Finally - a New PC

Looks great.

Congrats, LightStar! Sounds great! 

WOW... sounds like one heck of a machine...lucky for you!!!!!

but.. whats that ooooogely theme ???

Congratulations!  May it have a long and productive life! 

congrats, tom! i hope to upgrade mine to i7 this summer, too.

Which one? 

I know just the people to build it John! 

And here I was thinking my recent upgrade to a Phenom II x4 920 and a 9800GT (was an Athlon x2 6400 and 8800GT) was the bees knees... then yer had ter go n' post the specs of that glorious beast.

Not only am I jealous of the i7, I have screenis envy over that 24 incher as well.

Seriously, good on ya and congrats on your new rig... it sounds like a rip-roaring beauty that'll serve your needs exceedingly well.

I would like to have gone the i7/DDR3/GTX200 series route, but Oz prices remain high and it would have cost upwards of AUD$2,500 just for the mobo, CPU, RAM and GFX card. 

Nah, that's well out of my league and I'll have to be happy with my setup the way it is until i7 and DDR3 prices come way down.  However, I can't say that I'm unhappy with what I have... it's much faster and more responsive than the previous setup, with no more freeze-ups during video editing/conversion.

Anyhow, congrats again on your glorious beast... enjoy.

Oops... double post

Cool! Congrats!

I'm about to build myself a similar rig...

I hear ya there Starkers. though I-Tech does have some decent DDR3 ram prices currently. Their prices for the I7 though are still somewhat high, but cheaper than other places i have seen.

Personally i use computer fairs to get all my parts and build myself. Built me current rig (specs in sig), just the tower minus OS for $1150. That was case, MoBo, CPU, RAM, GPU, PSU, HDD's.

Thats a damn fine PC Lightstar. I am looking forward to using VM XP in W7 and to see what SD does with skinning for the new OS.

Gigabyte P35C-DS3R - Q6600 [email protected] Air - 4x1GB G-Skill PC2-8000 1000Mhz - Palit 8800GTS 1GB
Samsung 500GB HD501LJ - Seagate Barracuda 320GB - Seagate 80GB
Thermaltake Toughpower Qfan 650w - Thermaltake DuOrb Cpu Cooler
Acer AL2216W 22" & Acer X193w 19" in Dualview
Logitech X530 - Logitech LX310 Laser
Antec 900 - Vista 64 Ultimate

That'd be right... another case of one-upmanship... a braggart who has to go one better than me.

Nah, good for you... I hope it gives you much pleasure.

Out of curiostiy, I again looked up prices to upgrade to an i7 rig getting just the i7 920, mobo, DDR3 RAM and GFX260.  The best possible price locally would be AUD$1342 90 online (plus $120 for local shipping), or AUD$1729.00 over the counter (+ $80 traveling from one end of Brisbane to the other).  Prices in Sydney and Melbourne are generally cheaper than here, but the cost associated with interstate shipping would likely cancel out any possible saving.

To get these same components at my (immediately) local store would cost retail AUD$2159.00.... and not including case, ROM, HDD or other peripherals, they're all way too steep for me.

And depending on store, add to those figures another $450 - $500 for the i7 940; another $600 - $670 for the i7 950; another $1000 - $1100 for the i7 965.... and the i7 975 adds a whopping $1350 to $1560.

Nope, it's not just a case of not being in the same league anymore.... we're not even on the same planet.

Damn..those prices are highway robbery....some over the top profiteering going on here.

I attend the fairs in Newcastle when i can (i recently moved to Orange) and i can say with confidence the prices they have there are cheaper then what i see on I-Tech.

I could not give specific prices on what you are quoting but i will be sure to look and repeot back to you in mid June, at elast for curiosity's sake.

I agree retail is far too steep for the man in the kow to justify that much cash. Retail thrive on the uninformed middle aged dropping their cash down with no questions asked.

I use I-Tech as a price guide and to sort which parts i want, then i head off to the fair.

If your keen on upgrading soon i could put you in touch with the (trusted) vendor i buy from at the fairs. He is located on the North shore of Sydney so of course their will be S&H to factor in but i'll bet the BBQ you could do really well for a lot less money.

VERY NICE.

glad you got a new system

I wish I had your talent for graphics too.

Yeah, just had a look at their site and prices there are a bit better than other places I've seen.  However, it's not just the price of DDR3 that's the killer.  By the time you add $400 to $500+ for a 1366 socket mobo, the $400 to 500+ price tag for an i7 920 blows out... add x6 $45 - $65 per stick of DDR3 and you're still looking at $1,300 to $1,400 for just the 3 items.... and those are on-line prices... retail/over-the-counter goes up significantly.  So, anyone in Oz wanting to build a complete system around an i7 920 (Case: ROM; HDD's; GFX; Soundcard, etc) is looking at around $1,800 to $2,000 on-line, more retail.

