What would you suggest?

[Dante_Caligari]

I am building a rig for a kid at school. How does this look?

AMD Athlon 64 3500+
1GB DDR RAM
300GB Hard Drive
6600 Video Card
NEC DVD Burner

I need to know three things:

CASE
17" Monitor
PSU

He wants to use this computer mostly for watching videos and downloading off of iTunes (hence the 300GB), maybe some games.

I would appreciate any suggestions.

 

[MrZucchiniHead]

For the {Su get the Fortron 450w.

for monitor it depends weather he wants an lcd or a crt.

and for the case it depends on what his style is, you should let him pick out the case, and if not get a plain lookin Centurion or something similar. (the new xion solaris look kinda cool) just show him some cases and let him pick out his favorite.

 

[Tordenskjold]

Yeh LCD are all mostly the same, you pay for what you get though. and depending on ho wmuch money he has you could get two 250GB hdd instead or something. O have always foudn two hdd better than one huge one. For backup reaons etc. otherwise everything seems cool. and PSU usually somes with case depening on if he wants to buy a seperate better quality one.

 

[Tordenskjold]

oh and case.. get him something like the ARMOUR or something or maybe a SHARK.

 

[MrCoffee]

Sounds alright, the monitor is the main gray area I suppose. I presume we're talking LCD and there is plenty of choice at 17" but a price limit would be helpful, the are even some reasonable quality 19" LCD that are quite cheap.

How much gaming will go on on the PC? that'll have an impact on which monitor too choose i.e. a faster lower quality one or a higher quality one that might have some lag on FPS games.
Also I don't think theres really an awful lot of new games you can play well on a 6600 but I guess theres a budget involved,

 

[Dante_Caligari]

Well, gaming wasn't even mentioned when he told me what he was going to use it for, so I just thought I would put in a 6600 just in case. I have a 6600, and it works fine for most games.

I think that we will go with two 250GB Hard Drives as Tordenskjold suggested, since I think that is a good idea.

17" LCD.

Budget: Approx. 1,500$ (I am trying to get him the best and cheapest since he doesn't need too powerful of a PC.)

 

[MrZucchiniHead]

Well if he's on a $1500 budget you can go for a 6600GT at least if he wants to play sme games like CS:S and it will even run F.E.A.R. on low setting pretty well.

you could get him a dual core 3800+ but im pretty sure it wont help him much if he's not gonna game much on it.

dont use a case+PSU combe, the PUS's always die within a month or sometimes even a week! get the fortron our an antec 550w but i dont think he'll need that if he's not gaming.

He might like a TT Tsunami, but you could let him pick black or silver, i perfer silver but that's just me.

 

[xenium]

hey, I had my psu/case combo from raidmax for about 2 months and it still works (as of saturday, now its for sale). btw, my agp 6600gt played most games on medium settings and played oblivion at 800*600 with 2xAA and all scenery on with decent fps.

 

[Running]

i say drop the 3500+ and get a 3000+ or 3200+, he won't notice the difference that much. and you can put that extra money into a bigger hard drive. o and you should get 2 smaller hdd's because you can have the option to raid and they are usually cheaper than one big one.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16824002121
that lcd will blow your friend away. nec is one of the best brands for lcd's.

also since he's using for music and stuff, i think you should get an antec sonata II. which is quiet and comes with a good psu.