New computer.

[[TC]»Elmo«]

(2012-09-02 16:17)KaraK Wrote:  Kenwood, don't just think of what you need now, but what you might need in the future.

By that metric, he may as well spend 2 grand on a CPU, 3x €800 graphics cards, 64GB RAM a 512GB SSD and a couple of 3TB HDDs, because he *might* need it in future.

What he really needs to be thinking about is what he's likely to need in the next 3-5 years.


The current state of things:

i5-2550/3550 is plenty for gaming, any more is overkill. The i7-2600k is ~1.2x faster. If it's around 1.2x the price, then go for it.

8GB RAM is plenty for most people, and probably will be for the foreseeable future, especially if you have a fast SSD system drive (for paging). 8GB has only really been common on higher end enthusiast PCs for the last year or so. Unless you're planning on doing heavy video editing/photoshop/CAD or VMs, you're going to have a hard time using up 8GB.
Even if you do have problems in the next few years, DDR3 RAM will still be cheaply available if history is anything to go by - it took a few years for DDR3 to get as cheap as DDR2 and the DDR4 specification isn't even finished yet.
I've only been close to hitting 8GB usage on mine once; that was with Firefox (a few hundred tabs), multiple large Photoshop files (2.5GB RAM), several email accounts, LFS, LFS Viewer, Steam and a virtual machine running all at the same time.

From my calculations a while back, 80GB SSD is bare minimum for a usable 64bit Windows 7 install. I recommend at least a 120GB one or you're likely to be having disk space issues after about a year.

Graphics I can't really comment on, other than the fact that SLI does not give you 2x the performance, but does use 2x the power.

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(2012-09-02 20:04)Kenwood Wrote:  Gamer i10 (though the 1333MHz RAM is below average for today's standards)

No stock CPU (except possibly some of the faster i7s, I'm not certain) needs more than 1333MHz RAM. Faster stuff is usually cheap and easy to come by, but there's no point in getting it unless you're going to overclock.