[Build Complete] Pair of matching mid-tier computers for couples gaming :)

Here are pictures of our new computer room!

They're named Herple and Derple. :P

So I've always wanted to convert my girlfriend to the PC Gaming Master Race (she used to play the consoles a lot) and I thought it would be a lot of fun for us to build a pair of computers together to play games side-by-side. I also haven't had a real gaming computer. for awhile.

I tried to involve her in the process as much as possible. She built her computer (Herple) by herself just by watching me as I built mine (Derple). Her cable management is better than mine. I actually hesitated to post here because of how bad my cable management is. She also was involved in the process of picking out parts as much as I could get her to be. She'll be helping out a mutual friend of ours with her own build in a month or so. :)

We picked out the case first, the Antec Skeleton. I always wanted a Skeleton because I left the case open in my last gaming computer anyway, because often enough, things will go wrong and I have to tinker with the computer to fix it. For her part, she's always loved electronic music, cyberpunk and (after I introduced her to it) TRON. I do some "hacker-y" type stuff (reverse engineering, security penetration) for both work and play and I like to think it's one of the reasons she likes me. The case looks very hacker-y and cyberpunk to her, so she fell in love with it as well.

I realize the i7-2600s are not a popular choice here, but I wanted some extra oomph for doing multicore compilation (for work), the price difference with the i5-2500k did not seem that large and I really have no plans on overclocking anything. (I went with the stock CPU cooler as well for that reason)

The oversized power supply is because she sometimes has to be away at school for awhile and I'd like to be able to take her graphics card and crossfire it for ridiculous, unnecessary power. :P Plus, an upgrade possibility for next year is that I buy a couple more 6950s.

Part list permalink / Part price breakdown by merchant

A few build notes: Don't use a power supply with a 120mm fan with the Skeleton, the airflow and cable management is all jacked with it. Oh well. The Antec Skeleton is going to be somewhat more difficult than a standard ATX tower to work with, especially for beginners. I had trouble figuring out how to get the component tray out. The instructions are sometimes wrong (they tell you to push a tab up instead of down, for example). Also, the special screw provided to attach to 3.5" drives didn't fit the 3.5" adapter for the 2.5" OCZ SSD. Thankfully, my girlfriend figured out that a regular screw placed there would work almost as well, so that bit of ingenuity made things work out. The last thing is, all rebate deal is limit one per qualifying product type per household. Unfortunately, I didn't read this fineprint until after I purchased the parts. This means, I'm only able to get rebates on the parts for one computer, not both. :(

Macs vs PCs

A sidenote: My previous "gaming PC" was actually the 27" iMac work gave me. It's temporarily at my house while our office is being built out, so I've been gaming with it. It's spec'ed out about as high as it is possible: 3.4 GHz i7, 16 GB of RAM, 1 TB SATA Drive + 256 GB SSD, AMD Radeon HD 6970M 1GB GDDR5. Gaming on the 2560x1440 display has been gorgeous, and I've been able to play all the latest games on it at reasonable settings with good framerates.

However, I benchmarked the iMac and the new computers, and it's great that I've been able to get better performance (even on the non-graphics intensive PCMark07) at less than half the price. Even if I had purchased a 2560x1440 monitor instead, the build still would've been cheaper than the iMac.

27" iMac PCMark7: 4810

Derple PCMark7: 5392

27" iMac 3DMark11: X987

Derple 3DMark11: X1613