OG - I bought a customized Cyberpower with specs below (except for a just-installed Nvidia 260) two Thanksgivings ago. Both the sales adn the tech staff were excellent to work with, always accessible and quick to respond to questions. The hardware has run well and is still going strong.

Thanks Eugene. I am looking at:

Intell i7-920 Overclocked
MSI x58 Pro-E motherboard (might change this)
Liquid cooling
6 GB PCI1333 DDR3
ATI HD5870
500GB Hard drive
Two LG 22x DVD Dual layer drives
Thermal display
External All-in-one card reader
External USB hub
Windows 7 Home Premium
NZXT M59 case
etc

Comes in at $1,457 including shipping

Sounds good. But, my budget is only about half that. If my daughter's PC hadn't died I wouldn't even be looking to get a new PC.

And yesterday my other daughter's PC got infected with the Antivirus Pro 2010 virus. This thing is the most brutal virus I've ever seen. It nixes any attempt to remove it. You can't boot into Safe Mode, you can't bring up the Task Manager you can't bring up Add/Remove Programs, you can't attempt a System Restore, etc. I went online to look for help on how to remove it and the program wouldn't let me do any of the suggested fixes. I finally caved in and brought it to the Geek Squad. They claim they've been dealing with this for over a year and said they'd have no trouble cleaning it out (for $130).

I'll be glad when they both have Macs and I won't have to deal with their PC's getting infected anymore.

Yeah, I am sinking a good deal into this one. The one I currently have is 5 years old. So I tend to keep them as long as I can. When you divide the cost by the time you keep it, it is usually cost effective to get something good.

Sorry didn't mean to hijack your thread. I had a seperate one about asking any inout on Cyberpower, but I had no responses. I've mixed feelings about them based on customer reviews. So I shamelessly butted in here to get some input.

My E6850 3Ghz runs overclocked at 3.8Ghz (raising my CPU voltage to 1.425v) without breaking a sweat. I do have a Zalman CNPS8000 cooler on the CPU though but that one runs always at 1500rpm and my temps never get any higher than 65 C°, in the summer with very CPU pushing aplications running (games )
Also depends how good your case airflow is. If you gonna overclock make sure you have a good airflow in your casing!

Best regards, Kodiak.

OG, yours will kick the stuffing out of mine, and it was upgraded from their stock (sound card, bunch of fans, extra drives, upleveled mobo, etc.) at about your price - to just under $2,000! figures... But it was a huge move up from my home built endlessly upgraded previous rig. Hope you get a a lot of pleasure and no pain out of it.

You should have asked first, could have saved you $130 ^^! We've removed this stupid thing and it's variants countless numbers of times. It's easier to get rid of it from a Live CD, outside of windows. At least you didn't pay it to go away, as I've seen a few people do hehe




What a rig! I'm *really* interested to see how far you can push that on liquid cooling. Post some SuperPi times when you get done putting it together. Btw, seems as long as you have the cash, you should get Win 7 Ultimate to go with it

Why Win7 Ultimate ? What does it do better ?

By the way, Kodiak, I like your sig. I saw Zeppelin on Friday, June 10th, 1980 at Madison Square Garden, NYC. Best concert ever. They played non-stop for 3 hours. What a show!! They played there 6 nights, we saw them on their 3rd show. Awesome!

I'm not sure home premium already includes the complete PC backup (I think it does...)

Ultimate can boot from VHD files (which gives a nice undestructable test environment), you get Bitlocker and Bitlocker to Go (hard drive encryption and memory stick encryption), you get the WinXP mode (not useful for games though).

For a pure gaming system, maybe not needed. For a productivity system it might be worth it.