New AMD Build - Second Build

[huskerguy]

Good evening All,

This will be my second build. I used this forum the first time around and my desktops ran flawlessly for the past few years. (I just did a search and it was almost 4 years ago...unbelievable)

I'm going to just jump into what I am considering:



Newegg.com - AMD Phenom II X4 925 Deneb 2.8GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Processor HDX925WFGIBOX

Newegg.com - ASUS M4A79XTD EVO AM3 AMD 790X ATX AMD Motherboard

Those 2 items are currently offered as a combo with $40 extra savings

Newegg.com - CORSAIR XMS3 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 Desktop Memory Model CMX8GX3M2A1333C9

Newegg.com - CORSAIR CMPSU-650TX 650W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Compatible with Core i7 Power Supply


I wasn't sure on which memory to go with, the AMD vs Intel notes that I had been reading slightly confused me, but from what I can tell this would work fine. I don't plan on going crossfire or SLI, so I went with the 650w power supply.

I have an optical drive that I can use, it is IDE, would I gain benefit from being able to disable IDE on the motherboard and go with a SATA optical drive?

For hard drives, I believe below is the standard recommendation?

Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar Black WD6401AALS 640GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

I do currently own 2:

Newegg.com - Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250620AS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive (Perpendicular Recording) -Bare Drive

Granted, they are almost 4 years old now, and they do have a smaller cache, but would I see a significant performance increase going with the Western Digital Black? Would I be better off running those 2 drives in a RAID configuration? Storage wise, I've never come close to using more than 100 GB.

As far as video cards go, I'm completely stumped. I've been a fairly loyal NVidia user my entire life so I know that sometimes clouds my judgment. The main game I play is World of Warcraft, I realize that it has fairly low requirements, but I want to make sure that I can play at max details and any lag is not CPU or GPU based. I also hope to play the new Star Wars MMO when it is released. Any suggestions on the best bang for your buck video card in the $200-$250 range would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your time!

[Nikon]

as far as performance, i believe you would see a bit of an improvement, although i would still recommend the caviar black from an age standpoint.

while it is entirely possible your older drives have a good amount of life left in them, do you really want to take the risk of using a 4 year old HDD as a primary drive in a new pc? chances are they are past their warranty period too.

you could also get a smaller ssd for OS and such, and use the older drives for data (perhaps in a mirror raid configuration for max protection.)

just my 2 cents

[glc]

A SATA optical is worth the 20 bucks. For a video card, look at a GTX460 1gb.

If you don't care about data integrity, go ahead and use those Seagates in RAID 0.