in there anyway?

1. http://www.newegg.com/

2. Currently there are no sandybridge motherboards on the market due to a recall. They are going to be re-released soon.

Well I don't really need a new PC right this second anyway. Although the sooner I can run things better the better. :toughninja:

Newegg.com. There is no motherboard because you can't buy them right now. Expect a P67 motherboard to add $150 to the total price, if you combo it with the 2500k.

That's still pretty cheap. I could easily do that. Although the OS still is rather expensive.

So what's your setup?

More RAM is better to an extent. It does get to the point of diminishing returns once you go for mroe than 4GB.

Good Gaming Mouse?

For something cheap...http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Performance-Optical-Gaming-Mouse/dp/B0007Z1M50/ref=sr_1_1?t=slickdeals&tag=slickdeals&ie=UTF8&qid=1298196997&sr=8-1 ....$21.99 after rebate

This is nice....http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?SID=u0t2716385f9fp0c0s701&AID=10440897&PID=1225267&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-cables-_-na-_-na&Item=N82E16826104318&cm_re=g500-_-26-104-318-_-Product...Sold out as it was going for $34 AR.




I have to agree in what was said in sticking with 1TB drives. 2TB drives are a pain to setup sometimes when the operating system and/or motherboard has issues seeing the full 2TB...I have a 2TB WD Green for storage and was pulling my hair out to get my system to recognize it correctly. Formatting these things is not fun either. 1TB Samsung F3 drives are awesome...the WD Caviar Black drives are great too.

16GB of RAM is just overkill. 8GB is already overkill...in 2 years time, I'm willing to bet it will still be overkill. And in two years time, we will have probably already moved on to a different RAM standard.





Actually some boards have surface:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=p67+motherboards&x=0&y=0

There were quite a few more options earlier today than what is shown there, but as you can see...high demand and many of these boards are selling out. I went to my local Microcenter just an hour ago and they had several Asus' P8P67 Pro boards on the shelves...all of them B3 revision boards. So the motherboards coming back onto the market is already happening...might take a bit more time to have substantial quantities though.

i5 2500k
Unlocked Sapphire 6950 @890MHz/1375MHz
Gigabyte P67 UD3 (I don't recommend this, but I really had to get my build down in price by about $30, and this is where I do it)
Antec Earthwatts 650w (also where I shaved cost. Not modular, not SLI/CF ready)
CM 690 II Advanced
1TB Spinpoint F3
CM Hyper 212+ CPU cooler

The AMD Bulldozers will be launched in late June.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/03/08/amd-bulldozer-and-llano-details-purportedly/1?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bit-tech%2Fall+(bit-tech.net+feed)

So the lauch date is known, and now I have to wait on prices. If they're too expensive, I'm probably going with an i5 2500k. I do wish AMD would hurry up and let us know how much they'll cost! If it turns out they're more than I'm willing to pay I can upgrade right now, but if I upgrade right now before hearing prices and it turns out they're within my price range I'll kick myself for not waiting.

EDIT: Regarding PSUs, I read it's beneficial to use one with more than one 12v rail, in case you want to use multiple GPUs. That just made me realize I don't know anything about PSUs other than efficiency. How do you know if a PSU has more than one 12v rail, without looking at packaging or documentation, just looking at the cables? How do you know if you're plugging in the correct voltage for a particular part? I wouldn't want to plug in a cable meant for a DVD drive to my CPU or GPU and have it underpowered.

Last time I built a computer was 7 years ago, and I never gave any of those things any thought. I guess I got lucky and it all worked anyway.

I am using an AMD phenom II x4 810 on a gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P moboard with x2 2GB Corsair low latency DDR3 RAM which cost me like 200-250 total a couple years ago and I can still run most games on max settings (not crysis LOL) I only have a Radeon 4870 GPU too. Not sure why people think they need these overkill systems because software will not support them until the hardware had died anyway. I think I spent 700usd total on computer upgrades 2 years ago (using my old HD and PSU) and it is still going strong...

I would suggest seeing the best you can get for the $, but it takes a lot of time digging around websites and you will find it much cheaper than newegg. In fact in all the years I have been shopping around newegg has never had the lowest price on anything that is cost efficient (your mileage may vary), so just keep looking.

Well I spent $700 on this one 7 years ago and it's still going, although it won't run modern games including Oblivion.

I figure if a $700 investment 7 years ago still filled my needs almost up to now, then investing in a very powerful computer now can give me who knows how many years before I need to upgrade again?

Plus Battlefield 3 and Skyrim will probably demand very powerful computers. I don't want to invest in one that will have difficulty in 3 years.

I prefer the single 12v rail. much easier for me.

if you want 2 GPUs, 750 watt PSUs should be enough power, and come with enough cables.

Be interesting to see what Bulldozer has to offer. I couldn't wait so I got my i5 2500K setup first day of release. There are still no official benches for Bulldozer, just rumors galore.


Everything you'd want to know about PSUs:
http://www.overclock.net/power-supplies/715889-psu-articles.html#post9110838

Answer to particular question:
http://www.overclock.net/power-supplies/761202-single-rail-vs-multi-rail-explained.html