£1K build, a few questions

~lynks · 27 Mar 2012 at 19:32

Total Cost of £927.83

I have a budged of £1,000 and already own a decent keyboard and monitor.

I run Linux 99% of the time (working from home writing software) but would like to be able to boot Windows for BF3 and such like.

If anyone could help me to answer some of these questions, that would be really helpful;

Are any of those components way ahead/behind the general build? In other words, is there one component that will drag it down, or one component that I could easily downgrade without a performance loss?
I've gone AM3, because it's so much cheaper than getting a socket 2011 system, and I still end up with a 'top-tier' socket with tons of upgrade room. All the bad-press bulldozer gets worries me though - am I going to have a terrible time with this CPU?
Have I made any dumb mistakes in matching components up? Memory type, PSU power etc, I'm never totally sure.
The SSD I have thrown in because 256GB is enough for me, and frankly HDDs are so expensive right now it feels justified. Is it justified vs a raid setup given a 1k budget?

As always, thanks a lot

~lynks · 27 Mar 2012 at 19:47

Thanks for the reply stulid,

This is what I mean really; everyone seems to rate the 2500K so highly. Would it really outperform my build above? And would you personally not worry that you're locked into upgrading the CPU, Mobo and Memory all at once? I liked the idea of hopping up to an 8-core bulldozer in a single component upgrade.

~lynks · 27 Mar 2012 at 20:03

Thats good to know, thanks stulid. I will reconsider the i5 build.

~lynks · 27 Mar 2012 at 20:22

Ahh, I was under the impression that 1155 was EoL and that 2011 was replacing it. I completely didn't realise that ivybridge architecture was going to contain 1155 sockets too. That makes a huge difference to me.