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Building my first PC $2000 budget advice needed please.
kildonalis
Member UncommonPosts: 34
Im looking for a system with dual Video cards upgradable to triple card support. I play alot of MMO's and RTS games. Wife will be using it for Photogrophy stuff. I will be using a single monitor LED 27".
For a Hard drive ill be going with a SDD
Ive always been a Nvidia user but have seen the Raedon cards seem to perform really well especially for cost. As far as processor I was thinking of the AMD x6 Black series but again I am usually a Intel guy but seems like I can get more cost wise out of the AMD chip set but I may be wrong. Also a motherboard recomendation for this setup would be appreciated as well.
Also ive seen these I7 Turbo charged CPU's on Ebay for a really good price anyone familar with them at all and know if they are reliable or worth it? Seem to perform with the extreme versions or even better.
For a case im gonna go with the Cool Master HAF-X I like the look and design. With this case I wouldnt need to worry about cooling systems or should I? I was gonna load it up on fans seems alot cheaper than the liquid cooling systems ive seen.
No idea what I would need Powersupply wise as far as watts go for a system like this.
For memory Im looking at going 8gb 1600 DDR3 do I need more or is 8gb fine? Ill be running windows 7 Home premium 64-bit.
Going to go with a single Bluray drive.
Will have a sperate HD for her photo stuff.
A basic sound card. Also Ive seen some network cards say gaming and seem to cost way more but I know alot of companys label things to get money even though you dont getmore performance any reccomendation on this would be appreciated as well.
Thank you in advance for you help Ive been thinking of building a comp for many years Ive decided to make it happen this year.
Comments
There are not many MMOs that utilize dual GPU setups well enough to justify the cost. Honestly I wouldn't bother w/ a multi-gpu setup (on a budget) unless you are doing multi-monitor gaming. Just go with a GTX 580
8GB of DDR3 is more than enough. In all honesty, you probably won't see any improvement over 6GB.
Last time I checked the best bang for your buck on CPUs was the Intel 2600k and 2500k, but its been a couple months.
With that kind of cash to throw around have you thought about getting one built from somewhere like cyber power pc? or do you want the trill of building it yourself?
If your intent of building it yourself id say check out toms hardware for a couple of configurations but mmo's wont be able to push your system enough to justify the cost. cant say about rts's since i dont play them.
I could throw together an expensive build and say here you go but i wouldnt have expernence the products so i cant really help much, Sorry
I have looked at cyberpower alot of good prices on certain items but some parts are way over priced. As far as the dual card system wouldnt this increase my overall FPS? Wouldnt 2 mid range cards run better than one high end card? I do alot of raiding as well so trying to make that go smoother without giving up graphic quality if possible.
Thank you for the quick responses as well I appreciate it
Basically Kild, alot of mmo's and even alot of single player games wont use a dual graphics card setup - so if you have 2 mid range cards, alot of games will just recognize 1 card and not utilize the second, where if you had 1 high end card, it would be much more versatile.
Don't know about ATI cards but NVidia cards have a setup so if you do have 2 cards and not running in SLI mode it will use 1 for graphics and the 2nd card gets used for physics of some games.
Since your wife is gonna use it for pics you'll need a decent size HD for transfering from the camera to pc then burn to a cd/dvd. The SDD drive will help with the OS load time and any MMOs load times if you put it on that drive.
With that kind of budget, I would probably steer away from Ebay and go with a solid, reputable retailer with a known good return policy. I like Newegg, Amazon, and Tiger Direct myself: they may not be the lowest price, but they are consistently low, Newegg is really good about having stuff in stock, and all have decent return policies.
Quiz can probably link you exactly what to buy, I can give some general guidelines though:
The CPU you want to look for is called "Sandy Bridge". It's a Socket 1155 chip, and it's commonly called the Intel Core i7 2600 (or 2600k for the overclockable version). With your budget, there really isn't much reason to even look at AMD: their stuff is competitive price vs performance wise in the budget arena, but you have no issues with price with that budget, and the i7 has much better performance.
