Quote: Originally Posted by Monoxide1986 I've always been a fan of AMD (and only built gaming rigs with them for myself) so I've always stuck with them. No rhyme or reason other than the products I got from them performed well and lasted a long time at a cheaper price than intel. I'd be interested in hearing arguments for either or.

I've always liked Intel better. I never had great experiences with AMD. It's like everything is made using Intel and Nvidia, so there's usually a tiny bit of compatibility issues with AMD and ATI (which is obviously now both the same company).

Quote: Originally Posted by Monoxide1986 On the video card I've always stuck by nVidia, but have heard that AMD (ATI still to me) has gotten significantly better. I wouldn't mind sticking with nVidia, but figured I'd give AMD/ATI a shot. The two cards was mostly just to say I had a setup like that. I'll probably end up switching out to a higher end single card. Any big difference between the GTX 680/670 or 7970?

Depends on what you want to do with the graphics cards. Most games run slightly better on the 670/680. Some run better on the 7970. Three monitor setup on AMD is better. The 670 is about $100 cheaper than the 680, and can be overclocked to perform like a 680. I think the 7970 does calculations significantly faster though.

Quote: Originally Posted by Monoxide1986 On the SSD, it's still new ground to me. All of my tech buddies are urging me to switch over to one as my primary drive, but I've read too many reviews stating that they failed with in the first 6 months or so. My wife tends to store a lot of kids pictures and whatnot on the desktop so in the chance that it fails and I don't have proper fail-safes in place.. I'm dead. My same tech buddies also mentioned some software that does backups to another drive in the system automatically. How long does a backup typically take with that and are there any specific products that are good. I used to use Acronis True Image a bunch for imaging drives. The short life before failure still worries the hell out of me though.

If you're putting photos on your SSD, you're doing it wrong. That's what a platter drive is for. And I think SSDs have a decent warranty period. I'm new to using it at home, so I'm not sure. We use tons of Intel drives at work, and they're fairly reliable. But they're 2x the price of other brands.

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