Building a new PC

What's your budget? And why are you buying an old processor, and ram yet a top of the line video card?

Core 2 duo is what you should be getting.

Looks like a fairly good system. If you used an X2 4200+ and a Shuttle (tiny case+tiny motherboard) instead of the full sized Asus you'd have what I have. I've found the dual core comes in very handy - I can throw around heavy applications without slowdown (be applying a photoshop effect in one window while compiling in vs in another).

At the moment I would not recommend a Maxtor. Seagate is likely the easiest choice, followed by Western Digital.

Price wise the 7900 GT is a good deal assuming you spend that kind of money on video cards. It's a good card (perhaps even the best card at the moment) if you want to drop a decent sum of money to get high performance, but don't want to be spending as much as the rest of your system to buy some bleeding edge GTX/SLI setup. If you don't spend that kind of money on video cards, or are really wanting to upgrade to DX10 with a compatible card in the near future, you might consider a 7600 model instead.

Yes, it will run Vista (though all the 3rd party drivers might not be ready until launch, meaning it might not run Vista during the beta period). In fact you'll find Vista really isn't that hard to run: most machines bought in the last 2 years will run it if given a minimal DX9 video card (the newest integrated intel video chipset are enough to run Vista).

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What's your budget?

About £900 (GBP). That will also have to pay for a 17"-19" TFT Monitor, as I'm still using a huge CRT and desk space will be an issue.

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If you used an X2 4200+ and a Shuttle (tiny case+tiny motherboard) instead of the full sized Asus you'd have what I have. I've found the dual core comes in very handy.

Hmm, I think I would prefer to stay with a full size motherboard / case. Will the motherboard listed take the X2 series? Ignore that, I just checked, it does. [grin]

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If you don't spend that kind of money on video cards, or are really wanting to upgrade to DX10 with a compatible card in the near future, you might consider a 7600 model instead.

Yeah, I'll probably be wanting to change my card to a Nvidia 8 series as soon as they're available, so I'll look into the 7600. Thanks.

Why not socket AM2 if you're going with AMD?
Same price, less heat/power consumption (as far as I know), one or two percent better performance, and much better upgrade path.

You should obviousely use DDR2 memory, and AM2 socket.

Yes, i agree with the guy who posted above me, DDR2 memory and socket AM2. I have a shuttle, and as beautiful as they are, upgrading is a pain, as i just found out, this mobo is specifically designed and built for this machine so i can't upgrade it :D So i have socket 939 (which runs athlon, athlon 64 and (most of the) FX series, but ideally i want a sexy 940 pin, which is our AM2, dual core AMDs. One pin.... ONE PIN! very annoying :D.

So yeah, to summarise, AM2+DDR2+big mobo(as you want). My brother just got a new computer at a computer fair this morning and got an X2 4200+, 512MB nVidia 7300, gig of RAM and asus mobo, dvd drive etc (no screen/keyboard/mouse) all for £555 inc. vat. more powerful than my shuttle and half yet half the price :D (well, my shuttle is 2 years old now... but still beautiful :D). Hmm, that was a bigger summary than i had hoped for... I ramble way too much :D

I also will have to say yes to AM2. It will hopefully give you better options in the future when upgrading. It lso supports DDR2 RAM. And on RAM, make sure you get something with good timings. On a powerful computer slow RAM with bad timings can really hurt performance.

Thanks for all the help. I'll probably be putting the order in within the next 3 weeks, so once I have figured out exactly what to get I might post the specs to see what you all think.

1. If you are not going dualcore or getting the fastest nondualcore cpu at least get 1MB L2 Cache to make up for performance loss compared to even the slowest dualcore cpu.So yes it's worth added cost.
2. Yes this is true but I believe Maxtor released a fix .Anyways I would go with a Seagate drive anyday anyways since they come with standard 5year warranty vs 1year for Maxtor.
3. There is not even any comparison between a 7900gt and fx5200. I have an old fx5200 card that I still use for testing and it wasn't even able to run AOE3. With my 7900gt card I can run the game with all the graphics maxed out and not have any slowdowns so yeah it a 100x improvement!
4. This is microsoft's current hardware requirements for Vista and as far as I can tell the system you are building meets them.

Okay, based on the advice everyone has given me so far, I've come up with a new spec. which still falls within my price range:

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ (Socket AM2 2x512kb Cache)


• Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe, nForce 570 SLI, DDR2, PCI-e x16


• Corsair, 2048mb (2x1gb) DDR2 SDRAM PC5400 (675mhz)


• Gainward GeForce 7600GT 256mb GDDR3, PCI-e


• Western Digital Caviar SE16 250gb SATA2


• Samsung 19" LCD Syncmaster 920N TCO-99 Monitor, (700:1, 8ms)

C&C are very much appreciated, thanks!

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Original post by AdamWebb 1) Which processor would you advise for this system? I don't intend on going Dual-core, so I was thinking about the Athlon 64 3800+ "Venice". The "San Diego" chips have a 1mb L2 Cache, would you say this is worth the added cost?

At the moment, I do not feel that the larger AMD caches are worth it. AMD has an advantage over Intel in this area, since the memory controller is on the CPU itself, and it uses Hypertransport as well.

This means that accessing memory for AMD chips is a lot quicker than Intel, so this pretty well lessens the need for huge caches, since the small cache is able to be filled almost as fast as it is used up.

I do have a concern with your choice of a single core processor though; the 3800 is only $112, wheras a dual core 3800 is only $40 more, for $150. Dual core is simply amazing when it comes to multi-tasking, and I would never build a computer without it again.

Also, if you're looking for a future upgrade path, you may want to consider opting for AM2 instead of 939, since 939 is scheduled to be discontinued before the year ends, and you won't be able to upgrade your processor.

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2) I've heard about some problems Maxtor HDD have with the nForce 3/4 Motherboards, can anyone confirm this?

I haven't heard this myself, but Maxtor isn't really known for reliability in the first place. I'd have to go with Seagate instead.

I reread the post I'm drunk lol going to start over. If you're going to drop all that money on an SLI system I offer a better price/performance setup. History has shown SLI is NOT cost effective under any circumstances. At best you will break even if you're lucky. If you want blazing performance forget AMD. If you want to play games with this system check benchmarks for what games you want to play if you know. Nvidia and ATI actually offer quite different performance on different games. As far as the processor goes the Conroe smokes everything AMD does in every bench (sub $200 dollar range), if you can get one at a reasonable price it will do more for your system than anything else.