Sub-$1000 PC (with monitor)

[CompTech7]

I am on a mission to build a decent gaming PC with a take home budget of less than $1000

Here are the components I have so far and I want to leace it to this great community to help me trim the fat and get the best bang for my buck.

All items are priced from newegg.com

Case - COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UW - $49.99
Power Supply - Rosewill RP500 ATX 500W - $59.99
Motherboard - MSI K8N Neo4-F Socket 939 - $80
Processor - AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Venice - $159
System Memory - A-DATA Vitesta 2GB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) - $144.38
HDD - Western Digital Caviar SE 160GB 7200 SATA - $75.00
DVD Burner - LITE-ON 16X DVD�R DVD Burner - $53.99
DVD ROM - SONY Black IDE DVD-ROM - $20.99
Video Card - connect3D 3038 Radeon X800GTO - $169.99
Sound Card - AOpen Cobra AW870LP - $27.95
Monitor - Rosewill R912E Black 19" 8ms LCD Monitor - $259.99

Total (w/ S/H) - $1157.00

Any ideas??

 

[01100100]

If you want to bring the price down, you can easily decrease your RAM to 1GB.
also, I would change the western digital HD for a Sygate. They are practically the same price, and sygate is more reliable.

 

[macdude425]

Keep the WD. There's little to no difference between their reliability, so the most of us have seen.

About the X800 family---don't. The Geforce 6800GS is only a few dollars more and will perform much better. You don't need two gigs of RAM right now, so that will cut a significant hunk out of your price.

You may also find that onboard sound will do just fine for you. If it doesn't, you should probably save up and get a better sound card than the one you picked.

 

[PcMe]

If looks don't matter much to you, you can always go with a Fortron 450W powersupply for around the same price - more reliable and well known. Rosewill is like an offbrand - like Madcatz of gaming more or less.
Also I agree you don't need 2Gigs right off the bat. I'd say move it to one gig - maybe get Corsair Valueselect if you aren't going to OC. And later on if you think you need it, go for another gig.
I also agree on the 'no' vote for the X800. Go for a 6800GS - better drives, more reliable, and an all around better card.

 

[zmatt]

i dont know where you guys got your info but the X800 is definately a better card, runs circles around the 6800, anyway get either whatever you can get at the best price. i agree on memory, gaming and windows performance wont increase much between 1gig and 2 really you would only need that for high end video editing and you wuold use a mac for that or for a server and you r cpu is not a server cpu. cut the memory drop the sound card and you will be at $1001.13 its a little over but i dont think that matters.

 

[PcMe]

Read a benchmark such as this, zmatt
http://www.vr-zone.com.sg/?i=3012&s=1

The only time(s) the X800GTO did better was once in Serious Sam 2 (Who's going to play that anyway..) in one resolution, and when it was overclocked and unlocked more pipelines.
Overall the 6800GS is better - not significantely, but better.

 

[vaderpro]

 

[aliasaid]

only x800 cards worth getting are the x800xl, x800xt, x800gto2

the first 2 are higher priced so probably not very good value. but hte x800gto2, especially recently, they all come unlocked right out of hte box, and a simple overclock, and you've got yourself an x850xt p.e... try to convince yourself a 6800gs is better than a x850xt p.e.