Am I the only one who looks at the first post and thinks this machine is complete overkill for superboyac's needs? Seems to me like everyone is building their own dream computer vicariously for superboyac instead of helping him buy what suits his purposes
-Deozaan
Ha! Thanks Deozaan for your concern. But everyone's right, I am mostly to blame for the cost so far. I have definitely been asking for it. I know I don't "need" most of this stuff. At the end of all this, I am going to go through a fat-trimming, cost-cutting phase where I truly decide if I want to buy these parts or not.
On the other hand, if you look closely, it's not like I've chosen things that are a huge waste of money. Like 40hz said, a lot of this stuff is the right choice when you look at it from a bang-for-the-buck perspective. That being said, the truth still may be that I don't need half of whatever is banged for the buck, but I'll decide that definitely later on. And if I really wanted to be budget-conscious about it, how much could I really save? Let's think about it:
I'm not skimping on any of the audio equipment or the hard drive, no way. That's $560 right there. That's already approaching the cost of many budget Dell desktops that people get. The graphics card is definitely a luxury for me, but again, with 2xDVI, how much will I save, $100? That's no big deal. I can cut out $300 if I don't get two monitors. My case is also quite a luxury, so a normal case would easily be $100 cheaper. The Mobo/CPU combo is about $400, but I don't like skimping there knowing I'll use this thing for years and years.
All things said, I could probably easily cut out $500 of stuff right now. But $500 is really no big deal in the grand perspective. I can afford it...really. I'm not rich or anything, but I know I spend a lot of time with my computer and I make a good living. It's really not a big deal. More importantly, I don't think I'm being careless with the parts...just a tad on the premium quality side. It's an impressive computer, no doubt, but it's not just eye candy...it will be a workhorse, and I'll be thankful when it's 2015 and still going strong.
Also, even on my last computer which I didn't spend nearly this much attention to, and I'm using it over 7 years later, it wasn't all that cheap. First of all, I had to add a whole bunch of hardware to it as it went along, and I wouldn't be surprised if over the course of the 7 years if I spend over $2000 on it. Actually, I'm pretty sure I did. I had to replace an IBM DeathStar. Then I bought two more hard drives for backup purposes to ensure nothing like that ever happened again. I bought the pro soundcard. My PSU died, and took my graphics card with it, so I had to replace those. I bought a DVD burner. A couple of hard disk trays and a cooler unit. A new monitor the same time the PSU died (don't know if they were related). So there you go...easily $2000. I'm just doing it all up front now.
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. The most expensive Intel Quad Core offer I would get is the Q9550, from there, price increases exponentially and the returns of the inversion are much lower. The sweet spot should be the Q9300, but for some reason, it's more expensive than the Q9400 right now, although it runs at a few less MHz.