Building A Comp

ak_smallz · Oct 21, 2004

Nubius · Oct 21, 2004

Case seems decent although when buying a combo like that the PSU tends to not be as good as say a seperatebly bought PSU from a wellknown company but I've bought cheaper cases with PSU's and have had them work fine.

Overall the system you've select and parts will work together.

I suggest you get a motherboard from either ABit or MSI not ASUS as they suck balls and their quality has drastically gone down hill since back in the day. And unless you speak taiwanese goodluck with tech support.

Also if there's ANY possibly way of him squeezing out money to get a socket 939 board he'd be better off with that being that AMD will continue to upgrade that series and none of the others. Beyond that I don't believe socket 754 supports dual channel and with socket 939 you would have dual channel supported so that pair of valueram you got would get more performance out of them. Also if you read the reviews about that board it seems a few people have had problems with SATA installation. You might think 'oh well I dont use it' but still I don't like having a board knowing that a function is difficult to use. IMO the board should be all around completely stable and flawless which I think would be easier achieved by Abit or MSI. The cheapest Socket 939 chip is the 3500+ 64 which is $350 I believe so yeah it's a bit more pricier but I think would be better in the long rung.

The Graphics card you picked out looks pretty good and that card should function quite nicely. Other options to consider are the upcoming release of the 6600 series from nvidia and the x700 from ATI, the x600's from ATI are garbage so don't even consider those, but from beedub mainly I've heard that the 9800PRO is still one kick ass card so you really can't go wrong with that.

I might suggest getting a thermalright SLK-948U and putting on a 92mm Fan, tornado if you get a fan controller because the tornado is LOUD as hell, but I'm sure that volcano will be too. Also swiftech makes a nice finely polished copper base heatsink with a unique helicoid design that's supposed to cause more air disturbance and circulate air across the heatsink better, however it can only fit an 80mm fan.

Everything else looks good. Have fun

Blackmoore · Oct 21, 2004

Also if there's ANY possibly way of him squeezing out money to get a socket 939 board he'd be better off with that being that AMD will continue to upgrade that series and none of the others.

Im with Nubius, if hes looking for Dual Channel DDR support, and upgradability get a 939 Chip, they are around the same price. But if hes one who doesn't make computer upgrades often, and is on a lower budget don't sweat it By the time most people make a CPU change, the technology available at that time, surpasses anything the board would be useful for anyway. Even if it is still concidered useful, most people change it anyway, because there are newer and better things out.

Pinkies · Oct 22, 2004

Good call Nubius. I would go with a MSI board probally the K8N(i think) Neo 2 Platnium, which is only a 130 at Newegg, and like he said you would have to speak 5 diffrent oriental languages to get help. My ASUS A7V8X-Xs' agp slot craped out in about 3 days and i had to get an rma and it took me 3 houres to do so becasue i could hardley understand the lady. I guess its jsut a big money scam so you have to pay extra long distance. Anyways the video card is not that great, i would spend an extra 100 and get the 9800xt. I have one and its awseom. I would also get the scock 939 chip for future upgrade to maby one of the FX chips. Other than that your friend will be very happy with the setup. It looks good and everything will work. And you cant go wrong with Newegg, there the best out there and you can get some major steals on their daily deals section. Also i wount get that 160 gig hard drive. Get a 76 gig 10,000 rpm one so later he can get one more just like it and he can set them to Raid 0 which would make them screaming. Hope this helps!

Nvidia fan boy · Oct 22, 2004

I have no problem w/ my board Nubius. Not all Asus boards are bad, you just have to get the best one. I would prefer NOT getting Asus though.

Pinkies · Oct 22, 2004

like i said MSI is the way to go. But for 50 extra you can get a gigabyte board that has DSP and Nforce3 250!

ak_smallz · Oct 24, 2004

alright, i tried all i could to lower his budget.. but he wouldnt budge so i did the smart thing and improvised

Nubius · Oct 24, 2004

The PSU will be fine. It should have more than sufficient rails for him. Everything looks good. Go with that last selection of stuff and he'll have a great system. Try and see if he'll swap the 80gb hard drive for $60 for a 36.4gb, 10,000 RPM SATA drive for $100...those things are so damn fast, it really makes a drastic improvement on loading times.

Building A Comp

ak_smallz

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