The tricky part is picking out the motherboard: If you are really wanting multi-GPU, that really narrows down the search on motherboards. You want to shop for a one with x16/x16 (or at least x8/x8) PCI lanes, and if your looking at triple cards, there are only a couple of options available for that at all.
Multi-GPU will also define your power supply: the size of your power supply will be largely determined by which video cards you get, and how many. You don't really want to just overkill on it (as that kills the efficiency of the power supply), but you do want a bit of margin to grow/expand/upgrade later on. For most people with a single high end video card, a 650W good quality power supply is a good fit.
You will want both an SSD (probably 120G or 250G in size, either a Crucial M4 or a OCZ Vertex 3) and a storage drive (1TB or larger WD Caviar Black, no reason to go with much else). The OS and your frequently used programs go on the SSD, all your bulk data (infrequently used programs, pictures, videos, MP3's, etc) go on the storage drive.
8G is fine for RAM. 1600 is a decent speed to shoot for on your budget. No real reason to pay for anything faster, as it has a minimal impact on real world performance.
Make sure you get the 64-bit edition of Windows.
A word about multi-GPU configurations:
Your budget can afford it. A single 27" monitor will not really benefit from it though, as a good single card will be more than fast enough to drive a 1080p 27" display with nearly every option in the world turned on as it is, so the extra GPU's just kinda sit there and eat power. Now maybe in a year or two games will come out that can use it, but in a year or two the next generation of video cards will be out as well... If you still want to do it, by all means, there are a few games out there that will let you tick up one or two extra options with SLI/Crossfire, but by and large you'd be hard pressed to notice it if you had to pick out the difference (other than one puts off a lot more heat and makes a lot more noise). It really only makes sense to SLI/Crossfire upper-tier cards so that you get more performance benefit out of it. If you get mid-tier cards, you can slave two of them together and get the same performance as a single card, but what's the point of that when the single card is cheaper, uses less power, requires fewer PCI slots, and yields the same performance? That would mean your looking at ATI 6900 series or the nVidia 570/580 cards, and to be truthful, a single card of any of those cards has more than enough horsepower to run a single display as it is. You really need to push 3 or 5 monitors (and that subsequent higher resolution) to really see the performance benefit of SLI/Crossfire.
Cooling systems: you won't need anything fancy. Make sure you get a decent enough aftermarket CPU cooler and the case has a couple of fans, and that's all you really need. Unless you overclock heavily nothing will stress out too badly on heat.
Sound: for most people, the onboard sound on motherboards is more than enough. If you are doing sensitive audio editing or are an audiophile, then look at a dedicated sound card.
Network: on-board motherboard ethernet is fine. Most motherboards do not come with WiFi (which isn't recommended for gaming in the first place). "Gaming" network cards are not worth the price, and can actually hurt your throughput in order to game a very few extra milliseconds off your ping time.
My opinion: stay far away from Raptor drives.
Performance-wise: for the same price, you can get SSD drives that have vastly better Random-I/O performance (what games and average computer users see most commonly)
Storage space-wise: for a fraction of the price you can get WD Caviar Black (or Green) drives with much larger capacities.
With SSDs, there really isn't much reason to look at Raptor anymore unless your doing a lot of sequential digital video editing (about the only thing that really benefits from the Raptor's faster sequential read/write times).
And you want to stay far away from RAID-0 with any hard drive configuration. It's dangerous.
My opinion: stay far away from Raptor drives.
Performance-wise: for the same price, you can get SSD drives that have vastly better Random-I/O performance (what games and average computer users see most commonly)
Storage space-wise: for a fraction of the price you can get WD Caviar Black (or Green) drives with much larger capacities.
With SSDs, there really isn't much reason to look at Raptor anymore unless your doing a lot of sequential digital video editing (about the only thing that really benefits from the Raptor's faster sequential read/write times).
And you want to stay far away from RAID-0 with any hard drive configuration. It's dangerous.
We will have to agree to disagree on these points. I've built both types and have to say the raptors are still superior. I do however keep a 1tb external drive and backup once a month. In two years I've never had to reload however. With the raptors going from 1.5gb transfer to 3gb now, testing has shown them to be a better value for storage space. On top of that I don't have to worry about which drive I have what software on as I always get top speed.You're better off building your own if you can. That lets you pick out every single part and make sure there aren't any cut corners anywhere.
