I Guess This Makes Me A New MG Enthusiast :-)

[ginfan]

So I jumped in with both feet. After a month of research I’ve been teetering between 2 builders the past couple weeks, Maingear and DigitalStormOnline.com. Though both seem excellent organizations focused on high quality and customer service at a reasonable price, the community I’m seeing on these boards among a few other things listed below won me over.

I just placed an order for an Ephex with the following config:

Exterior Automotive Color: Black Brushed Aluminum Finish
Power Supply: 1000W Enermax Galaxy Power Supply
Motherboard: NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI Motherboard
Processor: E6850 Core 2 (3.0GHz x 2)
CPU Cooling: Zalman Ultra Quiet CNPS9500 LED 92mm CPU Cooler w/ Copper Base
Memory: 4GB Corsair XMS2-8500 DDR2-1066
Do you want us to Redline™ your CPU?: YES
Hard Drive 1: Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB 7200RPM 16MB Cache – SATA II
Hard Drive 2: Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB 7200RPM 16MB Cache - SATA II
RAID (Requires Identical 1st & 2nd Hard Drives): RAID 0
Optical Drive One: 20X Dual Layer DVD±RW Drive w/ LightScribe Technology - black
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra 768MB PCIe
Do you want us to Redline™ your GPU?: YES
Sound Card: Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi™ XtremeGamer Fatal1ty
Network Card: Dual Gigabit LAN
Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium (64-Bit)
Warranty: 1 Year Maingear Warranty

Pro and Con List:
Pro: MG sales responded to my emails quickly and thoroughly—no partial responses! MG Sales did their job this week and deserve a pat on the back. Sales at Digital Storm, has no email support, making me call, and when I they didn’t seem as comfortable technical questions.

Pro: MG has a new but seemingly solid discussion board community with a solid showing of happy customers. I’m encouraged to see several employee posts, including the CEO. I’m also encouraged that criticism towards MG that could be taken negatively is responded to instead of simply deleted.

Pro: Aesthetically speaking, I prefer the stylish clean lines of the Ephex design.

Pro: If I understand correctly, I’m getting 5 games thrown in the mix… Guild Wars with an intel proc and 4 others with an nvidia card purchase (the 4 weren’t listed on the invoice, so I’m not 100% sure about that-just going off the banner on the main page).

Pro: MG has been around longer, giving it the appearance of a more stable company

Neutral: both use high quality pieces and seem to focus on quality control and ongoing support

Con: As of this morning, DSO had better pricing (about $150-200 on my rig) & free shipping. This made it much harder to pull the trigger, even after I had made up my mind to do so. In MG’s defense, last week, they were about the same price after shipping.

Con: DSO has a 3 year warranty included without extra charge, though both have lifetime phone support, including upgrade assistance.

Con: DSO provides a few more goodies in their custom manuals focused on future upgrades.


DECISION MADE! NOW THE WAIT BEGINS!!!!

[RottynDawg]

Welcome aboard ginfan! Looks like one very fast system on order.

[theDreamer]

Glad to hear you put your order in.
I would not worry to much about your cons though, hoping to put you at ease with your order here. A three year warranty is nice, but with computer technology in its current state, after 6 months your computer is considered "slow." Now do not let that deter you (it is inevitable), but what I am saying is, during that second year of ownership if something happens you will most likely not care to have it fixed, but just upgrade as it will be slightly better.

The price is a tough thing to dispute, X price is X, but there are to many reasons, all which are assumptions, as to why DSO has lower prices currently than MG.

Focused on future upgrades is actually something I normally deter from thinking about when building my rig. Now I want to know that my X part can be compatible with new parts, but any company who is selling you a pre-built machine is not going to lie if they want to keep your business. They will tell you if what you are putting in will be obsolete, if they also know. Example is the 939 from AMD disappearing now, I know a few companies who told there customers either to wait for you have no upgrade path with that, so they waited.

Hope that might have put you a ease a bit more about your purchase.
Though with the system you have specced out I know you will not be disappointed when it arrives. What do you plan on using this for right away? Games, Video/Photo editing?

