CPU Building Tips

[bradley walters]

I have decided to build my own system. I was wondering if you fellow forum-goers could help in this process, by telling me what else I need for a complete system, mainly what sorts of cables and adapters I will need. Here is what I have or will buy



Thermal Take VA3000 ATX Case

1 GB Corsair XMS PC-3200 RAM

ECS 915P-A (1.0) ATX Motherboard

Seagate 80GB SATA Hard Drive

NEC Black 8x DVD+RW Drive

ATI Radeon X800 XT Video Card

Intel LGA775 Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz with HT

Soundblaster Audigy LS sound card

ThermalTake Jungle 512 Pentium 4 cooler

Arctic Silver 5 Premium Thermal Compound





Thanks

Brad Walters

 

[compy]

how much money are you working with here?

 

[bradley walters]

Under $2K, otherwise I'd just buy a Dimension XPS.

The CRITICAL COMPONENTS I have to have in a system are:

P4 HT 2.8 or higher
256 MB Radeon X800 XT or nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra
1 GB Ram

HD size must be above or at 60 GB.

 

[Circa219]

you obviously need a sufficient powersupply if one doesn't already come with your case and an OS. other than that, looks pretty cool.

 

[KornNut]

- Your hard drive is a serial ATA harddrive, so this requires a different power supply plug and a different connection cable. I would suggest getting a high power supply especially if you're going to have alot of components, but you can save money by getting a $10 SATA power adapter (SATA power to standard) rather than getting a really expensive PSU that has it (although, if you look hard enough, there are some cheap PSUs that will have it. As for the connection cable, the mobo should come with atleast one.

- Do NOT hook up a thermostat or any of the fans to the motherboard. The 2.8 GHz P4 w/ HT takes 76 watts of power (a whole lot more than your traditional 40 watts). This will cause some weird problems. I strongly suggest hooking up the fans and thermostat (if the case has one) to the PSU.

- Buy round IDE cables. They're a cheap way to keep your PC cooler.

- video card- i strongly suggest the NVidia 6800 Ultra. Here is the benchmarks compared to ATI both using your processor:

http://www2.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjQ0LDEz

Good luck with it.