For a processor, Thuban (Phenom II X6) only makes sense if you run programs that scale very well to six cores. If you're doing very heavy duty photo editing, then the program you use might qualify. Games certainly don't.
The best gaming processor on the market right now is Intel's Sandy Bridge, that is, Core i5 2500 and Core i7 2600. Or add a K on the end for an unlocked multiplier that you can overclock. The next best is Intel's older Lynnfield processors, which are the same price as Sandy Bridge and not as fast. And then there's Intel's Bloomfield and Gulftown processors, which are both more expensive and not as fast. Only after that do you get to any AMD processors. AMD is a good value option, as Intel charges over $200 for all of the above processors, while AMD can get you something that works nicely for $80. But on a $2000 budget, you can afford to spend $200 on a processor.
If you want to go nuts with a ton of processor cores, then you might want to wait for AMD's upcoming Zambezi processor. The top of the line 8-core variant is said to be priced at $320. That will be a lot faster than Thuban (or at least if it isn't, then AMD is in deep trouble), and likely competitive with Sandy Bridge quad cores in gaming performance. (The difference between 4 and 8 cores doesn't matter for games; per-core performance matters a lot, though.) Zambezi was supposed to launch at the start of June, but it's delayed because Global Foundries' new process node wasn't ready yet, and will probably launch in August.
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For what hardware you need to drive a monitor, inches don't matter. Pixels matter. There's quite a difference between a 1920x1080 monitor and a 2560x1600 monitor, even if they're both 27".
I'd advise against going with more than two GPUs on a single monitor. Neither AMD nor Nvidia have drivers for 3- and 4-way CrossFireX or SLI that are as good as either of them offer for 2-way CrossFire and SLI, let alone single cards. The extra performance from more than two GPUs simply isn't useful for a single monitor. What it's really for is driving Eyefinity displays where you spread a game across three or five monitors, and that takes a lot more graphical power than just one.
There's also the problem that motherboards tend not to have the PCI Express slots situated as would be ideal for three video cards. Two, yes, but not three. Furthermore, you want at least PCI Express 2.0 x8 bandwidth for each card. For a Sandy Bridge system, you can split the x16 link in the processor into two x8 links and it works. But you can't get three x8 connections out of a single x16 one, so you'd have to add another PCI Express chip like Nvidia's NF200, and that adds to the cost. For an AMD processor, this isn't a problem, as the 990FX chipset has all the PCI Express lanes you need and then some.
In addition, even if you buy two video cards today, it's very unlikely that you'll end up adding a third down the road. Rather, by the time the two video cards you get today aren't good enough, it will probably make more sense to replace them by newer cards than to try to track down what by then is a very obsolete card. For that matter, by the time you decide they aren't good enough, the most likely reason would be that they're missing features you want (e.g., DirectX 12 support, which doesn't yet exist), and adding a third older card wouldn't help with that at all.
Keeping the option to add a third card later isn't free, though. It could easily mean spending an extra $200 on the motherboard, case, and power supply, just to have an option that you probably won't use.
The modern video card options that you might want to consider are a GeForce GTX 560 Ti, Radeon HD 6950, GeForce GTX 570, Radeon HD 6970, and GeForce GTX 580. That's in increasing order of both performance and price tag. The 6950 is only a little better than the GTX 560 Ti, and the 6970 is only a little better than the GTX 570, but the other gaps are somewhat larger.
The GeForce GTX 580 is priced rather out of line with its performance. It only performs maybe 40% faster than a GeForce GTX 560 Ti, but costs twice as much. If you absolutely have to get the fastest GPU that you possibly can, then a GTX 580 is it. But it's priced as if to say, you really should consider a slightly slower card, or maybe two of them. The real reason for this is that most of the GF110 dies that come back from TSMC can't meet the GTX 580 specs, so Nvidia has to sell them as a lower bin, and with few GTX 580s available, they have to price them such that most people looking for a high end card will flinch at the price and get something else instead.
