Need to make a new PC

[Nicolette]

My current system is a custom rig, but about 8 years old. Its a Socket 939 running a dual-core 2.1ghz, 3gb ram, 1 radeon 1gb pci-e card, in an asus a8n-sli board. Its held up very very well for 8 years but its a bit dated and I would really like to start working on something midrange to last me for a bit.
ive been looking @:

Cooler-Master-RC-922M-KKN1-GP-Tower-Black
www.amazon.com/Cooler-Master-RC-922...UTF8&coliid=IIRN7A184T6ZZ&colid=1N8HKWSI6KMI8

with an
AMD Phenom II x6
http://www.amazon.com/AMD-Phenom-Th...TF8&coliid=I39Q2OFIN11A1I&colid=1N8HKWSI6KMI8

in an:
Asus Crosshair IV
http://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Crosshai...TF8&coliid=I1L6KXMJV5Q0G7&colid=1N8HKWSI6KMI8

with 8gb corsair ram (110$)
2tb 7200 drive ($140)
750w PSU

but i cant decide on using this cooler master heatpipe for the CPU
http://www.amazon.com/Cooler-Master...TF8&coliid=I13C9EAGL8FQJ3&colid=1N8HKWSI6KMI8

or going with water cooling which i have no experience with
http://www.amazon.com/Corsair-Cooli...UTF8&coliid=IXK2GG24CKEGY&colid=1N8HKWSI6KMI8

and i still need good video - best I think ive found is:

Sapphire radeon HD4870 2gb ddr5 cards
http://www.amazon.com/Sapphire-Rade...TF8&coliid=I3NXP0IRPUJF89&colid=1N8HKWSI6KMI8

and apparently id need:
http://www.amazon.com/Arctic-Coolin...TF8&coliid=I2USHN0Y8OUDNQ&colid=1N8HKWSI6KMI8

to cool it... and even then I could probably heat my apartment with it.

Any ideas out there?

 

[Taurothar]

First off, did you only look at amazon, or have you tried looking at newegg?

Zalman heatsink for the computer should be your primary cooling choice, shouldn't need anything other than that. Water cooling is for serious overclockers only and shouldn't be toyed with if you're not certain you need it. This particular one is the highest rated cpu cooler on newegg, and I know several people with one, and my pc in the works will have one as well.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835118223

I'm not sure what kind of budget you're working with but that vid card isn't available anymore on amazon, but here's what I think would be a better deal, and no, you don't need any fancy extra cooling for it.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102909

Other things to think about:
Arctic silver 5 compound for the processor heatsink. Makes a world of difference in how effective the heat transfer between the two is. Only like 10 bucks for a tube, and you'll probably only need one for every computer you build for a couple decades.
Hard drives are slower the larger they are in general, I would stick with two 1 tb drives over a single 2 tb drive, and will cost you about the same. Get a couple western digital black drives with 32 or 64 mb cache.
You would probably be better off with 6 gb of triple channel ram over 8 gb of dual channel which I'm assuming is the kit you have there, so long as you're looking at ddr3. The average to moderate hardcore gamers won't touch 6gb, and the speed from triple channel kits is worth the 2gb sacrifice, and if you decide you want more you can add another 6 for 12 total.

 

[CidBahamut]

I wouldn't go with the Terrabyte harddrives at all personally. They're louder, clunkier and more prone to developing problems in my experience. Recently I actually scrapped a few larger harddrives and shifted everything onto a RAID built out of 250GB drives. Less noise, more reliability/redundancy and about the same speed as far as I can tell.

Can't really speak to the rest of the stuff as my rig's a few years old now and I"m not familiar with the components you're looking at. NewEgg's a good place to research though.

 

[Pascal]

From my experience, these all-in-one water cooling kits don’t cool all that much better than air. I just finished putting my new box together last night with the Cooler Master V8 and HAF 932 and I’m pleased so far. I’ve not had a chance to stress test the system yet, but my idle temp is 35C at the stock 3.5 GHz.

