What hardware are you going to buy in 2011?

[veK]

Well, I think this series of threads is going into it's 6th or 7th edition with the new year arriving soon. As usual the threads starts a month early for all your investments into hardware next year. So what plans - or maybe questions - do you have for next year?

I have decided to wait with my new PC until January for several reasons. First of them being that I'll move soon and leave this nice city. So building a PC right now is pretty unnecessary I guess although I'd like to have one over xmas. Another reason is money, because only after I have moved I can decide how much I can actually spend in detail on a new PC. Another reason is that the new 580GTX videocards are very hard to get right now unless you pay even more money - but this thing is expensive enough as it is so I won't do that. Also new AMD Radeon highend cards will hit the market shortly and I'm interested how well they do although I'm pretty sure I'll go with that nvidia card. But a new Radeon might come in handy regarding prices so waiting until January is probably not such a bad idea. And last but not least Intel will be releasing their new CPUs alongside a new socket in early January and I want to wait for them too. I just hope they will actually be available after their launch and mainboard reviews are up shortly afterwards.

This is what I'm planning to get as of right now (I don't need a new mouse, still have a X-Fi soundcard, good headphones, a microphone and HDDs for data story):

CPU: Intel Core-i7 2600K

Videocard: Nvidia GeForce 580 GTX

System Drive: Crucial C300 RealSSD 128GB or maybe even 256GB

Power Supply: Enermax MODU87+ 600W ATX 2.3

Mainbord: don't know yet

Memory: don't know yet

Case: Lancool PC-K62 Dragonlord

Fancontroller: Akasa AK-FC-03

DVD-Drive: Sony NEC Optiarc AD-7260S, SATA

CPU-Cooler: Scythe Mugen Rev. 2 or Prolimatech's Megahalem

Other: WLAN-Card, Quickport Bay, Keyboard

[SandChigger]

Probably a new MacBook. :)

[Andrew]

Ordered some black Friday deals (BFD) (Saturday): Hmm, I think only 1 item was black Friday deal.

$16 Scythe S-FLEX SFF21D 120mm Case Fan

BFD $13 Rosewill WMC Remote control/Rcvr RRC-127 for Win 7

$95 Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive (sadly missed the big $80 sale for it, but need it)

$22 Logitech 963326-0403 Cordless RumblePad 2 USB

$14 XIGMATEK Cooling System XLF XLF-F1455 140mm White LED Black Case Fan PSU Molex Adapter/extender included

Got 2 new fans, 1 to replace one that came with case as it is a bit too loud (even at lowest setting) and I have disconnected.

So my antec 300 case has two front intake, 1 back exhaust, 1 back PSU exhaust, 1 top 140mm exhaust, 1 side probably intake. 1 stock amd cpu fan.

So 7 fans running at once in computer soon.

Attached are temps that programs are reporting. I assume my core temps are incorrect for some reason (room temperature yah right).

Next to order are extra HDMI and VGA cable. HDMI cord in cart currently $3.

Also just ordered another 12 AAA Sanyo Eneloop rechargeable batteries as they were on sale for $32

I spent wayyy to much money on electronics in past 3 weeks.

Next big purchase: 24" monitor. upgrade from my 22"

Possibly a new tv sometime next year, but no rush, especially if old tvs keep working.

[gryphon]

First of them being that I'll move soon and leave this nice city.

Leaving Hamburg? Finally going to Berlin I hope? ;-)

Probably a new MacBook. :)

Go for the Air (If you need one for showing off) or go for the Pro. The white one looks like a Fisher-Price toy and and MacBook Pro's start at just over 1000. Unless you really like the white exterior of the MacBook go for the Pro.

[SandChigger]

Yeah, I was thinking Air. ;)

[Mahdi]

Now that we are down to one computer for the two of us, and my water heater came with a 0% financing deal, I am definitely buying a tablet as my personal websurfing/e-mail/entertainment device this winter/early spring. Still leaning towards the Playbook but will wait for reviews/a chance to play with it myself before making a final decision. No purchasing it blind. Who knows, a better "Honeycomb" or Windows 7 device may come out yet.

[veK]

Leaving Hamburg? Finally going to Berlin I hope? ;-)

Yes, I'm leaving Hamburg. But I'm not going to Berlin. Actually I don't like Berlin very much. I really love Hamburg but a new task is waiting for me some place else. I'll be living in a small village soon, about 50km away from Munich. Unfortunately Holland is further away then and I have to figure out a better way to visit some of the festivals next year. Maybe I'll go to Amsterdam first and travel from there. A friend of mine from Hamburg just recently moved there.

