Well, it’s that time of year again and my tax returns are in, or at least they were in mid-February.  I gave half of my tax returns to my mom to help pay down the money I owe her from when she helped me out a couple of years ago and then decided I would use the rest to “upgrade” my laptop to a desktop computer.

Several years ago I had decided to use a laptop computer instead of a desktop because it took up less space and allowed me to travel with my computer more easily.  I opted for a Dell Inspirion 1520 and was satisfied with it for several years.  As I said above, I decided I would go back to having a desktop as my main computer again as I have been getting in to gaming again.

I decided I would do some shopping around and looked at all the major online retailers to compare who had the cheapest items.  I checked Newegg, Amazon, Fry’s Electronics, Best Buy, and a couple of other sites.  Turns out that, at the time, Newegg had the best deals on all the components I wanted so I started putting my order together on their site.  After a little adjusting of the items I wanted to get the best price, I settled on the following components:

EVGA GeForce GTX 590 Graphics Card
NVIDIA 3D Vision glasses
2x Patriot G Series ‘Secor 5′ Edition 4GB DDR3 1600
Raidmax 1000W 80 Plus Gold Power Supply
EVGA X58 FTW Intel Motherboard
Intel Core i7-950 3.06GHz Quad-Core processor
Microsoft Natural Ergonimic Keyboard 4000
5x Seagate Barracude 7200.12 500GB Hard drives

This gave me a satisfactory build that will allow me to play all my games on full settings and not have to worry about it locking up or crashing all the time.  I combined the memory I bought with some that was laying around and now have 12GB of system memory total.  WAY more than enough to play any games and run several applications at a time without issue.  I also decided to put the hard drives in to a raid5 array to take advantage of the data recovery ability of the array and also to turn my 5 500GB  drives in to one 2TB drive.

This all would have worked out without a hitch if it wasn’t for the fact that Newegg’s shipping department decided it would ship the 5 hard drives in an unsatisfactory fashion.  They had the drives placed in a styrofoam base that only covered the bottom inch of the drive and then bubble wrapped the rest of them which allowed them to bounce around and bump in to each other while being shipped.

When I got the drives, 2 of them were D.O.A. and even had a broken power connector on one of them.  I sent those two back to Newegg, and after a couple of days a third drive decided it would die on me too.  I sent that one back to Newegg also, and after a few weeks got a replacement on it but the other 2 were sent back to me because I had written D.O.A. on them with a sharpie and they said that I had voided the warranty because I had put “graffiti” on them.

Well, as I am sure most of you are aware, if you write on metal with a sharpie, you can easily clean it off with a little rubbing alcohol.  I cleaned the writting off the drives and then sent them in to Seagate for warranty replacement and it took about a week and I had a full raid5 array of 2TB to play around with.

So far I am loving this computer.  I’ve been playing EVE Online and Champions Online at full graphics quality and the computer has ran without issue.  I highly recommend the components I bought to anyone looking for a good gaming rig to purchase.  However, I would recommend using caution when buying online as there is a possibliity that the bad shipping condition of the hard drives wasn’t just a one time fluke!