A friend sent me towards here: http://www.portatech.com/products/product.cshtml?id=83688&o=74761%2C70312

And looking at the options, I'd probably go with the APU A10-7850K, though is it worth the $20 to go up .2Ghz?

ASRock FM2A88M Extreme4 as the second option, no reason not to go ahead with getting a nice large chunk of RAM, right?

For the cooling fans, I already have 2 case fans, so I should just be able to go with the upgraded cpu fan, right?

I'd opted for the 8GB single stick of RAM, which gives me a chance later to buy more RAM as I can afford to, while starting out nicely anyways.

I have no need for OS, optical, hdd, or a case.

I was thinking a 600W power supply should be good to handle the board, 2 SATA optical drives, and 2 HDDs, right? Also looking at getting the nVidia Geforce GT630 - 2GB video card.

I'm curious of your thoughts on this particular setup, or if you might have suggestions of an equally powerful setup for roughly the same or even less money?

I'd like to have this set up so I don't have to worry about upgrading things for another 5 years and still be able to do what I want, which is programming, watching movies, and playing video games without lag.

* AMD processors have decent price / performance ratio, but they surrendered performance to Intel back in 2006, when the Core series came out. In 5 years, an A10 should remain alright for desktop usage, though.

* a single stick of RAM is bad for memory bandwidth, which has significant impact on some algorithms. Better using 2 x 4 GB sticks than 1 x 8 GB stick, and a motherboard with 4 RAM slots, so that you can upgrade to 4 x 4 GB if necessary.

* the GT630 is a pretty low-end card. You could do more GPU and GPGPU usage with even a 650, which isn't much more expensive than a 630. A 660 or 670 would buy you maybe another year.
An already fairly large, and growing, number of algorithms can be implemented on GPUs ("GPGPU") far more efficiently than the best CPUs can yield; what in 5 years from now ?

Precisely this. Forcing data through one RAM module is not ideal. I can't really think of a system that has one stick of RAM these days. The more RAM modules you use the better off you'll be. If you have four RAM slots on your Mobo and want 8GB but I would go with 4x2GB or, as Lionel said 2x4GB and eventually upgrade to 4x4GB.



RAM is awesome for making things previously open, open faster. Think of it as an SSD. When you open a document it opens into RAM and when you save the file gets written back to the HDD but doesn't leave RAM. When you close that file, it doesn't necessarily leave RAM. So, if you happen to open it again it loads immediately. Now, if you have a file open a massive 2GB file then the unused but active portions of RAM get swapped out. When files get swapped out, the HDD becomes a temporary hold area for things in RAM. If you use a lot of swap, I'd consider upgrading your RAM. One thing that can cause swap to occur would be textures in video games.



CPU Speed doesn't really effect much when you're playing games compared to the GPU. The CPU is important if you're doing a bunch of video encoding (or CPU intensive tasks) then the extra .2Ghz will be more beneficial but you're not going to see video encoding take significantly less time. It might be a matter of seconds or minutes. For comparison I believe I can transcode a 2 hour long 1080p video in about 40 minutes (mkv -> mp4) and I have a Quad Core 2.0Ghz. It's been a while since I've transcoded something but I'll certainly get back to you when I do so again.

Honestly, I would go with the extra 0.2Ghz just to future proof my rig just a tad bit longer.

4 x 2 GB RAM sticks is great for bandwidth in the short and mid term indeed, but it will require changing all sticks when upgrading from 8 GB to 16 GB.

FWIW, I basically stopped using swap, unless I was running peculiar workloads (a couple Number Field Sieve post-processing jobs, before I got access to computers with 4 GB of RAM), when I got a computer with 2 GB of RAM, in September 2007.
Nowadays, my computers (personal and work) have 4 or 8 GB of RAM, I have access to two computers equipped with 16 GB of RAM, and I simply don't use swap anymore, all the more all of those computers are running Linux.
For computers running Win 7 or 8, I think 4 GB of RAM warrants swap allocation (AFAICS on my Win 7 VM at work, it's unhappy below 2 GB of RAM...), but with 8 GB of RAM and more, I'm less convinced that even Windows needs swap.

I find it useful to have at least some amount of swap on my machines, but more than a few gigs is probably overkill. Certainly it's not really worth worrying about how fast your swap device is unless you have a very small amount of memory, and the old rule of "twice as much swap as physical memory" is completely excessive nowadays.
I wrote about the reasons for this approach in some depth a while ago.

Anyway, I'd say 8GB of memory is plenty for most workloads, and I'd personally implement it with 2x4GB sticks.

Well, I was going to get another 8gb within 2 months of getting this setup, just would need a couple of months to knock the debt back off the card :p

So, anyone else have recommendations on motherboard combos that I might look into?

