.
Regarding the sale prices:
Visit newegg.com each morning & see what their ShellShocker deals are. Every week they have cases, PSUs & memory at stupid, ridiculously low prices. I picked up a full sized
Lian-li K-57 case for $49.99 delivered. It's an amazing case, so long as you don't want a pimped-out artpiece. The K-58 is better with another 140 mm fan plus an extra drive cage, and I've seen that go for $54.99. They are FULL sized cases, which may not work for you, but I love 'em because I can work easily inside them and cooling/air-circulation keeps them at room temp, always. The Lian-li's are exceptionally well-designed, with fantastic cable management and anti-vibration features.
Same with DDR3 RAM. They're just about giving it away these days. I see Corsair and G.SKILL 2 x 4GB kits, top end stuff @1600 or 1833, going for $39.99 delivered nearly every week, $45 & $50 shows up even more often. No rebates on those.
I rarely go for rebates; most of the prices I listed can be had for straight-up buy on a sale, or using a promo code. Get on the
newegg eBlast newsletter. I get about 5 or 7 emails a week from them ... they're pretty cool about NOT annoying the shit out of you with SPAM. Make sure to click through on
the Daily Deals from the front page three or four times a week; they are updated regularly & sometimes are nearly as good as the ShellShockers.
You might, BTW, scrape enough saving out of it for an SSD drive ... which will give amazing performance for your OS drive, then use a mechanical/platter drive for storage ... whatever the best you can afford. In fact, if you can do that, you can look at 5400 rpm storage drives and not worry about a premium on price & energy use with those.
For your OS drive, you really don't need more than a 64GB drive; it will format to just about 60 GB, 20-25GB used by Win7, 30 GB leftover for apps that need that speed. Put apps that don't use that speed on the other drive (MS Office or OpenOffice, for examples). Of course a 90GB is better (saw one, a SATA III, go for $75 after rebates about 10 days ago), but a 120 or a 128 is overkill, especially for a budget system. Further, you can get a SATA II drive; prices are dropping hard for those because they want to push SATA III drives. It'll still be blazing fast, one of the best performance enhancements you can put into a budget build. Sure, grab a SATA III if there's a deal, but it can be put on the back-burner as an (unnecessary) upgrade next year, maybe jump to a 128GB or 160GB at that time if you're flush with cash. With a good eye to bargains/rebates, you should be able to get $0.90 per GB or slightly less today, certainly under $1.00/GB.
Finally, regarding dual core & video playback:
Modern dual core systems are spanking powerful for video playback. You do need to be careful to make sure you're not underpowered, but it's nothing like the worry of the older Core Duos. Even the Core 2 Duos are a vast improvement over Core Duos, and they're all nearly obsolete in the face of an i3 running at 2.5 or 3.0 GHz.
I struggle with several old Pentium 4E 550 (Prescott) chips, running at 3.0, 3.2 and 3.4 GHz. But these are not true, physical dual core CPUs. They use hyperthreading tech to simulate a second core; my "2nd core" on these is a virtual core ... and these are spanked out of the ballpark by a Core Duo or a Core 2 Duo running at even 2.0 GHz. I run a fairly substantial bit of 10-bit encoded anime on these systems (especially the 3.4 GHz) and I get pretty respectable playback.
As I
noted in this post, I dumped the basic CCCP +MPC-HC configuration. Uninstalled it completely and went with this one:
-
http://haruhichan.com/wpblog/?p=205 -
http://haruhichan.com/wpblog/?p=2263HUGE difference in system performance. I still get some stutter & slight lag on the more aggressive, very high bitrate encodes, especially in Hi10P. But my system now plays a very impressive amount if them, especially at 720 or (even moreso) 576 or 480. I've not even tried for more aggressive tweaks yet, just cruising along on that cookbook configuration.
I never could play 1080 on this system; just a few struggle along sortof .. but true 1080 just isn't in my needs or my budget these days, and the 720 encodes are plenty sweet. On a more robust, more modern system, you should not have notable playback issues unless you go for extreme bitrate, true hi-def 1080 encodes.
Your performance issues will be determined by what else you wish to accomplish with this build.
Which, BTW, you might mention. It'll help sorting out what you really need here.
[
EDIT: Even without the rebate is not too shabby @$35 delivered:
Thermaltake TR2 W0070RUC 430W ATX12V V2.2 Intel Core i7 Compliant Dual 80mm Fans Full Cable Sleevings Power Supply
Average Rating 4 out of 5 eggs(2,614 reviews) - 2011 Reader Choice Award: Best Power Supply
w/ rebate, $23.00. ]