[ginfan]

No worries Dream :-) I'm not "worried about the cons" per say, just listing them in spirit of feedback.

As far as my future plans go, I plan to play multiple instances of Everquest 2 at the same time until I either go blind, grow hair on my palms or am tossed into a lake of fire... whichever comes first.

[93rd.PanzerLehr]

Nice to see someone getting a new pc.. could you tell me (us) what you plan to do with your new computer. gaming? photo editing? regular round the house pc? :?

[ginfan]

Though conceivably I could do work on it, it is really a toy to be used primarily for gaming.

The most intensive work use I can think of at the moment would be to develop project plans, process flow diagrams, Illustrations and graphs using MS Project, Visio, Excel, SnagIt, Access etc... and imbedding them into a largish Powerpoint deck.

[93rd.PanzerLehr]

I dont meen to make you regret your order, but in my opinion you should have gon with RAID 1 or none at all, simply because unless you plan to back up all your data you shouldnt use RAID 0.

Ok to simplify.

RAID 0 - Makes for a faster hard drive and theoreticaly boosts speed in gaming and other intensive apps. (though very few will make use of this) and is not very good at securing your data.

RAID 1 - Better data security because what is on 1 drive is mirrored on the other so it is secure. (although that is the only benefit i can think of.)

Dont take my word for it though because i dont really understand it that well.. :?

And you should reconsider in the SLI motherboard if you only want 1 video card, but if you want the option of upgrading go right ahead..

:opinion:

After all it is your pc and you know your needs best... And have fun with your new rig and congrats.

[theDreamer]

Raid is fine if all you install is applications because then all you lost is time.

[noodlesnspam]

nice config there, DSO isnt bad, i recommended a friend to purchase DSO a year ago before i knew MG existed.

DSO pricing is decent and quality is decent, but still cant compare to MG build quality and styling my opinion of course.

you can kind of tell how much a company cares about quality by the cases they choose for their top models.

MG for example chose top lian li and silverstone chasis, these models receive excellent reviews no matter what ethusiast pc magazines you read.

the dso chasis along with a few other top companies and their cases arent so stylish or as optimized either.

i personally would never buy a DSO or VM computer strictly because of case selection, its just horrible, i dont need a custom computer company to design their own cases when theres awesome top quality pc cases out there already that do nothing but make pc cases all day long.

MG rocks b/c they take amazing cases and paint them or give them a window option; wish other companies would do that instead of making their own cases which look like crap.

Im being a little harsh but lets face it, having a ferrari engine under a toyota corolla is not going to make me pay 250k

[ginfan]

Panzer, SLI for the future, raid zero due to last second compulsion. I was planning a single drive for some time, but not being able to squeeze the the 1TB Hitachi Deskstar into my budget, sparked some last second creativity... I decided to be fancy since I wasn't building the box myself this time :-) Though I don't want one of my drives to fail, I'll live if it does.

I agree about the aethetics Noodle. The look of the Ephex system was one of the reasons I chose MG. I hate cases that look like they were designed by a 15 year old in 1985---"I know what this case needs! More ninja star cutouts!!!!" I'm glad to hear, you having seen a system from both first hand, that you feel MG's build quality is superior as well.

[ginfan]

The power of suggestion is powerful. Combine it with a conversation I had with MG sales this morning and the fact that 64 bit drivers for ATI's TV tuner were just released, and I made a system change, adding the tuner and swapping the 250's in raid 0 with a 150 raptor as primary, 500 mb secondary.

This added a few bucks to the system, but it's MY toy! Just don't tell my wife :roll:

[theDreamer]

This added a few bucks to the system, but it's MY toy! Just don't tell my wife :roll:

We won't, unless of course she comes on the boards and starts asking around. Though we can always just deny it all. 8)

[Gsquared]

This added a few bucks to the system, but it's MY toy! Just don't tell my wife :roll:

Ginfan? Mmm ... no ma'am, never heard of him!

[RottynDawg]

I might of heard of him.../cough, lemme check my Paypal account...yep, I've heard of him ;)