Eliade

bigpoppa206, on 28 August 2012 - 03:58 AM, said:

Well I just bought my new system, receiving it tomorrow.
Keeping everything else, including video card ( 9600gt ), I'm not a big gamer, maybe down the road I'll upgrade but as long as it plays 1080p movies flawlessly I'm happy.
Just upgraded to
- i5-3570k ( almost same as i7-3770k but without hyper-threading, it might be a good thing but didn't have that extra $100 for it )
- corsair vengeance 2x8gb  (CML16GX3M2A1600C10), the low profile version, in case I upgrade the included cpu cooler to a monster size one ( the timing aren't as good as the 4x4gb package for the same price, but didn't think this would be really noticeable ) so that I can eventually and easily upgrade to 32gb down the road, ( Firefox, Lightroom and photoshop running together are going to be happy )
- the gigabyte  ep45-ud3r was good with me, ( unlike the shuttle computers that eventually all died, sad because they ran osx rather well, those good quality capacitor in the gigabyte does play a role and isn't just marketing on the box) so decided to stick with them with a GA-Z77-DS3H, cheaper end of the available spectrum, but probably best buy for the money. At least it is latest technology ( USB 3 is onboard, don't know yet if it works with osx, but since apple has it in the new MacBook Pro I believe it should be working out of the box, the usb3 being run by the intel chipset and the CPU, no third party chipset)

A rather fresh computer under the hood for $410 isn't too bad. Cheaper and much much faster than a current Mac mini. ( of course recycling the case, psu, hard drive and video card does help keep the price down )

I did a little research at what is available and that seemed like a good buy for the money and power, if you have an extra $100 to throw in then get the i7-3770K for it's hyperthreading if you think it will benefit you.
( K is for unlocked, OC potential, which I may do if I see an actually difference in speediness in a regular daily routine)

Plus that system is also recommended by the hackintosh community ( tonymacx86's website, so should be really easy to get osx up and running in no time.

And the board comes with a VGA and dvi and hdmi out which uses the graphic processor integrated in the CPU, so three monitors might be happening ( well not yet for me ) and if it does work in osx, which I tend to believe so, since MacBook Pro uses it.

Cheers!