Oh yeah, my main rig, current specs...

AcBel 800w PSU

AMD Phenom II x4 920

Corsair 2gb DDR800 Ram x4

Gigabyte GA-MA770DS3

Galaxy 9800GT x 1gb

Seagate x2 500gb @7200

Seagate x1 250gb @7200

WD x1 500gb @7200

Seagate 500gb external HDD

LG x2 DVD ROM

Samsung x1 CD ROM

Soundbaster X-FI Fatality Pro Xtreme Gamer

Logitech X530 5.1 sound

AverMedia Hybrid TV tuner.

Samsung card reader.

ViewSonic 22" VA2226w x2 (the second mostly for watching NRL footy)

Vista x64 Home Premium/Win 7 x64 dual boot

LOL, i often use my 2nd monitor for NRL and the V8's.

Congrats LightStar. That is one sweet rig.

I understand that you are using Win7RC as your primary OS. Any issues?

That's exactly it... over the top profiteering, especially by the retail giants.  Shoot, even my local PC store, a 3-man operation beats Harvey "We won't be beaten on price" Norman.  Now I can understand a small concern like that having higher prices - less trade/fewer bulk purchases to reduce costs - but the larger stores have no excuse to profiteer as they do.

Not only that, we in Queensland generally pay higher retail prices on PC items than our Southern counterparts, so yeah, we're behind the 'rip-off' 8 ball in that regard... and ordering cheaper products online from interstate dealers often works out little or no cheaper after S&H costs.  For example, when I bought the Phenom II 920, I could have picked one up for $289 from a Sydney online dealer, but the S&H was $30, so went with one locally at $310 retail and had it that day.

Having very recently upgraded, I doubt that it'll be on the cards for a while now, but thanks muchly for the offer.  Apart from i-Tech, you might also want to keep an eye ob PriceSpy for PC related gear... they scour for the best prices daily and post the updated results regularly.  There are some Qld dealers listed, but many are located down your way in NSW.

looks like a beauty....goodonya!....:)

Thanks for the tip. don't think i had come across that site in my travels. (adds to list, can never have too many sites to check pricing from  )

Congrats on your new machine Lightstar!

Which Coolermaster full tower case did you get?

I have the Coolermaster Comos S and love it. I am using Win 7 RC as my main Os, have been using Win 7 since January, got fed up with Vista ultimate. What a difference, stable, fast to start up and shutdown!

That sounds like a more than capable machine,congrats. All you may need to upgrade now is your chair. Who would want to leave the computer?

Dual 500GB disks? Meh. Wake me up when you switch that crap for 2 x 256GB Samsung 256GB SSD on RAID0 for the OS / VM / Sins / other apps, plus 2 x 2TB HD for storage.  Core i7 is a great platform though, congrats to you .

In theory Raid0 would be less safe, but with all the abstraction of actual physical addresses on flash, There is no such thing as 'bad blocks' , corruption is only likely if you have problematic software. If you ever hit bad blocks on a SSD, it's end-of-life for it anyway, you should replace is because the write cycles are all running out. should take quite a few years for that to hit though. 

But current system's bottleneck is the storage part of the equation, you will still drag the system if the disks are slow. I bet you got high quality parts, even if they are 'just' 500GB each. From what I have read, those Samsung  SSD are really good, head and shoulders above anything else (even the intel ones).

Although you may want to wait till Year's end or 2010, cause SSD will get cheaper fast.

[begindaydreaming]

My personal hunch is that they will be able to saturate SATA2 300MBps speed next year. SATA3 ups the limit to 600MBps, and is expected to be finalized at this year's second half. With Any luck, next year we will also see SATA3 SSD breaking the 300MBps barrier.

And you will have to buy a PCI Express SATA3 controller for your wonderful rig, to take advantage of all this newfound speed...

[/quitsdaydreaming]

If you look at the higher-end HDD parts (SATA, not SCSI), you will find that they are also making speed progresses with perpendicular recording. The latest 2TB disks pack quite a punch. If you simply don't want your chkdsk to take forever, you can use a technique of using a small partition at the outer end of the disk surface and leaving the rest unallocated. Being the fastest part of the disk, and having the reading arm travel faster can get you 10-20% more performance, at the expense of storage space. Plus the pragmatic bonus of faster disaster-recovery.

i think i'll build it myself, tom. thanks for the offer, tho.

Well, other than having some software that will nto run in Windows 7, expecially since i am using the 64-bit version, nothing major at all.  Very good OS, and it's great that you can turn off transparency if you wish.  Nice feature!