I'm not sure how Windows behaves, but I've found on Linux also that the more swap you have, the longer it takes the system to recover when a buggy program decides to eat all available RAM in an infinite loop (something which I've encountered more than a few times, usually before I even have a chance to take action before the system's gone). Several GB of swap might yield a frozen, thrashing system for hours if not days before OOM kill finally happens. Setting up an appropriate per-process rss limit in cgroups or /etc/security/limits.conf seems to really help here.

With 12 GB of RAM, Linux's default swapping policy also seems too aggressive for me; I found tweaking vfs_cache_pressure and cranking swappiness way down necessary to avoid too much code getting evicted in favor of disk cache and actually making my desktop *less* responsive. I have 5 GB of swap, which is probably way too much already (right now, I'm using about 0.01 GB of it ).

My netbook only has 1 GB of RAM and could actually use swap (to avoid unwanted OOM kills when I happen to load one of those newfangled bloated JavaScript pages, for instance), but there's not enough room on that crummy 4GB SSD. (Tried putting swap on an SD card/USB stick once, but that caused panics on suspend wake-up because it apparently doesn't reconnect the device early enough.)

But I'm going way off-topic.

Whatever combo you get, be sure to double-check the CPU compatibility with the BIOS version. Last summer I made the mistake of assuming a certain popular retailer only sold combos that were ready to use out-of-the-box. It was only after I tried to boot that I found out that the CPU was a BIOS upgrade away from being usable. @__@

So, a few things I'd like to comment on.

For one, if you are planning to get a dedicated GFX card, I would not go with an APU, since the APU is essentially a processor with a graphics card built in.

I'd scrap the A10, which by itself is about 170, and go with a AMD FX-6350 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113327

It is a bit cheaper and you aren't paying for the inbult graphics unit you won't use anyhow because of the video card.

As for the video card, if you want to continue going nvidia, I agree with Lionel, the one you wrote about is really weak, especially with the price it is at and the fact that it is out of stock. Go with something like the GeForce GT 640, or the GT 650, both of which seem to be a bit more than the 630, but it is worth the extra 30 bucks for that much more power.

However, if you wanted to go AMD with the video card, to match the processor, I would go with the Radeon HD 7770, which is priced the same as the 640, but is tied in terms of performance with the 650, it is a fantastic card that can run pretty a lot of games at decent settings with decent FPS. I personally have not yet met a game I have needed to use "low" graphics for with this card.

I would pick this particular motherboard with the processor that I posted above, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131872

As for the fans, 2 should be fine as long as airflow is, well, flowing.

If it isn't too late on the 8GB RAM, go with 2 sticks of 4GB and use that. If not, it probably won't be a real problem, so don't worry about it too much.

Finally, the 600W PSU should be fine, in fact it could be more than you need, but stick with it anyways, you never know what upgrades might lie in the future.

I haven't purchased anything yet, as no one had really offered up any alternatives. Got any links to decent PSUs and video cards you'd recommend going with?

And my idea with the 8gb was to get 1 stick for the short term, give me a couple of months to pay off what I put on the card, and then get the second 8GB card. Would be nice to not have Chrome/Fx steal all the RAM, since for whatever reason they like to eat it in huge heaps. :/

I have no specific wants on brands, as I'm not 100% how good any of them truly are. So offer away, if you don't mind, on them links

Ah, alrighty then. So as long as you're planning to do dual channel on the RAM, then that's fine.


So here is a list of the parts I would recommend based on your post

Processor

Motherboard

The processor and motherboard here are pretty much the same as that APU and mobo combo you posted above, but you'll get way more performance out of it because it won't have the useless APU GPU that you won't use and are mainly paying for if you went for the APU Mobo combo.

RAM (just buy a second one down the line)

Video card I recommend


1GB version of the card that is a lot cheaper. Recommended as well if you don't want the 2GB version

It should definitely not affect performance to get the 1GB version unless you want to go to some crazy high resolutions


This is the PSU you should get. It is nice and modular which helps with temperatures and keeping things neat.

If there is any questions or anything that should be changed, or anything I missed, let me know.

Going to be looking into this again, since prices are supposed to be a bit cheaper today, right? Hopefully so.

So I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on components for building a computer for today that one could get for a good price? Looking to get a quad core system going with a minimum of 8GB of RAM, minimum 1gb video card that can handle 2 monitors, psu, and possibly a good cooling system for it. I think that's part of what took down my older system, besides the age.

Prices should be lower in late December / early January (right after Christmas), shouldn't they ?

I thought electronics were reduced in prices on Cyber Monday, but I could be wrong on that. :<

It sounds like you already have a pretty reasonable idea of what you want in that build to me. Don't worry too much about cooling; stock cooling is good enough for pretty much all i5s and i7s unless you're getting into crazy overclocking, which is unnecessary for what you're describing. If you do go for 8GB of RAM, make sure it's at most two sticks of 4GB each so you leave two slots open for the future.

You're correct, Cyber Monday is usually a good time to shop for electronics. NewEgg, for instance, has brought all of their Black Friday sales back, plus a few more.