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A couple of months ago a friend came to me and asked about upgrading his machine. With his current rig running a Core2Duo, 3gb of RAM, Windows Vista 32bit, 2 Nvidia 9600GT's and a spinning hard disk. What he wanted was something that would boot quickly, handle his four monitors for stock trading and be an overall better PC. We had some work to do.
Review by: Skyler
Pictures by: Skyler
Parts
With the new Intel Sandy Bridge architecture out I knew that this was the way to go. An Intel i3 2100 @ 3.1Ghz would be more than enough for this build, heck, it might even be overkill. It really was a perfect part though, the price was right and it offered great performance. Gaming is an after thought on this machine, but even if he did want to throw in COD4 the i3 would suit him well.
With the new Intel Sandy Bridge architecture out I knew that this was the way to go. An Intel i3 2100 @ 3.1Ghz would be more than enough for this build, heck, it might even be overkill. It really was a perfect part though, the price was right and it offered great performance. Gaming is an after thought on this machine, but even if he did want to throw in COD4 the i3 would suit him well.
No need for anything more
4gb of DDR3 1333Mhz Corsair Vengence RAM was the second part on our list. With the big heat spreaders any overclocking of the RAM will be cooled off easily.
4gb of DDR3 should work wonders
A new Gigabyte GA-H67Z-UD3H (I love how that just rolls off the tongue) motherboard found it's way into our hands. This board didn't support SLi but we didn't need it. All we needed was a board that would support 2 GPU's to handle the four 24in 1080p monitors that he was using, I'll get to that later on.
This Gigabyte board will suit us just fine
30gb of OCZ Vertex Series Sata II SSD goodness handled our boot times with a fresh install of Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit.
Who says you need a huge SSD to have fun?