Quote:
Originally Posted by Tchocky
Nice build. What case have you got it in?
I would have changed a couple of things myself, but at this level of hardware I think personal preference really outweighs actual performance/efficiency differences 
Probably wouldn't have bothered to RAID the SSDs, I'm not sure the speed difference is noticeable. Probably would have gone for a i7 for VM (or even one of those nice AMD 8-cores), and a 7970 instead of the 680 (but that's just me, my first proper GPU was ATI and I'm not really letting go of the bias  ). |
We used Thermaltake case, nothing fancy, just gets the job done.
With the RAID ssd, windows literally boots in 5 seconds. The boot speed is almost instant. Sure, we went overboard, but goddamn it, its fast.
As for the xeon + 680, we chose the xeon since it can run silent, with the fan off. For a bedroom PC (that often is kept on at night for downloads and what not), this is a must. The Xeon produces almost no heat (so we can turn off the fan), and the graphics card can be turned off completely with a few hacks.
As for AMD/Ati, I liked their parts but their performance per watt is dreadful. Sure, the AMD FX is slightly cheaper, but the amount you lose on your power bill (for a pc that is on 24/7), you lose the savings quite quickly.