Friend's first build =)

[Jinru]

i want your guys opinion on the stuff hes purchasing within a few days. i tried to give him an idea of what he should want for present day, top notch gaming, without personally picking out the hardware. since i'm kinda rusty on whats best right now.

Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro-SLI ATX AMD Motherboard

BFG Tech Geforce 7900GT

COOLMAX "PCI Express" CXI-400B ATX v2.01 400W Power Supply

AMD Opteron 165

CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR

Western Digital Caviar SE 250GB

is the difference in L2 Cache between a opteron 165 and x2 3800+ a noticeable significance? i was thinking if he ever decided to OC his CPU, he would be better off with Opteron and their stock heatsink's. i'm sure the power supply could be changed to a better brand, but if theres something else around the same price range it would be nice. since he planned to spend at most $1k, but with Tsunami case he's reaching almost $1200. i'll be letting him know what u guys think

thnxs for help

 

[magouster]

If your friend is planning on overclocking, I would rather go for a Asus Mobo in the same price range, or a DFI Lanparty which is slightly more expensive. Also, consider dropping the SLI motherboard if your not planning on running 2 GFX cards later on. The two PCI-e slots on the Gigabyte Mobo was too close together anyway, making it impossible to fit 2 dual-slot graphics cards in next to each other, and even if you got 2 single-slot cards, they'd still be pressed up against each other.

The PSU should be fine, try to check their website to check the Ampereges on the 12V rail, since that is more important than the Wattage. It should be at least in the area of 20 Amps or more.

Go for the 165. It runs slower than the 3800+ at stock speeds, so after a burn-in period of about 100 hours, I would definitely OC that baby! The cache makes a difference, but not the kind that will blow your eyelids off!

The rest looks perfect! Hope it helps

 

[PZEROFGH]

I would be looking to buy a new PSU if i were you...

Anyways yuor links lead to to microsoft's homepage

 

[espeed]

two changes - change mobo to dfi ultra-d and change psu to either enermax noisetaker 600w or OCZ powerstream

 

[Jinru]

k thnxs for feedback guys, but he ordered it this mourning T_T... would've been nice to atleast change his mobo to a Asus and vid card to EVGA

 

[john3]

k get the DFI lanparty UT ULtra-D for motherboard, and Antec TruePowerII 550Watt PSU, and hes good to go.