Now can we please get this stickied?
Thanks, mfenn for all the research and work you do to post this. I like to read these and get a good idea of balancing my budget with recommended parts and places to go. I am on a tight budget and even though my budget is not at the $1000 level, I am able sometimes to pull things from the higher budget builds into my budget build to improve the overall running and feel of my system.
T_Yamamoto
if you need a cheap upgrade, just subtract the parts you already have and youre good to go
thanks mfenn for all the work you did doing this. I am looking to build a mid-range system in the next few months with my tax return but I'm waiting for hard drive prices to decline some more. (it's absolutely ludicrous that the Samsung F3 1TB is still $119.99...i remember when it was $60 when I bought it in November 2010.)
Very good updates here. However, there are some things I'd change:
For one, while the Crucial m4 is a good buy at $165, there are better deals. One of them is the SanDisk Extreme 120GB, which is $140 and is one of the fastest SSDs on the market because it uses toggle-mode NAND and SandForces' year-old SF-2281 controller. And according to reviews, reliability is excellent. Seems like the best choice right now for a 120/128GB high-performance SSD.
The money saved there I'd use for a much better motherboard, namely the ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3. It has support for CrossFire, allowing you in the future to run two of those HD 7850s. It also has a lot more features than the PRO3.
SFF-2281 SSDs make me nervous due to the (lack of) firmware reliability. Even a company with the resources of Intel took over a year to make what they consider an acceptable firmware. It is however a very high performance controller if you're willing to accept a little extra risk.
As for the mobo, if I were going to spend some more money there, I would go with the P8Z68-V LE for the front panel USB 3.0 support. I don't think that Crossfire/SLI support is very relevant to most people.
That was a good argument maybe six months ago. Now, not so much. Newer firmwares put reliability on par with all the others, and the initial firmware for the SanDisk Extreme seems to be just as reliable as Marvell's/Intel's/Samsung's if we're to go by user reviews.
From what I've seen ASUS' Sandy Bridge motherboards are less reliable than ASRock's. Ignoring that, I think the opposite: this is a gaming machine; therefore, many people are gonna want CrossFire support in the future.