Hey guys, apologies for the lack of posts recently. It seems that summer doesn’t help clear up my schedule, rather i have work now… so yeah.

Anyhow, I have come to give you an idea for a nice cheap hex core build. The budget? 1k. Purpose? This is mainly a build for multimedia, as that is the main purpose of the hex core, multitasking, encoding, video editing, and such. Usually, I prefer Intel, but hey, AMD does have a larger value for performance…. ^^. Remember, all prices are in Canadian, and are based from Newegg. Some of the prices may change over time from sales, and i haven’t added shipping. Anyways, here we go!

#Edit: I have posted this at both AllTechRelated and projectFight, so if you find it on both sites, please note that it is not copying, rather I have just decided to post this awesome thing on both sites.#

Motherboard: MSI 870A-G54

The MSI 870A-G54 is a fine choice for our needs. It includes all the latest features such as USB 3.0 and SATA 6GB/s. It has enough slots for expansions, and supports our Phenom II x6. Quite relatively inexpensive too.

Price: 109.99

CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1055T Thuban 2.8GHz

Well, there are 3 choices for your Phenom X6. The 1035T, the 1055T and the black edition 1090T. To be honest, I believe that the 1090T is quite pointless for spending the extra 100 dollars on. True, it has 400 more mhz of oohmf, and has an unlocked multiplier. But hey, it’s more of a challenge to overclock without the unlocked multiplier. Also, the 1055T can easily be pushed to 4.0ghz on stock cooling. Of course, if you want to dish out an extra 100, be my guest.

Price: 211.99

Case + PSU: Antec Sonata III 500 Black ATX Mid Tower with 500W PSU

The Antec Sonata is a wonderful case. It’s decent for our uses, with 4 internal hard drive slots, which is decent if you ever need to go RAID. You have a fine 120mm 3 speed control fan, that can balance quiet with cooling. There are 2 front USB drives for convenience, and best of all, it comes with a 500W PSU. Mighty fine for what we’re building. Nice price too.

Price: 124.99

RAM: 2X G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600

Since we’re mainly using this computer for multimedia, 8GB of RAM will be more than enough. G.Skill RAM is quite reliable, and cost effective. I don’t suppose there’s much to say about the RAM.

Price: 102.99 X2

GPU: MSI R5570-MD1G Radeon HD 5570 1GB

Since we’re not gaming, the 5570 is mighty fine for our purposes. It can support the new DirectX 11, and has 1GB of memory. Want something even better? Put off the graphics card for a few months, after all, the prices will change with the release of the new 6xxx series. It’s a fine budget card, and is certainly something to look forward to if you’re coming from the drab world of integrated graphics.

Price: 87.99

Cooler: ZALMAN CNPS9700 LED 110mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler

If you plan on overclocking, you’re going to need something better than that stock fan. If you know AMD, the fan that comes with it is loud. LOUD. What you want is a combination of efficiency and silence. This is the cooler that is the perfect hybrid. At 1250RPM, it is whisper silent at only 19dB. It’s not all that expensive either.

Price: 44.99

HDD: Western Digital Caviar Black WD1501FASS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″

If you’re working with multimedia, surely you will need a lot of space. This Western Digital HDD gives you 1.5TB of room, mighty fine. It has a 64 MB Cache, and has a spin rate of 7200RPM. Best of all, it’s a great price for a great amount of storage.

Price: 109.99

Optical: LG DVD OEM

There isn’t much to say about the drive. It’s cheap. It works. Why not Blu-Ray? Well, with all the new 3D drives coming out, it’s best to wait. Can’t wait? Go ahead.

Price: 22.99

Grand Total: 918.91.

Wow, that was a lot less expensive than I thought. Is it just me or is that the same price of a 980x? Anyhow, I suppose once you add shipping and taxes (I love living in Alberta, no HST ^^, sucks to be you in Vancouver and Ontario) it will be somewhere around 1000. If you really want to, you can spend another 100 on a graphics card, and perhaps get yourself a 5770 or such. So, here are the overall system specs (considering that you haven’t oc’d anything)

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Phenom ii x6 T1055 – 2.8GHZ

8 GB DDR3 1600 Dual Channel RAM

1.5 TB Storage Space

1 GB Radeon 5570

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Thanks for reading, Happy Building,

- gammaraptor-

Recently, I had a friend that wanted to purchase a GTS 250 graphics card at Future Shop. Which model you may ask? The 1 GB Model. What was the regular price? 149 dollars. What the heck happened? According to my friend, they had priced it wrong, and it was 49 dollars. Sadly for Future Shop, they had a policy where if the price is wrong, the customer gets the product at that price. What ended up happening was my friend decided to buy two because the price was so good. I kind of envy the cheap deal, but I don’t have a computer with a PCI x16 port anyways… Although I feel a bit sorry for the guy who priced the thing, I guess that Future Shop should really think about the policy before they make one like this. Oh well. All we asian kids care about is getting the stuff cheap =]. I think that just changing the price tag at one of these stores would be a lot more effective then breaking in….. I’m just saying… Hope I’m not getting any bad ideas into your head.

- Happy Shopping! -

- gammaraptor -

Recently, there have been many lawsuits filed against Apple. Apparently there have been problems with the iPhone’s reception. Apparently this is due to the integrated antenna in the structure of the iPhone. The reception is then affected by the way the user holds it. The solution? Steve Jobs is telling users to hold it differently. This is what does the tech team says. “avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases”. And apparently the users don’t like cases either, because it apparently “ruins the sleek look”.

My opinion? Suing is a bit extreme, but hey, you bought the phone, you want it to work.

- Have fun with that uh…. lawsuit -

- gammaraptor -

203 Hardcore gamers set the new Guinness World Record for the longest continuous LAN party by playing games for 36 straight hours!

Source: Guinness World Records

Hmmm…. Only 36 hours? I thought it was at least 70 hours or something. I’m pretty sure I could beat that, of course, I would need a lot of caffeine pills, and a lot of aspirin for headaches from motion sickness. Not to mention a lot of food, and a modified toilet chair. I think I’d need a lot of power bars, and room in my house too. Hey, at least it’s better than going for the largest LAN party ever, and i’m pretty sure that was over 9000 people. Oh yeah, it was DreamHack. Counter Strike anyone?

Happy Gaming!

-gammaraptor-

Recently, Adobe found several exploits in Flash. It was almost on cue. Adobe quickly fixed the problems, and released 10.1. Adobe is urging people to upgrade, even though it’s just a “point number”. Flash has been a favorite for hackers to exploit various systems. This reminds me exactly of what Steve Jobs said about why he refused to include Flash in the iPhone and the iPad. I bet Jobs is going “I told you so” right now. It’s a bit sad that flash will eventually be succeeded by HTML5. So, Flash users out there. Get upgrading.

Happy upgrading!

-gammaraptor-

If you have lots of time, lots of patience, and the know-how, you can build your very own linux distro! Linux From Scratch is a book written by Gerard Beekmans, that teaches you how to do just that. Oh no! A book! Do you have to pay for it? No. You can find the book on the linuxfromscratch site. How much work do you have to put into it? That depends. If you use the live-cd, not as much. But it’s quite important to know how linux works, otherwise you won’t really be able to learn anything or develop your operating system after you’re done. You have to be dedicated, and committed for it to work.
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Well, the iPad does have more functions than just surfing, music, the “larger iPod Touch” function kind of thing. I thought up of ten other functions for the iPad. Please note, don’t actually try any of these, in case you do, ProjectFight is not responsible for damages to property, self, ect.
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