Attempting to put together a pc Advice

[gaara]

RAID controller cards are pretty good, usually better than controllers built into the MB, but that are pretty expensive from what I recall and are more aimed at server use.

I haven't looked into RAID contollers very much, but you'll obviously want the one with the fastest load times.

If you have the controller built in (and I am confident it is), you won't have to worry about a seperate controller. If you don't, I'll be more than happy to help you pick out a good one though.

 

[jvc8400]

Thanks for the help Gaara I really wanted to get the Ati x850 xt @ 485.00 but I did not want to have a card that covered one of the pci slots + looks like this dell case is going to be oxygen starved..I really am thinking of just drilling a bunch of holes where i can to mount an exhaust fan... to me it just looks like it needs it.

 

[gaara]

In all honesty, I would really suggest you dish out $50-100 and buy yourself a new case. I know you just bought that one and it may seem like a waste, but I've heard that Dell cases are the worst possible cases for everything.

Of course a bit mod modifying and some work can turn any case into what you want and need it be.

Also, the x850 is a PCIe card, so you're going to have to make sure your board has an open PCIe slot for such a card, rather than an AGP slot.

If you have any other questions, feel free to inquire, and I will answer to the best of my ability.

 

[jvc8400]

Gaara the motherboard has the pci express slot and the more i think about it the more i would like the ATi RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition @ 485.00 esp sence it looks like i am not even going to use all 3 pci slots... so what is one of them is covered right? if i go nuts and go that route I will for sure be modifying the case and getting a bigger power supply...to bad the amd cpu's do not accept the ddr2 memory otherwise i should just salvage what i can and go with the good video card (x850 xt) and start over with amd and different motherboard and case etc??

 

[gaara]

Well, apart from the Dell case, your setup is still pretty damn good, and even if you did want to go the AMD road, you could always go to ebay and probably get a pretty good price on that hardware.

A covered PCI slot won't be too damaging, really the only high priority things that I can see going into those slots are sound and network cards.

It's all personally preference in the end, if you want an AMD based system them go for it, but your Intel based system is not a bad system at all.