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be specific of what you want first and whats the rig's purpose. i.e. work, gaming, movies or all of them.
+1, please. Your intended use will set some requirements and show where some compromises may be possible. Video encoding and high-end gaming use lots of resources; encoding needs big CPU juice and gaming needs big GPU juice. How much/how often each also important. Most everything else will work just fine under modern hardware such as you are looking at; 8 GB RAM is plenty.
Will you be overclocking at all? You can bump that AMD chip up to 3.8 GHz without breaking a sweat, and you should still be able to get it stable on air-cooling up to ~4.2 GHz (if you wish to push it) and at least ~4.0. Up to ~3.8 GHz you probably can get by on the stock heat sink + fan, but over that you'll want to budget ~$50-$65 for a CPU cooling block upgrade. Although,
this one looks good for under $30.
Guess while we're at it, please mention which country ..? If USA, we can assume websites like newegg; otherwise it'll help to know which locality the budget will be spent in.
How fast do you want to do this? If you have 4-6 or 8 weeks, you can get the parts as they come on special and shave costs down, but you need to check 2 or 3 websites daily and know to buy immediately when you see the Good Deal. If you need to buy it faster, you can lose ~$100 by missing deals.
So, we'll assume moderate to none video encoding and moderate gaming rather than bleeding edge. You do not need 750 W PSU. 600-650 W will be plenty. I don't see a video card, and your
ASUS M4A87TD mobo will need one. Someone else will need to step in on that; I'm not fully researched on video cards right now. Are you going Windows as your only OS, or do you want linux (also) ..?
One concern I have is the hard drive. I would not use that drive to install the OS on. It is fine for a mass storage device, but I'd look to a smaller, more reliable drive to install the OS and all major apps on. A
500 GB WD Caviar Black can be had for ~$45-$60, depending on specials. I use the
750 GB version, which recently went for $60 delivered on special. There's also a 640 GB ... any of these are good, just look for the best price. The reliability and performance of using these as your OS drive is a serious consideration. There may still be 320 GB versions floating around, which you might be able to snap up for ~$35-$40. I use 2 x 750 GB drives, which I perform a complete mirror from one to the other about every 10 days ... that way if anything goes wrong, I just pop in the new drive and I'm running again in ten minutes; all my
data is archived, and teh Important Stuff is double archived onto yet another drive.
If the budget can swing it, certainly want an SSD as it would radically improve your overall system speed. A "smallish" 64 GB drive is actually plenty of room for a full Win 7 install plus all major apps. You can conserve space on a drive that size by installing many apps that don't require top performance to the 2 TB drive. Example: don't waste time/money on MS Office .. use
Open Office, neither of which require the speed of an SSD and you can save a couple of GB install and work space by placing them on the Hitachi drive. Same with Photoshop. If it fits on the SSD, no problems ... but it doesn't require that performance unless you're doing pro level work.
Prices:
~$150: AMD Phenom II Black x4 3.4 Ghz
~$100: ASUS M4A87TD EVO AM3 AMD 870 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
~$70 HITACHI Deskstar 2TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
~$50 Antec Three Hundred Illusion Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case (these go on special often; last week ~$45)
~$50 (
after rebate) OCZ ModXStream Pro 600W Modular High Performance Power Supply
~$90 G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB)
Now that I looked 'em up, I'd spend the
~$60 on the OCZ ModXStream Pro 700W Modular; for the extra $10 I'd be comfortable with the 700 W as a nice extra reserve, very especially if I want to overclock the CPU and run a more aggressive video card. Adding more hard drive capacity in the future will also use extra power ... so if you have a 2TB drive and, let's say 2 x 3TB drives more in a year, that 700 W will still be pretty comfortable.
Anyway, we're up to ~$520, plus $30 for the cooling block upgrade: ~$550.
So, ~$250 to play with for a video card, and possibly an SSD. Watching newegg for SSDs, you could get a 64 GB for ~$100-110 these days, leaving ~$150 for a video card ... and if bleeding edge games are not of great interest, you can do quite well in that range.
Have you considered any other peripherals you need? Keyboard mouse, extra USB hubs? An extra case fan (esp. if overclocking) ..? I always recommend budgeting in a substantial surge protector, which can run
~$30 - $50.
I forgot about the OS. If you're buying an OEM license of Win 7 Home Premium, you'll need to budget ~$100; seen on special for ~$90. Ultimate of course goes ~$150-$170-ish. Going that route takes you up into the ~$900-$950 range.