If you're using a 2560x1600 monitor, then you might want to grab video cards with 2 GB of system memory each. For 1920x1080, this isn't important, as 1 GB is enough for nearly everything.
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You should definitely get a good SSD on your budget. You seem to be aware of that. But not all SSDs are the same, and some are actually quite bad. One good option at current prices is this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233160
That's 107 GB of usable capacity.
If you're willing to pay a price premium for something faster, you could try this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148442
That's 119 GB of usable capacity. Will it be faster by enough for you to notice a difference? Compared to any hard drive, definitely. But comparing one SSD to the other, I don't think you'd notice a practical difference in performance.
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If you get a Sandy Bridge processor, then you want a socket LGA 1155 motherboard with a P67 chipset. For a 2-way CrossFire or SLI motherboard, any of these would be appropriate, depending on which brand you want to buy from:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131703
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128478
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130574
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157229
All else equal, I'd prefer to buy from either Asus or Gigabyte rather than MSI or AsRock. But all else is not equal, as you can tell from the price tags. MSI and AsRock make some pretty good products, too. I wouldn't buy a motherboard from a brand other than those four. Well, maybe Zotac if you're looking for a mini ITX form factor, which you aren't.
If you do go with an AMD motherboard, then try this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130604
When Zambezi was supposed to launch, AMD gave motherboard manufacturers the go-ahead to start selling motherboards for it. That will certainly support a Zambezi processor (which is what it's really meant for), and probably also next year's Komodo, and possibly beyond that. It's backward compatible to the older Phenom II and Athlon II processors already on the market.
Asus doesn't seem to have their (relatively) low end 990FX motherboard out yet. Gigabyte does, but they've got four PCI Express x16 slots, spaced all weird, it isn't clear which two are wired for x16 bandwidth, and I'm not willing to look it up myself.
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For a power supply, try this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817322011
That's Super Flower's gold platform, so it's very nice. If the lack of reviews scares you, then these two are the same thing:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817121076
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817116012
Now, that's plenty of power for two video cards. Well, maybe if you get two GTX 580s and heavily overclock the processor, that would be pushing it. But for two other video cards, or for everything at stock speeds, that's plenty of power. If you really want to be able to accommodate three video cards, then you'll need something a lot more expensive, like one of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139014
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371043
Those are really made by Flextronics and Delta, respectively.
That's an extra $120 merely to have the option to add a third video card later--and an option that you probably won't use. I say that's a waste of money.
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8 GB is plenty of memory unless you have some unusual needs. Actually, 4 GB is enough memory for the foreseeable future. But on your budget, you should probably get 8 GB just because it's cheap. If it only costs $60 to get 8 GB, then why not?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233144
DDR3, 1.5 V, 9-9-9-24 latency timings, so nothing wrong with the memory, either. 1600 MHz doesn't offer much advantage over 1333 MHz, but it's cheap enough, so why not? Above 1600 MHz memory is a waste of money.
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If you have a near-term use for a Blu-Ray player, such as wanting to watch Blu-Ray movies on your computer, then go ahead and get one. But don't just buy one thinking you might need it in the future. If Blu-Ray ever catches on for general computer use, it will be much cheaper then, and cheaper to buy both a DVD drive today and a Blu-Ray drive at that time than to get just a Blu-Ray drive today.
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Pulling a lot of power from the wall can mess with voltages. Have you considered what happens if the voltages that your power supply pulls from the wall get out of whack? Bad things, that's what. But you can protect yourself with an uninterruptible power supply, like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16842102048
If the power goes out briefly (e.g., enough to make your lights flash), it will keep the computer running as though nothing had happened. If you lose power for an extended period of time, it will keep it running long enough for you to shut down what you were doing and turn the computer off properly. If reliability is important to you, or if you live in an area without a terribly stable electricity supply, then a UPS can be very nice to have. It's not for everyone, due to the price tag. But I thought I'd bring it up.
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A Cooler Master HAF X is a nice case. But so is a HAF 932, which is the next step down in that line. It's a lot cheaper, too, and still has plenty of airflow for anything that you might plausibly do:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119160
If you love the HAF X, then go ahead. You've got the budget to fit things like that. But I thought I should point it out.
