So my good friend, Al, was looking around for a new PC. He was planning on getting one this summer and was looking at something custom. So I take him under my wing a bit and help him out with the build. We only started talking about it yesterday and today it has been ordered. We're both happy with what we ordered, too, so I wanted to give everyone a quick rundown of a very nice system for not very much money. This is about in line with the $800 I spent on my E2140 2 years ago (not including the $180 I spent in upgrading it the following year) so it's a nice show of how far tech has gone in now a year and a half or so.


AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition
Biostar TA790GXB A2+
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDet...st=Combo.205339

Two sets, G.Skill 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 1066 CL6
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820231226

HIS Radeon HD 4870 1GB IceQ 4+
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16814161265

Corsair 650TX power supply
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16817139005

Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822136284

XClio Windtunnel chassis
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16811103011

Scythe SCKBT-1000 Kabuto CPU cooler
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16835185098

Two Scythe 120mm Slipstream medium-speed fans
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16835185058


We also tossed in another set of Arctic Silver ArctiClean bottles as I'm running low on the TIM remover. Of course, we're using Arctic Cooling MX-2 thermal paste as well. The final price came out to be about $888 including shipping. We saved $90 by buying the processor and motherboard together, so after the motherboard-sale promotion, we got a $100 AMD 790GX+SB750 board for $10. We then spent that saved money on a better graphics card and for 4GB more RAM. I'm going to be doing this build later in the week and I may post some pictures as well. Had we stepped back on the RAM and the hard drive, it would have cut $98 off the final price and still had a good computer.

Pretty nice build; does he use it for gaming?

He's going to be using it for RTS's and emulators, mostly. It's more of a school + professional work computer. He's a computer science student so it's going to be his main computer for a while. We're going to make it last with 8GB of RAM and a nice quad-core. The HD4870 is going to be used as an accelerator for his pro apps and more than likely to be softmodded to be a FirePro 3D V8700.

AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition

Most of it has arrived today, so I'm putting it together in a few short hours.

EDIT: All together now. It's running like a champ. So well, in fact, that I decided to build another machine based around some scrap I've got hanging around.

Athlon 64 3500+ "Lima" 2.2GHz
Asrock A780GXE/128M
WIntec AMPX 2x1GB DDR2 800
Onboard Radeon HD 3200 graphics (780G chipset)
Western Digital Caviar SE16 320GB
External USB combo drive (CD writer, DVD reader)
OCZ StealthXStream 500W power supply
Old generic chassis
Probably topping it off with Windows Vista HP32 and Windows 7 HP32.