About to buy a new rig - COMMENTS NEEDED!

All,

Taking advice from here and there in another thread, I've put together what I hope will be a good new gaming rig.

Those of you in-the-know about such things, please take a look at my Newegg list and tell me if I've made any obvious errors like missing essential components or incompatibilities between memory and mother board or whatnot. I am a REAL neophyte here, so I definitely need the assistance.

I'll be buying a separate monitor and keyboard.

Looks a decent build to me, though if you wanted to save a little money, you could consider dropping that i7 to the Lynnfield i5-750; in terms of gaming performance, it's not going to matter that much. It also won't make a difference later on, since the i7 you selected uses the same socket as the i5 - the bigger i7s use a different socket (1366) altogether.

My build is similar, but I opted for a full ATX case; its the only thing that made my recent 5970 purchase possible. I would think something like that would be a bloody tight fit in a midATX.

You could also stand to get a slightly bigger PSU; 650 isn't bad, but considering the expectations of higher end GPUs, it may need replacing at the same time you do your graphics card...though admittedly I didn't bother to look up the exact demands of the 5850.

I didn't see any incompatibilities here.

Well for the infamous "only $20 more" you could get the P7P55D-E LX and gain a pair of SATA 6 ports, a pair of USB 3.0 ports and one eSATA port for use in the future.

I also think the P7P55 LX only comes with one SATA cable.

Or you could go with the DDR3-1600 memory in my $1375 rig (now with OS) for $5 more. I believe the i7-8xx can handle it without any OCing of the base clock. You should get a percent or two better performance.

I didn't have time to look up any reviews or the like that might have checked the space available for the vid card. Some of these new ones are seriously a lot longer than some people plan for. I think the 5850 isn't quite as bad, but that would be one thing you might look in to.

I think the mobo upgrade Father mentioned would be good, but I'm of the opinion the memory upgrade wouldn't give you much oomph. But then, it's a cheap upgrade, so what the hey.

Personally I think only the USB 3.0 will be of any use with the next generation of external hard drives. It sort of replaces eSATA for an external hard drive high performance interface. Now with USB 2.0, external drives are capped at around 30-35MB/s. USB 3.0 kicks that up to performance levels indistinguishable from internal drives.

As for SATA 6, maybe once they start making self contained RAID 0 SSDs that could take advantage of the extra bandwidth that SATA 6 will amount to something. As for conventional mechanical hard drives, it doesn't buy you anything with the current generation of drives, even the new Raptors.

TL;DR Version

Current MB choice needs an extra SATA cable (about $3).

For $20 more you can get a MB that comes with 2 SATA cables and has latest and greatest USB, SATA as well as an external SATA connector. I personally only see the latest and greatest USB port as something people will generally use with newest crop of external hard drives.

Long Version on the $20 more

What I'm saying is that while those features are nice, someday down the road, I think USB 3.0 is the only feature that most people will ever appreciate when combined with a USB 3 external hard drive.

External hard drives are one of the easiest ways to add storage for people to afraid to crack open a case. Before USB 3.0 there was three different ways to connect them to your PC.

• USB 2.0 - Everyone has it but it caps the speed at around 30-35MB/s.
• IEEE 1394 aka Firewire aka i.Link - First high speed external serial port. About the same speed as USB 2.0 in practice (1394a) but fewer motherboards have it. More important back before USB 2.0 came out. Use to be big on Macs. Often used to transfer digital video from some brands of digital camcorders.
• eSATA - An external SATA 3Gb/s connector. Fairly new, not a lot of motherboards have it. 6x faster than USB 2.0.
• USB 3.0 - Brand new. About 10x faster than USB 2.0, faster than 3Gb eSATA.

My current list is here. It uses the motherboard you recommended, the P7P55D-E LX. Are you saying I need a SATA cable with it?

Oh, and your two links don’t seem to link.

(Sorry to be such a pest... but this is all ENORMOUSLY helpful! THANK YOU!!)

Those weren't links, I tend to bold and/or color links.

No, your original MB pick, the P7P55 LX only had one SATA cable. The P7P55D-E LX comes with two.

Looks good.