Thanks for all the replies everyone. Once again, you have all been extremely helpful.
I'm actually planning on building two new (mostly) identical computers. My son is getting old enough that he's not happy with gaming on his really old computer, and I'm not terribly happy with what I currently have. Since I'm splitting my budget for two separate computers this time, I really need to save a lot of money.
My budget is about $800 for both machines. I can re-use a lot of stuff from current computers (PSUs, optical drives, hard drives, video cards), so I can save a lot of money that way. I pretty much only need to buy two new cases (I don't want to re-use old cases), two new motherboards, two new CPUs, and two new sets of RAM.
My expectations for these systems aren't very high - I'm really only looking to build a couple of computers that have at least dual-core CPUs and 8GB of RAM. More would be better of course. If I can get decent Diablo 3 performance, I'll be happy.
One sticking point is that I also want to include the price of two copies of Windows in my budget.
edit: I totally forgot to address the case size issue! In short, I would actually prefer bigger cases. I'm not looking for a small footprint and bigger cases are easier to work with.
(12-08-2012, 05:42 PM)Lissa Wrote: If you are planning to get a new MB along with case, let me know and I can suggest a couple things (because of my looking to shrink footprint of my machines).
I'm actually planning on building two new (mostly) identical computers. My son is getting old enough that he's not happy with gaming on his really old computer, and I'm not terribly happy with what I currently have. Since I'm splitting my budget for two separate computers this time, I really need to save a lot of money.
My budget is about $800 for both machines. I can re-use a lot of stuff from current computers (PSUs, optical drives, hard drives, video cards), so I can save a lot of money that way. I pretty much only need to buy two new cases (I don't want to re-use old cases), two new motherboards, two new CPUs, and two new sets of RAM.
My expectations for these systems aren't very high - I'm really only looking to build a couple of computers that have at least dual-core CPUs and 8GB of RAM. More would be better of course. If I can get decent Diablo 3 performance, I'll be happy.
One sticking point is that I also want to include the price of two copies of Windows in my budget.
edit: I totally forgot to address the case size issue! In short, I would actually prefer bigger cases. I'm not looking for a small footprint and bigger cases are easier to work with.