asking for a huge favor here guys.

[F9thRet]

I wound up selling what cows I had just before all of this started, cause I knew with the drought (haha) Hay, Grass, and alfalfa prices would be through the roof. I do know that candlebox, who lives over in chandler, has an appaloosa he is trying to find a home for.

[JohnGabriel]

If you have something on your list under a couple hundred, I can help. I prefer Amazon over other stores if you have a wish list there.

[candlebox]

Horse shit stephen, using your fema money for games.

I am just glad we got power back as fast as we did.

[F9thRet]

LOL, actually, I'm not using the Fema money for this. Fema doesn't cover items in the home. This is from Insurance LOL.

Nah, every dime with FEMA will go into replacing parts of a roof, Floors, and holes I'm discovering in the outer walls. So much rain damage even after the Tornado.

I micro manage everything. The ranch stuff, I still have a few bucks, but I keep it separate from the housing expenses.

[Ualaa]

If you're going an 3930K route.

For a motherboard, one of these, depending on your needs:
Asus P9X79 Deluxe (or Pro).
Asus Sabertooth, X79.
Gigabyte G1 Assassin 2.
Asus Rampage IV Extreme.

The board doesn't have to be Asus, but that was personally my choice.
The Deluxe or Pro versions are both good, and that seemed to be the most common/popular choice for the 3930K chips.
The Sabertooth has military grade parts (not sure if that is hype, or makes any difference) and the board is layout gets very nice cooling.
The Gigabyte was a special order, but had a lot of extra features onboard... blue tooth, killer nic, Xi-Fi audio, etc.
The Rampage IV Extreme can be overclocked further than the others, with more tools in that direction.



I generally take a look a the Tom's Hardware for video cards: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...ew,3107-7.html

My biggest caveats would be to avoid the dual-chips on one card route... GTX 590, GTX 690, 4870 X2, etc, and go with a single card over pair of cards that are both underclocked and then put onto the same chip.

The video memory on the card is going to be a larger limiting factor, than which card you go with, assuming you go with an upper end card.
I liked the GTX 670 4GB.
A 680 is going to be stronger, but I didn't think the increased 10-15% benchmarks was worth the 40-50% price increase.
The Titan has since come out, and that has 6GB of video ram... which is more than the 4GB you can get on a 670/680/690 (I wouldn't go with the 690 types)... but it is basically a thousand.




If you might go with a ramdrive, higher speed ram is a good consideration.

From links MiRai shared with me, outside of benchmarks there isn't a lot of difference between higher MHz ram (with looser timings) and lower MHz ram (with tighter timings).
I went with 32GB of DDR3 1600MHz with 8-8-8-24 timings (CL 8 ram).
1866 CL 10 ram, was basically the same price and the same performance.
2133 CL 12 ram wasn't that much of a difference, but cost more.

There were a few threads (Sam Deathwalker bait, and maybe another) where some people were talking of free/paid ramdrive software.
The higher MHz ram seemed to noticeably perform better than the slower ram.
So if you're going (or might go with) a ramdrive at some point, then the faster ram is a consideration.

I'm not sure if the benefit of a ramdrive is going to be that much, compared with a fast SSD for the gaming folder.
There was a certain level of hassle, transferring the game onto the ramdrive and then transferring it off each time you powered up or shut off the PC.

[spher0boom]

I'm very sorry to hear that you have to go through this.

If you have something on your list under a couple hundred, I can help. I prefer Amazon over other stores if you have a wish list there.

I would agree with John. Everything I've bought lately has been cheaper from Amazon than from Newegg.

Also, you'll be spending a lot of money shortly. Make sure you have a good rewards credit card ... If you do one of those bedroom tvs will be free (or clse to it) given what you will be spending. If you don't currently have a card the amazon card offers 3% for anything bought on Amazon, so it would be an easy way for you to get a little extra from your insurance/fema money.

[candlebox]

Stephen got screwed by FEMA according to FB. Shit luck.

Not sure if he lost his PC or what but I can fork up a donor for the time being. If anything he can use the chassis for his own build.

[eternaldrk]

Hey, a couple of things to note about gfx cards if you haven't bought your parts already:

- NVidia's card scale better in SLI/XFire still and generally provide more consistent frame rates. Tom's Hardware has new tests that check for dropped and runt frames that aren't reflected in frames per second but to the human eye looks like stuttering or lag.
- The GTX 770 has just been released and generally outperforms the AMD HD 7970, its about 10 to 20% faster than the GTX 680, and comes close to the GTX 780/Titan in some games. It comes in 2GB and 4GB flavors, but so far only the 2GB are for sale.
- WoW still runs a little faster on NVidia cards than AMD.
- AMD gfx cards have FAR better general compute capabilities that NVidia, so something to consider if you want to do any video transcoding.

That being the case, there aren't many new NVidia offerings with more than 2 or 3GB of video RAM, which is pretty annoying. There is a 7970 with 6GB of RAM available on newegg that would be nice for boxing:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814202005

This would be my choice if I were putting a system together right now. You get the 6GB of RAM, 70% to 80% of the performance of a Titan at almost half the price. You also get AMD's far superior general compute capabilities.