Quote Originally Posted by 'jettzypher',index.php?page=Thread&postID=171908#p ost171908
i dont want to sound like an ass, but you bought and paid for alot of things that you either dont know what it is, dont understand, or have expressed that you really have no use for. why? it could be a decent system, but you spent alot of money on unnecessary hardward that youre not gonna use for awhile if at all (extra sound card, excessive amount of ram, and water cooling for example). just food for thought...
I don't think he did that. Item by item:

Case: pretty typical gamer case

Power supply: this is the smallest first-tier mfg'd power supply available from his builder, so actually he picked the cheapest one.

Water cooling: cheap feature he threw in for fun, and most likely it will lower temperatures a little although probably not very much. Fun is a rational reason to buy something.

CPU: he wanted i7 for perfectly rational reasons, and this is the cheapest i7, so actually he picked the cheap one.

Motherboard: All i7 motherboards are expensive now because they are new and selling in small quantities. He picked this one on the basis of Newegg reviews which (in my experience) is a pretty good way to pick things.

12 GB ram: It may sound like too much but a couple of years ago, 4 GB's sounded like too much. I've been buying PC's since 1983. Back then 1 MB sounded like too much. I guarantee you that during the life of this machine, 12 GB will seem like too little. Plus keep in mind that under Vista and Windows 7, all ram gets used even now for preloading. Maybe you think he could have bought 6 GB now and the rest later when DDR3 prices fall, but since he wants 24 GB eventuallly, he needed to buy 12 GB now to avoid throwing away DIMMs later. And as for DDR3 prices falling, I just checked his builder's prices. He paid $150 for the additional 6 GB. That's pretty cheap . Even if he waits till next year when DDR3 prices fall, how much will he save on that 6 GB? $50? But that $50 *is* buying him something now -- the use of that RAM during the next year -- because in fact Vista and Windows 7 use RAM for preloading. Plus there are people here who say i7 benefits from more than 6 GB with 5 WoWs. I don't have an i7 nor do I play 5 WoWs so I don't know, but it makes sense to listen to them and apply their advice.

Video card: This is a solid choice. High powered but not far out on the diminishing returns curve. He didn't do anything extreme like buy two 260's in SLI or anything like that.

Hard drive: If anything he was too frugal here. Almost everyone here would have picked a bigger one or more of them.

Sound card: Supposedly they have some advantages over onboard sound. I'm not sure what they are myself. In a case like this, where the item is very cheap, I often do the same thing Owltoid did -- buy the thing without being sure -- because my time has a money value and it would cost more to research the item than to simply buy the thing.

Speakers: they came practically for free with the system

Vista BASIC: for goodness sake, he got the dirt cheap version! How many people here would skimp on Vista and get the version without Aero? Owltoid is actually the opposite of what you say -- he's a miser!

DVD: He got the cheap choice.

Professional wiring: Okay, at last, $19 for something that might really be useless. But he trusts the company (as I do also after reading their site) and since I trust the company, I'd be willing to bet $19 that this wiring is really better than their regular wiring. It probably has more cable ties and they probably take more time to tuck cables behind things. I would pay $19 for that also, and I'd also be willing to pay it without being certain, on the basis I described.