... Still worth the drive from LA to OC to save $30.
Unless cab-fare.
Convenience premium is convenient.
I'd spend $30 to not have to drive to a physical store, park, walk around among the proletariat, play patronized consumer for the irritating sales and checkout clerks, then drive back home. Yeah, avoiding that is worth at least $30.
Also: do some PSU research, starting with jonnyguru.
Anandtech has nice comparison charts. Tomshardware... is annoying, but has some charts.
Idk how you feel about newegg, but i'm less pleased with them in recent times, although the only alternative available in my area is the rebate-heavy tigerdirect. I can't imagine finding a better deal in any physical store.
I thought this thread was not legit. I can't believe the venerable demik would ever need help choosing PC parts.
Surely this is all a clever ruse...
But what *I* would do, is scour ebay for the best deal on a still-fresh discard from one of those early-adopter upgrade addicts, who always keep their rigs packed with the latest most overkill components, and drop their previous stuff on ebay at hilarious prices.
I would also suggest always buying RAM new, and mostly agree with missalaire, in that 8 GB is plenty, and lowest possible latency is "better" than highest possible speed... but really, you want to try to match your ram with your cpu speed, which requires knowing multipliers and mobo characteristics and such.
If i were to build an intel rig, i'd either want to go with the most outrageous thing they offer (too expensive), or try to build the lowest-power-consuming thing possible, but still have the best possible gpu for it. And, don't get any graphics card with less than 3 GB vram, but it also should have a gpu that can actually USE all that vram effectively (some can't, due to the gpu not being powerful enough for the kinds of stuff that amount of vram would be good for... look at some bf4 performance issue reports all over the web).
And! if you care about your PSU fan possibly being loud, or the amount of stress you're putting on the PSU, or want to keep your rated efficiency expectations, you'll want to calculate your expected peak power requirement for all components, and get something rated for almost twice that (some PSUs overrate themselves, or don't quite meet their claimed efficiency numbers). Once you start plugging in all kinds of other stuff, you might end up with a box that shuts down in the most intense moments, if it draws too much power... or it might just wear out from being slammed at max capacity 24/7 (or however many hours your typical gaming session may be).
Anyway, my point is: research every component before you buy anything.
Thanks to jonnyguru, i ended up scoring (i call it a score!) a NIB kingwin lazer gold 850 for ~$100 (which is just about perfect for my oc'd 8350, 590, 2 hdd, 1 ssd, 1 dvd, water pump and 12 fans, 9 of which are on my radiator... and most of my usb slots populated). At the time, it was better than anything i could have found up to $150+. I almost went with an Antec HCP platinum, which is about as good as it gets, but they're not cheap at all.
Oh and! If there are specific games you want to run well, go to their forums and look in the relevant section for people having issues running the game.
Or, you know, you can totally just disregard this and let other people tell you what you should do with your money.
