whoa... i shoulda come back sooner....
i went intel cuz it's cheaper... seriously. pci e mobo solutions are cheaper and more numerous. to get that kind of price and selection from amd i have to go agp. so add twenty dollars to my gfx card. processor @ 150: considering how this thing will overclock is a great deal regardless of it's comparison to AMD. HD audio.... in fact, it's a seperate piece from the mobo (dfi is the shit.... ordered the asus p5gdc deluxe and after some hassle, ended up with this ... i'm satisfied) so ground noise is eliminated.
gaming....
definitely! just gaming? no way. if all i wanted to do was game, i'da got a fukin xbox... but i didn't. the thought of multitasking, even though it's a touchy subject (thread went somewhere in the three hundreds i believe), really appealed to me. i do a lot of encoding, burning to disc, gaming and i don't wanna wait for one to finish before starting the other. am i saying AMD can't do that? certainly not, but do i know that, either? again, no.
i think nvidia and amd dropped the ball on adopting pci e. the selection is almost non existent. i was able to read three or four different reviews about each of my mobo possibilities. unless i wanna buy the exhorbident asus sli, or the perennially poor overclocking gigabyte, i was grab baggin it.
i bought that 512 stick to add to the 128 from my office depot comp-n-abox. kingston value ram. i'm not sure if i should wait and get a gig of good shit, or get another KVR 512 to better my chances at running them dual channel at decent latencies.
i got two burners so that i can disc to disc, duh. no fukin around... that's how i do it. anyways, it's was a one day sale with a pack of 50 blanks at the egg. 40 bucks, i think.
uh.... this is gonna be my first build, so amd and intel fanboys alike wish me luck. i've got mechBgon's guide on hand for when i do actually put it together. i'm a noob from the hands on perspective, but if i'm gonna spend 500 bucks i do my homework.
Jason, I appreciate what you and Becky are trying to do, but i'm not sweating it, so i don't see any reason for you to, either.
Zebo, nuff respect. i've read in on some of your sh!t, and appreciate the congradulatory nod.
anyways....
any words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated... do's, don'ts and things of that nature.
the case is pretty fukin sweet, too. when (if) i get this baby runnin', i'll take some pics and post them for you guys to check out.