New rig

Had a nasty series of power interruptions kill my previous system back in January due to the stupidity of someone in my house. Power supply damaged and the motherboard and graphics card completely destroyed, effectively totalling the system. Anyway, I've sold what I could off of that system and built a new one. Here's the specs, I've gone with an all AMD platform this time (no point in doing otherwise given how far Intel is behind AMD on desktops now and Nvidia pretty much going to Hell):

Power Supply: NZXT HALE82 V2 modular 700 watts
Board: ASUS M5A97 LE R2.0
CPU: AMD FX 8350 Vishera, 8 core, 4GHz
GPU: AMD Radeon 7950, 3GB, 384 bit
RAM: G Skill Ares series DDR3 1866, 8 GB (2x 4GB)
PPU: Dell PhysX card (got it for cheap, so I thought it would be beneficial for older PhysX games)

and just for the hell of it, I mounted it all in this case:
   

Although amusing, it's actually a very bad idea to use that case with your hardware unless you plan on doing liquid cooling-- those cases had particularly bad airflow, and your system really needs to breathe.

Other than that, nice setup

Ahh well, certanly better then laying all components on the table...

Iv recently been thinkking about a setup with water cooling which could heat up water for central heating.

BitFenix Prodigy http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2012/09...y-review/1

Or

Antec One: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2012/06...e-review/1

Or

Fractal Design Arc R2: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cases/2...2-review/1

These 3 cases are affordable (especially the Antec one) and great value for money.

Oh and Lee, get yourself one of those plugs that has protection built in so you don't get power loss issues again!

The case believe it or not actually isn't bad for airflow since I have proper cable management, the blower on the graphics card sticks out enough to hog a considerable amount of intake (most of it actually, actually had to ditch the floppy bays so it could fit), and the general path from the front to back is really short (this keeps air from staying in the case longer than it should). I've also switched out my cooler with something a bit more suited (ZALMAN CNPS 7500 Cu) that is essentially a circular piece of copper with a 110mm fan on it and the CPU sits pretty close to the exhaust AND the power supply (which like most PSUs is set up to exhaust air). The thermal paste is currently in a break-in period, but I've yet to see any alarming temps on it, in fact I haven't seen the CPU go past 45c yet and none of the fans have come close to running full speed even though I configured the board for performance, so everything is all good.

I dont want to start an AMD vs Intel/Nvidia war, but are they really that far behind? I didn't really follow that much maybe one year. As far as I can remember, AMD always just had much better pricing.

I dont want to start an AMD vs Intel/Nvidia war, but are they really that far behind? I didn't really follow that much maybe one year. As far as I can remember, AMD always just had much better pricing.

In regards to Intel:
For desktop computers, in my honest opinion AMD has a considerably higher price to performance ratio on their CPUs. Just grab some spec sheets and compare the Vishera CPUs to the i7s. It wouldn't surprise me if Intel bounced back though, AMD and Intel both tend to be good manufacturers.

In regards to Nvidia:
From what I've seen with my previous graphics card and the way Nvidia in general has been handling things, Nvidia really is pretty much going to Hell not much different than what became of ATI before AMD bought them out. They've adopted a sort of release early, release often approach to their drivers resulting in things like the 196.75 driver burning cards up (mine actually got damaged by a Linux driver that was based off of that btw, and my fan speed was manually set to run max) not to mention some serious regressions in performance (I went from running StarCraft II on max to running it on medium a year later just to achieve the same frame rate), and are getting killed on price at the moment as current Radeon cards seem to be comparable to Nvidia cards completely outside of their price bracket. Nvidia has also done a few things that I see as anti-competitive as well, which really makes me not want to support them. In particular they have done things such as bricking PhysX functions for anyone that tries to run a hybrid setup (a system that has an Nvidia card and one of their competitors), removing SLI from all boards that use AMD CPUs, and deliberately dropping support for PhysX PPUs (even though they outperformed their Geforce 9800s in regards to PhysX handling) in an attempt to force consumers to buy their GPUs if they want PhysX functionality (fortunately for everyone it was mostly older games where PhysX was really shown off, so the old driver for these cards is good for running a good chunk of PhysX supported games).

BitFenix Prodigy http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2012/09...y-review/1

Or

Antec One: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2012/06...e-review/1

Or

Fractal Design Arc R2: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cases/2...2-review/1

These 3 cases are affordable (especially the Antec one) and great value for money.

Oh and Lee, get yourself one of those plugs that has protection built in so you don't get power loss issues again!

A surge protector doesn't protect against what happened to my previous computer, in fact I had that rig plugged into one. For protection against what killed my previous rig I actually would've needed an uninterrupted power supply. Also, if I wanted to I could just use my previous computer case (after I fix the front panel) if I needed something other than what I currently have, but what I have at the moment seems to be pretty well suited to what I need as it still gets a better airflow than you think it would (especially since cable management was far easier to do) and I prefer the old-school look to the crap that is marketed today.