My plan is to go SSD for windows and game im playing at the time. I will have a 1tb or higher for storage and her stuff.
So I had no clue about the dual cards I always thought it was much better thank you for opening my eyes on that. This is the card im looking at
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=6936558&CatId=3669
Now for the I7 cores I noticed the 6 cores cost double the Quad core. Is it really even worth the cost difference versus performance difference?
Six core
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=6524805&CatId=4072
Quad Core
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=7073159&CatId=6989
Thank you all again for your help
Since everything was more less said above, i will just summarise it:
Go with quality, not quantity.
Don't try to have the most cores and the most graphics cards, it simply won't work. Go with a sandy bridge as suggested before, and with 1 very good graphics card. This will allow you to have the most choice in motherboards and allow you to chose one that will really affect your performance by having everything communicate well.
My opinion: stay far away from Raptor drives.
Performance-wise: for the same price, you can get SSD drives that have vastly better Random-I/O performance (what games and average computer users see most commonly)
Storage space-wise: for a fraction of the price you can get WD Caviar Black (or Green) drives with much larger capacities.
With SSDs, there really isn't much reason to look at Raptor anymore unless your doing a lot of sequential digital video editing (about the only thing that really benefits from the Raptor's faster sequential read/write times).
And you want to stay far away from RAID-0 with any hard drive configuration. It's dangerous.
We will have to agree to disagree on these points. I've built both types and have to say the raptors are still superior. I do however keep a 1tb external drive and backup once a month. In two years I've never had to reload however. With the raptors going from 1.5gb transfer to 3gb now, testing has shown them to be a better value for storage space. On top of that I don't have to worry about which drive I have what software on as I always get top speed.
I do have to update this however. After typing this I went to new egg and realized technology has passed me by again. The sata speed is now doubled again to 6gb transfer and a single 600 gb raptor is now less than two 300 gb. My point anyway is not to undervalue the hard drive and transfer speed to your motherboard. Besides the video card, it can have the biggest single performance boost for gaming and often overlooked. Either of these solutions would work well.Plenty of good advice on the components of the PC you want to build in this thread however I would have to recommend Antec's Dark Fleet series of cases for your computer. They provide a large amount of air flow, look great, and also have filters on the intake fans which keeps all your components nearly dust free which in turn allows them to operate at their full potential. A few of these cases can be found on newegg http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007583%2050001516&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&SrchInDesc=DF&Page=1&PageSize=20
TSW - Daemon Server
Waiting on Camelot Unchained!
I don't think you realize how much you date your advice in that first post. The transition to SATA 2 (SATA 3 Gb/s) was a long time ago. In fact, it was so long ago that it has since been replaced by SATA 3 (SATA 6 Gb/s). AMD's chipsets all up and down their line are purely SATA 3 now, except for some old ones that motherboard manufacturers keep using on low end boards because they're cheap. Even the Brazos netbooks are all SATA 3. Intel has been rather slower to move to SATA 3, and they paid dearly for it when they tried to get too fancy with both SATA 2 and SATA 3 controllers in Cougar Point chipsets, when the SATA 2 controller ended up being defective.
Even Raptors themselves have long since been replaced. Western Digital calls their newer versions VelociRaptors. But even those are woefully obsolete. Check here for example:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3681/oczs-vertex-2-special-sauce-sf1200-reviewed/6
The VelociRaptor doesn't merely lose to good SSDs. It loses by about two orders of magnitude in cases where hard drives are slow. Putting a bunch of them in RAID 0 barely makes a dent in that. Actually, for random reads, it probably doesn't make a dent at all, as that doesn't scale well with RAID, especially at low queue depths. For sequential transfer speeds, it's more competitive, and the VelociRaptor would manage maybe 1/3 of the speed of the faster SSDs. But sequential transfer speeds don't matter, as everything is fast at that, except for some external devices like USB flash drives or USB 2.0 external hard drives.
It's not just six cores versus four. It's six slower cores versus four faster cores. The four cores will win unless you're running programs that can really push all six cores.