Anyways back on topic. Aside from the PC I'm also considering buying a new mp3-player next year. I really love the one I have right now because it is so small and has superb audio quality (like all the players from Cowon I owned in the past) but unfortunately it has only 1GB and the battery isn't as good as it used to be. So maybe I'll get the Cowon J3 next year altough I really don't like something that big with touch screen technology, especially since my Cowon U2 is as tiny as a lighter and perfect for any road trip. So I'm not sure yet.

[Gruntlord6]

I Finnaly built my new pc. Now I want my new graphics card to go with it.

Phenom II x 4 965

6gb DDR3 Ram 1600mhz

1tb Caviar Black FAEX

Ultra Power 55w PSU

Asus M4A88TD-M Motherboard

Nvidia 9600 GSO GPU

Antec Six Hundred Case

[veK]

So yesterday I started ordering - only the videocard for now as they are hardly available. Fortunately it has already been dispatched now and should arrive tomorrow or on monday. When the new CPUs are officially available from sunday/monday on I will order the rest of the stuff. I could have ordered some things already but I want to save shipping costs if possible. I just hope the mainboard I want will be available from monday on as well.

Currently I'm still a bit indecisive about the whole 256GB SSD thing though. The problem is a. it's prize and b. it's size - because if I install Windows 7 on it and the bunch of games I bought on Steam during their holiday sale it's almost full. Obviously I don't need all the games installed all the time but then again I don't want to uninstall and reinstall games and wait for them to download over steam. Also newer versions of the SSD I was planning to get have been announced and will hit the market in about 2-4 months which makes it even more painful to spend freaking ~450€ on such a device, especially since I already paid that much for the videocard (GTX580). So now I'm thinking about getting just a 60GB OCZ Vertex2 for around 100€ and put in one of my 2 Samsung Spinpoint F1 7200rpm 1TB HDDs (which I currently use in an external enclosure for data storage) for all the games and the other one (or a 2GB Western Digital Green) for all the data. But I really hate to put in 2 (or even 1 for that matter) HDDs into that PC because even if they are silent, they still make more noise than a SSD, they vibrate, they are slow... basically they just suck once you got addicted to a SSD. It's driving me crazy, because I really don't know what to do. I make my decision and 5 minutes later I hate it and think about it again.

[athanasios]

RAID to improve speeds?

[Andrew]

RAID to improve speeds?

Sadly RAID barely matches up to a single SSD (random 4kb is untouchable). :(

I'd hold off on SSD unless some big sale on older models. Should be lots of options within 6 months.

I got 2 60gb ocz vertex SSD. One has win7 and apps +1game, the other one has 2 games. Win 7 has 25gb free, games has 51gb free.

Got 1tb caviar black for torrents and data storage. It's noisy (compared to virtually silent ssd), but a necessity.

Maybe have SSD, and have HDD in another networked computer? That way main computer is silent with SSD, but able to read/write to hdd on networked computer?

[veK]

That wouldn't solve my first problem: installing all the games. I don't need all my data inside the PC and available but if I put in 1 HDD for all the games, I might as well put in another one for the data. I just ordered everything and decided to go with the 60GB OCZ Vertex 2 Extended which I will use for Win7 and programs only. I'll use one of my Samsung F1 HDDs for all the games then and I ordered Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB for all the data. So I have 1 spare Samsung F1 left over as well as my 2,5" Western Digital in another external enclosure with RFID security. I will use this one to back up the most important data every evening.

I can only hope I the mainboard I want will arrive at the shop on tuesday. It was supposed to be available on sunday and now that date changed to tuesday. I really don't want to switch to a different board because I really like the one I chose now. I also had to switch memory as the one I was planning on is also not available yet. The good thing about switching though: memory is cheap as hell right now and so I ordered 16GB although this is overkill I guess. There might be a few programs that can utilize it though. Maybe I'll take pictures of everything before I built the PC and afterwards :)

[gryphon]

so I ordered 16GB although this is overkill I guess. There might be a few programs that can utilize it though.

Same here, I have a PC with 24 and 40 GB in it. Both hardly ever use more then 7 GB. Only why I ever got it in use was assigning it to a lot of virtual machines.

[Andrew]

I can only hope I the mainboard I want will arrive at the shop on tuesday. It was supposed to be available on sunday and now that date changed to tuesday. I really don't want to switch to a different board because I really like the one I chose now. I also had to switch memory as the one I was planning on is also not available yet. The good thing about switching though: memory is cheap as hell right now and so I ordered 16GB although this is overkill I guess. There might be a few programs that can utilize it though. Maybe I'll take pictures of everything before I built the PC and afterwards :)

Hope you get SATA 6.0. Not sure how useful usb3.0 is at the moment, but mainstream SSD will take advantage of SATA6.0 in 6 months.