 

[Nicolette]

@taruthar i looked at amazon/newegg/tigerdirect, but for purposes of illustration i just grabbed links from amazon, since i only needed the product and not necessarily the price to show what i was looking at. Obviously i would then see where i could get it cheapest from there. But as for the suggestions: That Zalman jobby looks pretty cool. 3 pipes instead of the 8 on the very fancy v-8 in my OP, but i like the fan/copper combo. I'd planned on adding a 2nd 200mm fan to the side of the coolermaster, and then maybe adding some filters which, while killing some of the open airflow would keep the dust out of the case. Thermal compound i have, cables too so i didnt include.

as for the video though.. thats 1, 1gb 256 card instead of 2 for the same price. theres 1 used set up on amazon available atm, but i know a place to get the one from OP... is there a significant difference that im not noticing? Im not very conversant with the differences in video now since you can get 12 different 1gb video cards and theyll range in price from 300 to 79! afaik 2 gpu's on the same card get limited to like 1 gpu at a time, and are only marginally better than a single gpu and run hotter... thats about as far as i get.

@cid, if i stay to 7200rpm somnething like 2x 650gb a better idea than something silly like a high rpm smaller drive with a large volume secondary for storage?

also... this ram?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...45286&Tpk=Desktop Memory Kit CMX6GX3M3C1600C7
you were correct, the ones i was looking at were corsair dual-channel 8gb (2x4)

 

[CidBahamut]

If your big drives are just for storing files, rather than installing things on them you're probably ok. I've just noticed drives that are 500GB or bigger tend to develop ominous clunking noises and sometimes the odd i/o error if it's being used for anything other than low traffic storage. I'd say the smaller the better, as there tend to be fewer platters and other moving parts that can wear out. That's not to say that larger drives are going to break on you though.

Keep in mind this is based solely on my personal experience and there's a good chance it's not indicative of how most drives on the market function.

I switched to smaller drives because my rig doesn't need massive storage space and I value the system stability that RAID mirroring offers, along with having separate drives specifically devoted to storing media files. Best advice I can offer is to build your rig to suit your needs. Harddrives are cheap and easy to install so I wouldn't stress over it too much. Find yourself some good disk imaging software and you can hop your System between drives later if you really need to.

Sorry for rambling.

 

[Taurothar]

The memory you linked there is exactly the ones I'm putting in my new rig. They are some of the best economy ram around, and the only difference for the dominator series above it is the spiffy heat sinks, which adds very little overclocking ability if any.

The harddrive decision is one I've been on both sides of, but reliability of Seagate or Western Digital drives are far better than they used to be. The advice I have is to *not* get them shipped UPS though, recent statistics of failure show a trend that UPS'd drives fail sooner than ones that were bought in a store or shipped FedEx. Take that with a grain of salt, the whiners cry louder than the people happy with their products. I personally have a 1tb Seagate 7200 rpm 32mb cache drive that has pretty good transfer rates. My back up drive is a 320 Western Digital Blue 7200 rpm 16 mb cache since pretty much the early days of SATA and it's still running fine after many years.

For video cards, the one I linked is better than the one you were looking at as far as the GPU quality and speed goes. It is up to the latest DirectX spec, which the 4870 is only a DX10 card I believe, current is DX11.x. 1gb of memory on the graphics card is plenty for the average gamer. Do you have a particularly high resolution monitor (over 1080p), that's the only *current* situation I could see needing a beefier setup. That or multiple monitors. Now your motherboard is capable of doing a dual graphics card setup, if you ever wanted to venture into crossfire, but from my experience and from wise advice I've always taken is that for what you spend in getting the state of the art graphics cards *now* you could upgrade once a year for the life of the computer buying average good graphics cards spending less in the long run. The ATI 6870 line is about as good as it gets without spending obnoxious amounts on an nvidia card with a physx processor.