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The only real argument in favor of a GeForce GTX 580 is if you want the fastest performance that you can possibly get while avoiding SLI and CrossFire, and are willing to pay dearly for that performance. Most of the time, a pair of Radeon HD 6950s in CrossFire or GeForce GTX 560 Tis in SLI will handily beat a single GeForce GTX 580 in performance. The GTX 580 really only wins if CrossFire and SLI flatly fail to work properly. Those three setups all cost about the same price, too.
This is the monitor im planning on using
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0359893
The wife does alot of photo editing with photo shop will be her primary use.
As far as video cards go it sounds like you dont reccomend the 580 one but maybe the one below due to cost vrs performace. And for my previous question you actualy answered that in your post before as far as the different I7 cores.
Which video card would you recomend to use with that monitor and cpu as well as motherboard. I prefer Asus products if possible.
Thank you
Thank you for pointing that out I like the look of those cases alot.
I daresay you can save yourself a lot of trouble and cash and get one 570 card. It will be enough to run pretty much anything.
Generally, find a case you like and put in with what Quizzical suggests there.
That's only 1920x1080, so you could do that on a single card if so inclined. If you want to get two cards to make sure that graphical performance won't hold you back at all, you could on your budget. But it will be a while before that sort of performance is really necessary at 1920x1080.
A single GeForce GTX 570 or Radeon HD 6970 will get you about 85% of the performance of a GeForce GTX 580, but at 60%-70% of the price tag. That makes a GTX 580 not a terribly good value for the money.
I should probably add that rumors say that AMD's next generation of video cards could realistically launch as soon as September. That's a full node die shrink, and TSMC is promising 45% better performance for the same power consumption as on their older 40 nm bulk silicon process. If you're inclined to wait, then you should be warned that "could realistically launch as soon as September" is not at all the same thing as "will definitely launch in September". It's more along the lines of "will launch either in September or when TSMC has the process node ready, whichever is later". Of course, TSMC was supposed to have the process node ready last year, and that didn't happen.
If you decide to go with only one video card, then you can save some money by going with a smaller case, cheaper motherboard, and weaker power supply, since there's no need to accommodate two cards. That can save you $100 or so right there, not counting the cost of the second video card.
It's really a question of budget and desired performance level, that is, how willing you are to turn down graphical settings. If you insist on 8x SSAA and all of the fancy lighting settings turned on, then that takes a lot more powerful video hardware to keep things playable than if you're willing to accept 4x MSAA and turning off things like shadows, depth of field, and SSAO. A $100 card can run pretty much any game on the market smoothly. It's just a question of at what settings.
I like to play in max settings with everything turned on. this 2k is strictly for the computer I have set aside so I dont need to lower it but at the sametime I dont want to waste money either. I would like to build something that has a great upgrade potential in the future. The biggest thing is by saving on the video card it does let me put money into other parts as well. Are the digital cooling system monitor/controllers worth the money as well? With a single card system do I even need to worry about anthing like that anyways?
HOWEVER, IF you can save $ on your build, you can MAYBE upgrade your monitor to that sweet 2560x1600 resolution:) there is building a machine, and there is building the nicest possible machine for your overall budget
as for cooling monitor/controller.... if a system is built right, there is NO reason to keep tabs on the thermal solution.(except cleaning out your airfilters once a month and making sure your fans are still spinning:D all those digital readout etc about fan speed/temp is ONLY for show... IF you actually have a thermal problem, then the system wasnt built properly to begin with. bought the wrong case/heatsink is the most common problem. thermal solution is something you take care of in the original build. which is one reason why i recommend aginst the HAF case. it's not designed for everyday use. they have NO airfilters to clean out. ALL of the dust blown into the case WILL get sucked up by your fans, heatsinks, powersupply, and videocard. THE best case currently on the market is the silverstone FT02 (fortress2). if you get that case, you will use it till the ATX standard is obsolete:D there are very few flaws from an engineering point of view on the FT02. thermally perfect design IMO. the only BIG problem would be spilling drinks into the case. but thats a problem with ALOT of modern computer cases (including the HAF series)