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Well guys I need a need computer. It will mostly be used for gaming But i don't have that much money to spend. The most I can spend is around $500. I'll need everything except a monitor,keyboard,mouse, and speakers So I was wondering if you guys can do me this favor and show me what to buy and where to get it online. I also need a nice looking case.

Thanks

I'm not very good with finding good deals my self but Newegg is probably the best site for this stuff. Avoid tiger direct, they have a rather bad reputation.

thanks, but i don't know what i'll need.

Well, you can get pretty decent Athlon XP motherboards for under $50, and an Athlon XP 1800+ is around the same price. You will want to get a good video card, and at least 256 megs of Kingston or other high-quality memory.

I'm pretty sure you can put that together for under $500. (I built a similar box for my girlfriend for under $400...)

Here's what I would recommend (most of this from Newegg):

Enermax black Mid-tower case w/ 350 w power supply: $55

Lite-on black DVD drive: $33

Maxtor 80 GB HDD: $77.50

Kingston PC2700 CAS 2.5 DDR RAM: $81

ABIT nForce2 SPP: $71

Athlon XP "Barton" 2500+: $80

Radeon 9500 Pro 128 MB VRAM: ~$100 - 125 on eBay

Total price: $497.50 (assuming you pay $100 for the vid card)

Rationale:
The case isn't something I have any experience with, but it fits the bill of being cheap yet attractive, and the reviewers on newegg really seemed to like it.

The DVD-ROM drive is still an easy choice. I've heard some things about Lite-on recently that worry me, but never in reference to their DVD drives. You can't get a better DVD drive period, and when you throw in that it's the cheapest, it's a no brainer.

The hard drive seemed to be priced in that sweet spot where you pay too much when you move up and lose too much when you move down. It's a Maxtor, of course. A man who never buys anything but Maxtor hard drives will be a happy man.

The Kingston RAM had a good combo of price, performance, and reputation, although I've never personally used them.

Processor is the best dollar for dollar deal in the industry and has been for quite some time. Move down the ladder and you're getting screwed on performance for minimal savings, move up and you're paying too much.

Motherboard was an easy choice. nForce2 with SPP has been known as the best Athlon XP board for a long time.

Video card was a bit tricky. At first I wanted to recommend the Sapphire 9800 pro at $215, which is a phenomenal deal, but that would have put you at least $100 over budget. The 9600 XT was better at $150 but still not great. The Ti4200 is a nice card and can be found for $50-70 on eBay, but I think the best deal right now is the 9500 pro. It's faster than the 9600 XT in most tests, and will stomp a Ti4200. This is because it's built on the same core as the 9700 rather than a "budget" (aka crappy) core like the 9600 series.

*Looks at clock, sees that it's past bedtime* Well, that took a little longer than I wanted it to, but I enjoy this stuff (can you tell?) Hope the new machine works out for you. Good luck!

EDIT: Btw, in case you were wondering, even though it's on a $500 budget, this is not a feeble computer by any stretch of the imagination. This thing would absolutely curbstomp my machine and most other people's as well. So don't feel like you're screwing yourself by only spending $500.

2nd EDIT (then I'm done ): And yes, it will run Half Life 2 and Doom 3.

One last thing. If your $500 budget was meant to be including tax and shipping, then you'll want a GeForce 4 Ti4200 or Ti4600 from eBay instead of the Radeon 9500 Pro.

Well, it won't curbstomp my machine -- bow before my mighty 768 megs of PC2700 DDR and an Athlon XP 2500+, mortals! (Well, then again, my computer has been pulled apart an upgraded more times than I can count...)

But aside from the Lite-on DVD, that seems pretty normal. I'd recommend half.com instead of ebay if you want to get the video card faster, since you won't have to go through the whole bidding process.

As for Lite-On... I don't know. I haven't had the best of experiences with el cheapo CD/DVD drives; I had a nameless 52x drive go belly-up on me last year after about only six months of use.

Maxtor hard drives are inexpensive, but they used to be loud as fuck. They still are loud from what I've heard, although not as bad as the older 5400 RPM drives. Anyway, if you're going for a gaming machine, try to get a drive with an 8MB buffer and not a 2 meg buffer. It'll cost more, but the larger buffer means that it can move files a bit faster. Which is important for things such as loading game levels.

Crayz9000 wrote:Well, it won't curbstomp my machine -- bow before my mighty 768 megs of PC2700 DDR and an Athlon XP 2500+, mortals! (Well, then again, my computer has been pulled apart an upgraded more times than I can count...)

But aside from the Lite-on DVD, that seems pretty normal. I'd recommend half.com instead of ebay if you want to get the video card faster, since you won't have to go through the whole bidding process.

As for Lite-On... I don't know. I haven't had the best of experiences with el cheapo CD/DVD drives; I had a nameless 52x drive go belly-up on me last year after about only six months of use.

But it wasn't a Lite-On, was it? I've had 3 Lite-On drives and haven't had a single problem with any of them, and Newegg customer reviews show that basically nobody ever has problems with them. Of course, I'm talking about DVD ROM and CD-RW drives, that is. Strangely enough, their CD-ROM and DVD+/-RW drives seem a lot sketchier.

Maxtor hard drives are inexpensive, but they used to be loud as fuck. They still are loud from what I've heard, although not as bad as the older 5400 RPM drives. Anyway, if you're going for a gaming machine, try to get a drive with an 8MB buffer and not a 2 meg buffer. It'll cost more, but the larger buffer means that it can move files a bit faster. Which is important for things such as loading game levels.

The one I recommended does have an 8 MB buffer. In any case, Maxtor is the only manufacturer whose drives have a very low probability of going bad before they're so obsolete it won't matter. IBM is clearly the worst in this regard (I can attest first-hand to that), but other companies' reputations for reliability (like Western Digital) aren't much better.

Maxtor drives are not "loud as fuck". I've installed their 40GB 7200RPM drives in both my parent's computers and a 160GB in mine. They are so damn quiet that you can't even hear them spin up when I turn the computers on. I *might* be able to hear them when defragging if I'm lucky.

That being said.....

AMD XP 2600 (Barton) - $109
Asus A7N8X-E - $113.99
256MB Corsair PC2700 DDR - $49 (I'd double that if I were you, so you can take advantage of the dual-channel feature of the motherboard)
Gainward nVidia GFFX 5600XT 128MB AGP 8x - $104
Pro Source Mid-Tower Case w/350W Power - $26

Total: $401.99 w/free shipping via FedEx SuperSaver (3-business day) other than the case. It'll end up being around $15 to ship.

Whatever you pick, don't settle for less than a Barton. That 512kB of cache really does make a difference. You can prolly go for more if you want. This is just something I threw together for darthdavid's thread, with a slight modification.

You will note that I said "used" to be loud as fuck. Have you ever heard some of their old drives?

It's a moot point now. They're all about as quiet.

Some of the guys on the ArsTechnica board hate Lite-On CD-RW drives as they apparently do analyses of their pit patterns, jitter and a bunch of other factors (not public domain, alas, and you need custom firmware to do some of that work). They apparently greatly prefer Plextor drives, but those command a price premium.

Samsung and Seagate make the quietest drives; Western Digital the fastest. Hitachi/IBM no longer have their QA problems and are considered good; Maxtor is no longer very noisy.

Thanks alot guys. I think I'm gonna go with Arthur_Tuxedo recommendation.

*does a victory dance*