Is this thread still for use or has nobody built a whole machine in 6 weeks?
Anyway, after five and a half years of satisfying performance from my Dell Dimension 8250 (2.8GHz P4, 1GB 1066 Rambus, Radeon 9700), I've finally decided too many games it can't handle are being released, so it's time to set it aside as a secondary machine and get a new one.
This time around I'm not only spending my own money, I'm Dell certified and build a Opti 755 over a lunchbreak. I figured that's good enough of a platform to finally pick out my own hardware and build a PC. I haven't stayed knowledgeable on what's good or works well together, so more than anything I'd like advice and suggestions on what will work well together, especially if it looks like I've missed an important incompatibility.
I'm looking for a decent gaming/photoshop rig that will last at least a year or two before upgrading video & RAM or similar. I handled being out of date pretty well so I'm mostly looking to get a good bang for my buck out of good but not cutting-edge hardware. My budget is looking to be aimed at $1200 without mice, keyboard, and monitor.
So far I have this stuff picked out:
ASUS P5Q-E Motherboard and
Intel 2.4GHz Quad-Core. A co-worker reccomended an ASUS board with Intel processor, which was also my intention. The board seems to have a good amount of ports for my needs and good reviews for it and similar models, set at a good price. I might go with a variant depending on what RAM I end up with. The processor looks to be the de facto quad-core on NewEgg, and I'm inclined to spend the extra money over a duo.
Antec mid tower ATX case with 500W PSU. I shopped around for something that would hold everything I could need comfortably, and a power supply with decent wattage that wasn't more expensive than the case. Plus it looks pretty good.
I included a
CPU heatsink from the mobo's manufacturer that went with the LGA 775 processor both were made for.
Radeon's 4850 video card is rather new but quite nicely priced for still being competitive. That one seems to have the best pricing and reviews out of all the manufacturers. The 4870 has a slightly faster core clock but for $100 I'd say it isn't worth it. I'll spend the cash on RAM and get a new card when I'm hurting for more than just clock speed.
I have a Seagate 500GB SATA drive and some Samsung drives picked out for my disk-reading needs, but they're not part of my main concerns.
All I got left to pick with confidence is memory and an OS, which I really could use advice. I originally shopped around for some DDR2 1200 models but most of them seemed to have overstated speeds or designed with specific chipsets in mind. I currently have put a pair of
2GB OCZ Reaper 8500 RAM on my wishlist, but beyond being considered 'bargain memory' with tall heatsinks I don't feel very sure about the matter. I've been using 1066 Rambus for most of this decade so all I know is I like fast memory. Depending on what OS I opt for I might go for 8GB if it and 64 bits would give me enough of a performance boost.
No opinion on the OS right now. I need something for gaming, and one of our IT interns said he's using Windows Server 2008 as it's compatible with Vista but lighter on resource use. Even if that's true I wouldn't touch its $700 retail price. Vista might just be the simpler answer in the long run.
To top that all off, my brother is looking to upgrade his 7-year old Dell as well (reason one being WinME is a shrew, reason two being Spore). He doesn't need it for high-end or future games but I'd like to build it around my configuration or something close to it. I was thinking going with less RAM and one of those spiffy Radeon 1950 cards, but I'm open to suggestions of where I can leave out the excess oomph and save him another hundred bucks or so.
), dual-booting with XP Pro in case something doesn't work.
