@Draug
" It has a rotating multi touch screen that makes it a table when closed and a laptop with keyboard and button mouse (I don't recall if it had a glidepoint style mouse) when opened. "

I have the Thinkpad X201 Tablet, which converts between a traditional laptop and a tablet. I love it. As a laptop it's great. As a tablet, it's shit. *However*, with a stylus, it is amazing for taking notes, especially in classes with a lot of figures and diagram. It doesn't weight that much. For a tablet, it's a bit heavy, but I use it almost exclusively as a laptop, save for when I'm taking notes or writing.

With that being said, I can't get any of the Touch to work on Ubuntu, so it's a good thing I kept my Win7 partition : )

Hey computer people who know more than me out there. Think it is worth it to buy an SSD for my system? I can get a 120GB one for less than 200$

THat has a read speed of 550 mbps and write of 510mbps

@D33

For a laptop, it depends on what is more important:

Cost, Storage Space --> Magnetic
Battery Life, Weight --> SSD

For a Desktop, a SSD seems rather silly. The only benefit you get is marginally better read/write times under some circumstances.

abg, draugnar, anything?

Its going to be a desktop. I do like the idea of an SSD but wonder if it is really worth it. you can get a 2 TB HDD for the cost of a 120 GB SSD. I may get a small SSD like a 32 GB for boot up and a HDD for other data.

@D33

Please use "B" for byte. "b" means bit.

A Seagate Barracuda has R/W speeds of around 100MB/s. So, on paper the SSD is around 5x as fast, but in reality, you won't always be getting that speed. More importantly, there are other bottlenecks in the computer that will limit data transfer. I doubt you'll ever notice the difference. It will be a waste of money.

You could get a SSD just for the OS partition. You may notice a little performance boost, but still probably not worth the $$$. Plus, I don't know about you, but I rarely turn my desktop off, so boot time isn't really an issue.

I would likely have too, my parents don't like me leaving on computers all night. I did use B. And that is what I am thinking about doing. I am trying to keep the total build cost including monitor and keyboard under 1500 and hard drive may be an area to shave off an extra 25 bucks.

I am also still on the fence about doing the actual building or custom ordering because I haven't done actual building myself but it doesn't seem that bad. At least the help articles say so.

"I did use B." No, you said "mbps".

You could put your computer to sleep, which requires almost no power, but will "boot" back instantly.

What timeframe do you have for building this?

Will try and do so after Christmas when I get money and after I sell my old laptop and such to afford it.

What do you think about doing the actual building myself?

All the custom ordering operators say how hard it is but they want me to buy so they might be lying.

I think it's a great idea. A lot of fun and a good skill to have.

It would be better if you had practiced on older machines that you don't need to worry about breaking, but building a box is actually very simple. You just need a little knowledge and basic motor skills.

We have an old early 2000s desktop sitting in the attic that is unused. Maybe for practice... Is a liquid cooling system worth it either.

They're lying. It's very easy to do.

I've fully built 5 machines and done serious mods to 5 more. If the parts were in front of me, I could fully build a box in under 1/2 hour.

No.

Let me stress this:


NO!

Do *not* get liquid cooling. It is:
1) Unnecessary
2) Expensive
3) A Pain in the ass

What makes you say that? Do you have experience with it?

And are there any air cooled systems that can cool an 8 core CPU?

I've never used one, but I've read a lot about them and I've talked to people who've used them.

The first thing is that they aren't needed. At all. A proper fan and thermal paste will cool any CPU. That is enough reason not to get it.

But, if that isn't enough, they're a royal pain in the ass. Think about it: you have liquid all in your computer. It's expensive (because it has to be a dielectric), it gets all of your components super gross (you'll never be able to clean them) and it's impossible to move it without completely tearing it apart.

Yes. It's not that hard to cool an 8-core CPU. They don't run that hot. Just get good thermal paste (by Rosewill/Arctic Silver) and a decent CPU Fan/heatsink (I can link you to some).

Then, just pace a couple fans in the case to you get proper air flow and you'll be fine.

"We have an old early 2000s desktop sitting in the attic that is unused. "

Good. Open it up and take everything out and see if you can put it all back together.

The I will try doing so. You might have saved me 200 bucks with part advice. Though SSDs i must say don't need defrags, which can be annoying at times. Especially when trying to keep the family desktop's pre-SATA hard drive alive.

I have to do all the family tech. And fixing. My brother recently disabled the antivirus and let 4 viruses in. :( Took a long time to fix that.

Defraging is a waste of time, imho. You end up doing more damage to the drive and HDDs are so big, you don't really get anything out of the extra space.

One defrag a year is probably more than enough.

Since you already made some recommendations I also want to use a Sabertooth 990X motherboard ready for the USB 3.0 movement and an AMD Radion HD 6950 2GB DDR5 Graphics card. What are your thoughts on those?

When the family drive is 60 GB and pre SATA it is almost needed just to keep it working