It's that time of decade where I'm looking to build a new computer for myself. However, it's been a while since I've done so and the market is more confusing now than ever!
I'm hoping to not spend more than $800
CAD on the motherboard, processor and RAM but I have no real budgetary limit. Of course, I'm looking to optimize for some metric of performance per money... I will be exclusively shopping at
Canada Computers since they're local to me and have very competitive prices and knowledgeable staff (an industry rarity), so you can check their website for inventory...
I need a 64 bit Windows 7 machine for software development and video editing, as well as general computer use. Software development's not exactly a computationally intense activity but video editing and encoding is! I don't plan to play any games on it except
StarCraft 2...
My current machine only has a case fan. Both the processor and video card are fanless. I cheated a bit to do this by inverting the case's outtake fan to be an intake fan that blows right onto the Thermaltake
Sonic Tower heat sink that's cooling an Intel
E6600 processor. I would like to reuse my current video card (NVIDIA EN9600GT) and purchase a new heat sink to duplicate this fanlessness, especially if my video card is
CUDA compatible for my
NLE but I'd like to know if I'm mistaken in this...
Power consumption is also a mild concern so something reasonably power efficient would be nice. I'd rather not burn a lot more electricity just to be a little faster, especially since I'm the sort to leave their machine on 24/7...
What do you guys think? I'd be very happy to hear your suggestions!
Thank you...