My build for the ultimate performance PC

[the_tyrant]

Hey guys, well, lately I have been working on building a new computer for a friend. I think that my build might be of interest to the subsim crowd. I ordered the parts a week or so back, and I don***8217;t have the invoice in my inbox, so I might not have the exact components unfortunately.

So first of all, my friend is a big gamer, plays lots of pc games. However, gaming only comprises 10-20% of the usage of this computer. He has a small UMPC for a laptop, and would rather not use it when at home. Thus the other 80% of the time, he would be doing work processing, spreadsheets, and internet browsing. Virtualization performance is also a must, he is a hobbyist programmer, and he usually runs a few virtual machines on the computer to do testing. The hypervisor we are working with will soon be Hyper-V, and we would like high virtual machine performance.

So first up, is the CPU. We chose the Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 CPU. Great performance, great price, low thermal requirements, and amazing for virtualization; This CPU gets a MAJOR recommendation from me. Ditch your I7s, Xeon e3s are much better. Note: we used the v2 version of this CPU, do not get the v1, it is sandy bridge, v2 is ivy bridge.
Link: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117286

The motherboard choice for a Xeon is much more difficult. We got the ASRock Z77 Pro4-M. It is a z77 board with good, reliable build quality. It works great with our CPU choice, and is a good board for the price. This generation, for LGA 1155, I often end up recommending the z77 chipset. It is simply the most commonly available one at lower prices. Even if you don***8217;t need the graphics, you might want to go with one.
Link: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157306

For ram, we decided to go all out (hey, it***8217;s not that expansive). We got the Patriot Viper 3 32GB kit. 4 sticks of good quality, 8 gb ram.
Link: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220727
On the storage side, we used a mix of SSD and traditional HDD. We got 2 OCZ Vertex 3 120gb Sata III SSDs. They are in raid 0 configuration, for maximum speed. The goal is to put the OS and core applications on the SSD for maximum speed.
Link: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227706
With the SSDs, we also got a 3TB drive to store ALL our files. We went with a Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001. It***8217;s a no frills, simply, large drive for all our storage needs.
Link: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148844
Finally, for the video card, we went with the nVidia GTX 680. We got the ASUS GTX680-DC2T-2GD5, a cheap, simply, high performance system.
Link: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121634

So in all, we built ourselves the ultimate PC. In all, it costs almost 2000 to get everything up (without the screen).