Matt’s New Computer
July 3rd 2009 6:19 pm by Matt
It’s finally finished!
OK, so the goal here was to try to build slowly, waiting for deals on each individual component as they came up. For about a month I was all over Slickdeals and FatWallet waiting for the best picks. I was doing well for a little while, but towards the end I got anxious and did a few impulse buys to finish out the system.
OK, ready for a parts list?
| Model | Vendor | Price Shipped | - Rebates | Total | |
| CPU | Core i7 920 | Microcenter | $243 | $243 | |
| Motherboard | Asus P6T | Newegg | $240 | $15 | $225 |
| Video | EVGA GTX 285 | Newegg | $345 | $30 | $315 |
| Ram | OCZ Gold 6gb DDR3 | Newegg | $100 | $20 | $80 |
| Power Supply | Corsair 750TX | Newegg | $110 | $10 | $100 |
| HDD | Intel X25-M 80gb | Newegg | $317 | $317 | |
| Optical | LG Blu-Ray/DVD-R | Newegg | $100 | $100 | |
| Case | Lian Li PC-7B | Chiefvalue | $90 | $100 | |
| Totals | $1545 | $75 | $1470 | ||
You can see the complete list at Newegg
Like I said, I was doing really well until the end. I was sitting there staring at a case with power supply, ram and a motherboard. I couldn’t help myself. Literally my last two purchases were the processor and the video card. In the two weeks after that last purchase, the video card got as low as $310 and today Microcenter announced the i7 920s for $200 again. That means I could have saved another $45 for a grand total of $1425 shipped! Not bad for a top-of-the-line system, eh? In fact, less than a month after my purchases Intel came out with the 2nd revision of their SSD and, to compete with OCZ’s pricing, the price dropped by almost $100. That’s what we pay for being on the cutting edge I guess.
Still, consider that when I priced this computer together for “Can the brands beat a custom build yet” it came in at just under $1550 (minus the OS) – and that was with a Raptor instead of the SSD. It really does pay to shop around a little bit. I’ll definitely be doing it again.
I think I did pretty damned well. The result of all that:
Yeah, I was disappointed at first. Apparently though, the Windows Experience thing in Windows 7 can’t quite handle multi-core GPUs yet (or something like that). Even people with 3 GTX 295s max out at around 6.6. I’ve read that this is fixed in the leak of the next build. I’ll be sure to post an update if my score bumps up a few notches 
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