Which 3 games came with it?
Processing power it should be plenty for games.
Brand wise, I am not a fan of ASRock, Hitachi, and g.skill.... although I have gotten Hitachi and g.skill parts for free through dead computers.
As far as HDD's go I trust Seagate as my #1 brand, however I still do research into the drives they make before buying because while they have been awesome for warranty replacements on the rare occasion of a failure, BUT they have switched from a better quality control manufacturing location in Philipines of drives for some of there lower cost drives to a newer manufacturing location in China in which has had some bad batches. The last 3TB External that I bought for $99 on sale, was 3 of 5 star/egg rating at newegg, and the ratings of people with problems almost caused me to decline the deal. But having dealt with Seagate for the last almost 30 years with no major issues and they always making things right in the end such as a 120GB HDD that crashed under warranty after 3 years of use on a 5 year warranty and they shipped me a letter stating that they were sorry, but they could not return a 120GB HDD, they could only ship me a 160GB instead. I was very happy to get a 160GB instead for an extra 40GB of storage capacity. As well as my brother told me that Seagate bought out Maxtor and are applying their 5 year warranty to Maxtor drives that originally only had a 3 year warranty and a Maxtor drive I had that was a 500GB paperweight that was 4 years and 6 months old, I was able to contact Seagate and send this drive in under the new 5 year warranty term that they offered as part of the aquisition of Maxtor warranty terms, and turn that 500GB paperweight into a RMA# and shipped it off and get a Seagate 500GB SATA drive back in return that I used daily on a 2nd computer of mine. As far as Hitachi goes, I have a Hitachi Deskstar 164.7GB SATA/150 that I use with processing large video files recorded of gameplay with FRAPS and then encoding them down to smaller AVI files such as a 10GB to 700MB downsizing of raw fraps video format to a smaller encoded AVI without much loss in quality to post game footage onto youtube etc. The Hitachi I placed into this role because I didnt want to batter my SSD or my 500GB drive. If this 164.7GB drive is battered to death with all the read/writes and finally dies I can then finally toss it out. But I have difficulty in throwing away good parts even if they are 10 years old slower and smaller in capacity etc. If it crashes its like throwing away a burnt out light bulb vs throwing away a good one that still can serve a purpose etc. Here is the Hitachi that just wont die under read/write abuse and it has over 50,000 spin hours on it. Prior to me getting it, it came out of a businesses low cost server where they chose to have 2 of these in RAID array vs SCSI drives. Back in 2004, this drive was a fast drive at 7200 rpms and SATA/150. Today its a slower SATA drive, but is not a bottleneck for what I use it for.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Hitachi-13G0254-Deskstar-HDS722516VLSA80-164-7GB-7200RPM-SATA-3-5-HDD-/161217913518As far as ASRock goes, they are right along the lines of ECS brand boards. They generally have been made with quality cutting parts and manufacturing and have a high failure/bug rate. Biostar is the lowest quality board I will buy and I have no issues with Biostar. Been buying their boards and many of them for last 10 years or so. Only complaints I have with their boards are design based such as CMOS battery or USB header location too close to PCI Express slot so very tight clearance or contortion of USB cable from 7 gold pin header to USB at the front of the PC etc. As well as 1 board that had the 4-pin 12VDC molex in a position on the board on a mATX that with the case fan in the way you could barely get your fingers in to plug in the 12VDC and the yellow and black wire pairs had to be bent at an angle because of the case fan on the back of the mATX case that this placement slightly conflicted with. With ASUS and Gigabyte boards, the placement of everything is generally better, but this may be also because on those boards I am usually building a gaming system for someone and so its a full size ATX and not a mATX cram of everything into a smaller area board.
As far as G.Skill Memory goes. I got 2GB for free from a laptop that was being thrown away because a guys girlfriend accidentally sat in a wooden chair that the laptop was resting on and the display was destroyed and the Toshiba Qosmio "High End" laptop which be bought for $2600 he didnt want to spend the $280 on $200 for a new display for it + $80 labor. And so he decided to buy a new i7 laptop instead and asked if I wanted it for parts and I accepted. I ended up gutting it for the RAM and dual hard drives and sending the rest to recycle. The RAM fit perfect in my Toshiba Netbook which maxes out on 2GB, so it was a free upgrade. While this memory hasnt failed yet, for some reason the memory gives off a lot of heat felt from the bottom of the laptop. Info online suggested that this memory was known to run warm. Although with the heat created I would think that it should have a heatspreader etc although I doubt there is enough clearance on a netbook to have that feature. The original 1GB RAM module in it never ran as warm. Generally when it comes to memory I like to buy from these brands ( Kingston, Crucial, Corsair ) which I have had good luck with, no high failure rate, and of the 2 rare failures 1 with Kingston, and the other with Crucial they took care of me well with a fast turn around with replacement of the failed RAM and the replacement RAM was flawless. * The good thing is that I had some smaller memory capacity sticks to install into these systems to limp along on until I got the larger sticks back such as able to place 2GB 1333 DDR3 RAM into my newest gaming build when the 8GB 1600 DDR3 stick died after about 3 months of 4 to 8 hr a day heavy gaming from Crucial. Crucial was great in shipping me out a replacement stick within 7 days from the date that I sent my stick back. It may be unfair to rate G.Skill like I am since I havent had a failure myself yet to say whether they are good or bad, but given the many years with the other brands, I stick to what I trust vs buying into a newer brand and taking a chance.
