Build for a friend

[royalk4]

My buddy has an old Dell 8200 p4 and is looking for a new build. I told him I would help him set up a new rig. HE DOES NOT WANT TO OC, but I'm working on him doing it anyways. We are thinking that we will wait until august when we have more time to devote to the rig. Before we do though I wanted to ask a couple of questions that I've had since I've been out of the computer scene for about 7 months.

1. I know Conroe is coming out, and that AMD and Intel price drops are going to be significant (fingers crossed), Would it be better to go with the Conroe for Gaming or get an X2?
2. What are the benefits of AM2? I've been looking into this and the only major difference I've noticed is that you can use DDR2 RAM with higher latencies and obviously higher speeds.
3. When are the DX10 cards expected to come out. He's heard about them and wants to wait for them to come out before he does a 2K new build.
4. Monitors: I've seen the LCD monitor thread on AT but I wasn't sure how old/outdated it was. He watches a lot of movies and plays games like CS, HL2, BF2 (the last 2 on my comp not on his current set up) He doesn't like my Dell 1703 because it has ghosting. So I was thinking about the Viewsonic 2ms 19'' Monitor on newegg. it's like 240 right now.

Otherwise the build I was planning for him looks like:

AMD X2 3800+
ASUS/MSI (No DFI Mobo since I can't find an AM2 version)
Antec Neo 500W PS with modular cables and SLI
250 WD 16mb HD
19'' ViewSonic 2ms LCD
Evga 7900GT or the x1900x_ _ (xt or xtx)
GSkill 2x1GB DDR2 800 RAM, maybe a lower speed if there is not a significant difference
probably no sound cards since he has weak speakers
Mouse and keyboard will be his preference

 

[royalk4]

no one has any answers?

 

[AnthraX]

1) Definitally wait at least untill there are many Conroe benchmarks out then make your decision.
2) AM2 is pretty much the future with AMD. It will be used with it's next processors, K8L.
3) G80 (Nvidia) is in September and R600 (ATI) is in November.
4) Post a link to that Viewsonic.

 

[massacreinfallx]

1)Conroe is supposedly going to blow the competition away, outperforms 1000$ Cpu's for about 1/4 of the price. Im building a conroe system myself.
2) as of now there arnt many benefits with the am2, its just where amd is headed in the future and anthrax just said.
3)^^^^^^ anthrax covered it^^^^^^^^
4)as far as monitors go there are many good ones, just stick with a name brand to ensure good quality. If you stay under 8ms reponse time you should jhave no ghosting.

 

[Spartan]

Wait for Conroe to make your CPU decision. For one of those high end video cards, I woud recommend something a little more powerful for a PSU, like an OCZ Powerstream 520W or Antec TruePower 550W. I am assuming that that monitor is the VX922, which looks like a solid choice.

Overall, that will be a good build for that price. Wait for nVidia to release their G80 core cards and ATI to release the R600 core cards before deciding on your final build.

 

[Pepsiboy700]

Like they said wait for conroe to do a price vs performance comparison with legit benchies and definatly wait for the g80/r600 or get a 7600/x1800 max!