For a shade over $500 AUD, I've got a Core i7 2600, Gigabyte HA65M-UD3H (gonna get it changed to a HA67M-UD3H since I can't fully populate all 4 RAM slots with common Double-Sided 4GB RAM chips as Giggle-bit wants you to use either 8GB Double-Sided chips or 4GB Single-Sided, both of which are impossible to find here, and the guy who sold me the board didn't know about the DS/SS fun and games of Giggle-bit at the time whilst his boss keeps spouting "but it's common knowledge" and won't admit there's a problem with their advertising and not informing the consumer of any possible issues) and a Transcend 4GB DDR3 (1333MHz) RAM chip.
That is the three core pieces (mobo, CPU, RAM) you need to have the start of a working gaming machine for less than a quarter of what it'd cost me to buy a pre-built system with 7Home (maybe 7Pro if I paid for the upgrade) or an Apple Machintosh (I seriously hate pre-builds that put all the parts in the same damn chassis as the fucking main monitor. {Snark}Thank you{/Snark} fucking eMacs!) that uses last-gen parts that I easily out-class by getting the parts myself.
Oh, back on topic? Linux/Windows bitches. Linux for all my general usage and Windows for my heavy-duty gaming.
That is the three core pieces (mobo, CPU, RAM) you need to have the start of a working gaming machine for less than a quarter of what it'd cost me to buy a pre-built system with 7Home (maybe 7Pro if I paid for the upgrade) or an Apple Machintosh (I seriously hate pre-builds that put all the parts in the same damn chassis as the fucking main monitor. {Snark}Thank you{/Snark} fucking eMacs!) that uses last-gen parts that I easily out-class by getting the parts myself.
Oh, back on topic? Linux/Windows bitches. Linux for all my general usage and Windows for my heavy-duty gaming.