madmat

Yeah man, brick and mortar PC shops are great if you just have to have the part that day but for something that's not critical you just can't beat buying online. Oh, yeah just so you know, I'm not anti-Seagate, I've got three 7200.9 500 gigs in my PC now but without looking into one their drives enough to be certain it's indeed a Seagate built drive rather than a Maxtor rebadged as Seagate I can't just give them a blanket thumbs up. Sucks you've had so much distress from WD. FYI on buying a WD drive, should you ever get another, if you buy retail boxed drives you get all of one year warranty on it. If it's OEM (bagged or white box) it'll have three years for non-enterprise drives and five for enterprise class drives.

Actually the VX750W has four 6+2 PCI-e connectors. It'll SLI anything in dual card SLI you care to throw at it. I know this, I co-wrote this review.

XION = the poof! It's based on a very over-rated Sunbeamtech (oops, SuperFlower) design that doesn't like cross loads at all. The VX750W from Corsair is based on a CWT design and will do rated wattage easily, tollerates cross loads well and is conservatively rated. FWIW, I've got two WD SATA 160's from 2003 that haven't given me a bit of trouble aside from having fragile SATA data connectors. Although, they've beefed up their port design quite a bit since then. After Seagate bought Maxtor and relabeled Maxtor drives as Seagates, I have a hard time recommending them.

Big step up? Dude, you'll need a seatbelt on your computer chair!

Should be pretty kickass. The Intel's are better procs but for your budget you've got a very good overall PC. It'll game well and do all the other mundane day-to-day tasks you throw at it.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16814127361 $239 with $40MIR. Later you can get another and run SLI since, ya know, you've got the SLI mobo.

Look into a Corsair VX750W PSU. The same price as that XION and far, far better. But, yeah, the rest is fine.

Are you planning to OC? I'd get a better PSU. Also are you going to run a 64 bit OS? If you don't plan to OC you can get the Windsor core 6000 with twice the L2 cache for a couple of bucks less. The extra L2 can help. The Xion PSU is okay but it's not the best for the cash. As to the 64 bit OS... if you're running a 32 bit OS you can't use more than 3 gigs (total, this includes VRAM) of any ram so the four gig kit is kind of overkill. On the other hand, a 64 bit OS will support up to 128 gigs (IIRC) so yeah, four gigs will work. Although, if it were me I'd just go for dual 2 gig sticks rather than four 1 gig sticks. No upgrade path with quad sticks.

That sub looks lost in that box

Drew's a great guy and I'd definitely do business with him again. w00t!