Yep, ram is cheap currently. Hope it keeps going down in price :P

If you don't want games on hdd, what if you had them on hdd but used a program like ramdisk to put them into your ram? Should run fast then. Free version allows 4gb. more than that costs $10 (up to 32gb).

Spending a lot of money on expensive SSD not really worth it at the moment as prices should drop a lot in 6 months. Still only good for OS/apps (good for games, but expensive if you have lots!).

[veK]

Usually all new boards have SATA 6GB, at least all the boards that are available so far for the new 1155 socket. But it doesn't matter for the OCZ Vertex 2 I bought and I don't think I will get a faster SSD anytime soon now. I don't care about faster load times in games. The reason I don't want them on HDD is because I don't want HDDs at all any more. I just wish 512-1024MB SSDs were more affordable. RAM prices might fall a bit more over the next few weeks but in a few months their prices will increase strongly again accodring to some information I read a while ago.

[veK]

Well screw it. I just emailed the shop and told them to change my order. I cancelled the OCZ Vertex and the 2TB HDD and ordered the Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB.

I guess I'll just fill it up with games and whenever I want to play something else I just backup that particular game from steam and put in on one of my external hard drives I already own. It's 240€ more this way but at least I won't be unhappy with HDDs inside of the PC running all the time and have a much faster SSD for Win7 and also have the games on this drive. They just need to get back at me and confirm the change now. This time it's really going to be one expensive PC... SSD and videocard almost make 50% of the total cost.

[Andrew]

Micron's RealSSD C400 uses 25nm NAND at $1.61/GB, Offers 415MB/s Reads

Ships in February.

256gb priced at $425.

I see C300 256gb priced at newegg for $569. A couple months and get newer product and cheaper price. I know waiting sucks.

[veK]

Yeah I know the C400 is coming. But I won't wait for it. I want my PC now as soon as possible, it was hard enough to wait for the new Intel CPUs. Also the C300 has fallen in price a bit around here and the C400 will be more expensive when it's available. Also it's not going to be available in February right away in Germany and I'm not waiting 2 or even 3 more months and pay even more than I'm now paying for the C300. It's a hard choice but I can live with that. If I regret it 2 months from now I might sell the C300 and get the C400 instead, there's always people willing to buy the older versions - although I doubt I will go through the trouble of reinstalling windows and all the programs yet again.

[Gruntlord6]

Yeah I know the C400 is coming. But I won't wait for it. I want my PC now as soon as possible, it was hard enough to wait for the new Intel CPUs. Also the C300 has fallen in price a bit around here and the C400 will be more expensive when it's available. Also it's not going to be available in February right away in Germany and I'm not waiting 2 or even 3 more months and pay even more than I'm now paying for the C300. It's a hard choice but I can live with that. If I regret it 2 months from now I might sell the C300 and get the C400 instead, there's always people willing to buy the older versions - although I doubt I will go through the trouble of reinstalling windows and all the programs yet again.

I wish I had waited for the new AMD CPUs, but I picked up an OCD Vertex 60gb SSD, works amazing.

[athanasios]

Maybe you can install all the games on SSD, but since they will need more space, move the files of those you do not play often to the external drive and copy them back to the SSD before you want to play-much like the use of a ram disk?

[veK]

That's exactly my plan now athanasios

[D2k Sardaukar]

I read today that SSD's without super cap are worthless. If power fails your data gets corrupt or can even crash the ssd if it is in important write area.

Just so you know, only by 3th generation SSD's (if you have important data on the SSD). :)

[Andrew]

I've had several power outages with my SSDs. Havn't noticed any problems. Don't think it would be much different than with HDD. I know there was a bug in ext4 file system last year with power failures that I think they fixed (not related to SSD). Havn't heard anything about SSD power failure.

[athanasios]

A UPS could do the job. Haven't checked the details as I first hear about it, but if it makes the Drive much more expensive (you could spend those to buy a UPS and protect all your system, because what is the benefit to protect your SSD when all the system is off?-Again you will loose data.) then it is yet another trick to get into the pockets of the ignorant. Of course for laptops and other portables it would prove somewhat useful, provided the device doesn't have something similar.

[Gruntlord6]

Maybe you can install all the games on SSD, but since they will need more space, move the files of those you do not play often to the external drive and copy them back to the SSD before you want to play-much like the use of a ram disk?

an SSD can wear out, and the more you write to it the less of a speed advantage it gives you.

Games will load fast regardless of the HDD they are on because windows is on the SSD, so when the game is called from the storage drive, its being loaded at the drives full speed since the drive is not in use for other data.