good setup??

[Powerslave]

amd athelon 3200
nvidia 6600 256 pci-e
160gb hard drive
512 mb
sound blaster 7.1
im just listing the basic stuff, is this a good way to go?

 

[truebe]

amd athlon 3200, is this an amd64? if so yeah, get a venice for $200

dont get nvidia 6600. get the eVGA 6600GT.

What kind of hard drive? Seagate is good.

512mb ram is fine but it depends what your planning on doing, what kind of games do you play. 1 GB ram is really all you need right now

sound blaster? hmm...well iv heard alot of bad things about it but its better than onboard. whats your budget?

 

[aspire]

make sure you get the socket 939 venice core www.zipzoomfly.com its 195 bucks i think
like truebe said get the eVGA 6600gt costs about 185 get a seagate too very quiet, get the dfi lanparty for mobo its onboard is good enough you dont need a sound card and pick up the gig of ram you wont regret it

 

[zap]

its not bad

 

[Wayniac]

Western Digital is also good for a hard drive. Also, if you plan on having a good computer around for a while, you might wanna look into buying two 80 GB hard drives instead and trying to RAID them maybe (or doing something like that). I am not exactly sure how RAID works yet, but I think it works twice as fast because they work together.

Also, like aspire said, make sure you get the socket 939 Venice core if you are going with the AMD Athlon 64 3200+. I'd also have to agree on going with a gig of RAM.

 

[diabloII]

the memory on a videocard doesn't matter

the 6600 is a piece of crap

6600gt is the way to go

 

[Wayniac]

Might want to look into the 6800 GT too.

 

[diabloII]

if he's going AGP, then maybe 6800gt could fit his budget

also, you need 1gig ram for optimal performance

 

[Powerslave]

ok, so 6600 gt? should i upgrade my processor, and yes i have a budget, trying not to cap 1000 dollars.

 

[diabloII]

ok, here's a much better setup then:

AMD64 3200+ Venice (retail)-$210
DFI Lanparty ultra-d- $135
eVGA 6600GT - $180
1gb twinMOS ram- $95
Seagate 160gb SATA HDD-$93
NEC 3510A DVD-RW- $50
OCZ Modstream 520W-$106
Case & shipping- $100 max

that's probably the best setup you can get for under $1000

Reasons why to get what i suggested:
-the retail venice has a 3yr warranty and stock HSF; also the 3200+ venice is VERY overclockable (and even if you don't it'll run very cool, making your cpu fan run slower, or quieter) along with new SSE3 instructions
-dfi lanparty is the most stable and most OCable 939 board, making it the obvious choice
-evga is known for making quality gfx cards and the 6600gt supports PS3.0, making it able to run up coming games with the eye candy even $800+ X850XT PE's can't run
-twinmos ram; very good ram for cheap price, paired along with the dfi board, it can receive enough voltages to overclock like more expensive rams can, and even if you don't, they are still very good ram
-seagate makes the quietest & most reliable (imo) HDD's, SATA transfer at 150mb/sec as opposed to the 100-133 you get with older hard drives
-the nec 3510a won gold as the best optical drive they've tested out of a lot of other optical drives; not only are they cheap, but they also work great
-ocz power supplies are known to be very good; this psu can probably last you another upgrade (and yes, you do need another power supply, you can't use the one that comes with the case)

the case is your choice, if i were you, i'd look into the thermaltake xasers at about $70