I'm tossing around the idea of building a PC for my two girls for Christmas. They are 6 and 8, so I'm not really in need of a monster PC... browse the net, play kid games, word processing, e-mail, etc. I'm also tossing around the idea of not using a floppy drive... been building PC's over the years... is it time to stop putting floppy drives in? With cheap USB storage devices all over, am I dating myself by even thinking about a floppy?
I'm looking at the Aspire X-QPack case, so I'm trying to research Micro ATX boards. Two biggies for me is SATA and onboard video. I'm not really to sure what SATA is, but it seems to be a new technology that has faster transfer rates over the IDE's I'm used to(ATA133). In short, should I go for a board and drive for a SATA device?
Secondly, many of the Micro ATX boards have onboard video... which would probably be fine for my girls. On the other hand the boards that have the SATA do not have AGP slots. I'd like to have an AGP just in case I find out the onboard video is truly not good enough. The board I'm considering at the moment is a BIOSTAR GEFORCE 6100-M7, which uses NVIDIA GeForce 6100 (North) and NVIDIA nForce 410(South). Can someone make some suggestions or confirm this might be a good choice?
Here is my build list at this point:
- Aspire X-QPack (green - older kid LOVES green)
- BIOSTAR GEFORCE 6100-M7
- AMD Sempron 64 2600 or 2800+ (retail)
- WD SATA 3.0GB/s 120GB HDD
- CORSAIR ValueSelect 512MB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400
- LiteOn CD/DVD R/W/RW drive
- NEC Floppy (not sure why I still put floppies in PC's)
Again... comments, suggestions and etc welcomed.
I'm looking at the Aspire X-QPack case, so I'm trying to research Micro ATX boards. Two biggies for me is SATA and onboard video. I'm not really to sure what SATA is, but it seems to be a new technology that has faster transfer rates over the IDE's I'm used to(ATA133). In short, should I go for a board and drive for a SATA device?
Secondly, many of the Micro ATX boards have onboard video... which would probably be fine for my girls. On the other hand the boards that have the SATA do not have AGP slots. I'd like to have an AGP just in case I find out the onboard video is truly not good enough. The board I'm considering at the moment is a BIOSTAR GEFORCE 6100-M7, which uses NVIDIA GeForce 6100 (North) and NVIDIA nForce 410(South). Can someone make some suggestions or confirm this might be a good choice?
Here is my build list at this point:
- Aspire X-QPack (green - older kid LOVES green)
- BIOSTAR GEFORCE 6100-M7
- AMD Sempron 64 2600 or 2800+ (retail)
- WD SATA 3.0GB/s 120GB HDD
- CORSAIR ValueSelect 512MB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400
- LiteOn CD/DVD R/W/RW drive
- NEC Floppy (not sure why I still put floppies in PC's)
Again... comments, suggestions and etc welcomed.