[Zandro]

Hey guys,

I'm thinking about building a new PC. Never actually assembled one together, so it should be an interesting venture. I'm looking to spend about $1000 give or take $200 or so. I don't plan on any serious gaming or anything... the most gaming that I do is World of Warcraft for the most part. If this system will run WoW well enough, then it'll be good enough for me. Here's a list of the parts I got so far:

Case: RAIDMAX xB ATX-528B Black SECC Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail
$20 -- A basic case, with some room for expansion.

Power Supply: Ultra / X-Finity / 600-Watt / ATX / Dual 80mm Fan / SATA-Ready / SLI Ready / Black / Power Supply
$80 -- I essentially was looking for a decent PS which was SLI capable.

Motherboard:
ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe Wireless Edition Socket AM2 NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI MCP ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
$200 -- Seemed to be a good mobo which was both SLI capable and Socket AM-2 type.

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 2.20GHz / 1MB Cache / 2000MHz FSB / Socket AM2 / Dual-Core (Windsor) / Processor with Fan
$200 -- Looked like a decent AM2 type processor.

Graphics card:
XFX PVT73GUGD3 Geforce 7600GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card - Retail
$150 -- I wanted a card that is right now good enough to run WoW, and at the same time is SLI capable, so that down the road I can add another to improve on it. What do you guys think?

Hard Drive:
Western Digital Caviar SE WD800JD 80GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
$50 -- Just a WD HDD, 80 GB is enough for me.

Sound Card:
Creative Sound Blaster SB0570 Audigy SE 7.1 Channels 24-bit 96KHz PCI Interface Sound Card - OEM
$30 -- Always been a fan of Creative. I'm not too concerned about sound, I don't plan on anything really loud. I basically wanted a sound card that will work with the speakers I'm buying...

Speakers: Creative Inspire P7800 90 Watts 7.1 Speaker - Retail
$80 -- I currently have the Inspire 5.1 that I bought way back in the day for $100, and they've worked fine. I figured this would be a decent enough upgrade, for a cheaper price too, what do you guys think?


The above are the main parts I'm worried about. I'm not too concerned about the other stuff like the RAM, CD/DVD drive, and stuff.

The monitor I'm stumped about. My budget for it is just about $200, and I'd really love to have a 19 inch LCD, preferably black in color. Do you guys know of any such ones?


So yeah, please take a look at these parts and let me know what you guys think. Feel free to critique and all that good stuff, I appreciate it!

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Seems fine, i wouldnt put to much into SLI you seem a little misinformed as to its benefits unless you intend to use a high resolution monitor adding a second card later will yield minimal performance boost especially when you consider the extra you are spending on Mobo and PSU to get SLI, on your budget you might be better getting something slightly cheaper for the PSU and Mobo maybe spend that money on a better case. You dont need to change the PSU that one is fine quality wise if you can get cheaper with the same quality level and 500Wish or better then do that.

Make sure you get DDR2 memory not DDR. For the monitor Viewsonic or Samsung are your best bet for quality and price, samsung usually is very cheap.

You might want to get a HDD with a 16Mb cache, you also get more GB/$ at 160Gb-250Gb.

[warriorscot]

Seems fine, i wouldnt put to much into SLI you seem a little misinformed as to its benefits unless you intend to use a high resolution monitor adding a second card later will yield minimal performance boost especially when you consider the extra you are spending on Mobo and PSU to get SLI, on your budget you might be better getting something slightly cheaper for the PSU and Mobo maybe spend that money on a better case. You dont need to change the PSU that one is fine quality wise if you can get cheaper with the same quality level and 500Wish or better then do that.

Make sure you get DDR2 memory not DDR. For the monitor Viewsonic or Samsung are your best bet for quality and price, samsung usually is very cheap.

You might want to get a HDD with a 16Mb cache, you also get more GB/$ at 160Gb-250Gb.

[Zandro]

Thanks for the quick reply.

So you think that the SLI capability on a mobo bumps the price up considerably? In that case, do you know of any mobo's that are similar in terms of quality to the one I listed, but without SLI?

If 500W is enough, then yeah, I can get a 500W version of the same PSU for about $10 less.

What better cases out there do you recommend? I'd really like to not spend too much more on a case, I basically want something I can work with, nothing too fancy.

For a better hard drive, how does either of these 2 sound?

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822144701
or
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822136062


Thanks!

[warriorscot]

AS you can see the difference in price at 250Gb is quite small so i would get that also will offer better performance than the original 80Gb.

Well SLI bumps up the price but there are also varying levels of SLI you picked there one of the most expensive which has two full 16x lanes. you get cheaper ones that have just 16x for the two slots which are cheaper. You also get models without SLI just look not one in particular to really reccomend, i usually start looking at MSI motherboards from experience i tend to go with MSI personally but they also have good documentation and its easy to understand the product range look around see if you can find something Abit and Gigabyte are also good i generally dont use Asus for AMD. Crossfire motherboards here are significantly cheaper almost a third off the price of a near identical SLI board. And single slot 570 ultra boards are also about half the price of the mobo you picked.

Case antec or coolermaster do quality cheap cases Antec also make excellent PSUs, you might check out the sonata 2 its one of the best deals right now because its an excellent noise reducing case but comes with a good PSU as well. Raidmax cases arent usually very good when it comes to quality they are also butt ugly, pays off to spend a little more on a case its also one of the few components that will rarely fall prey to the march of technology so you can use the same case for many years.

[happyrock]

you can also check out sharkyextreme for their $ 1000.00 value gaming rigs..one intel based and one AMD based...lists all the components for both

http://www.sharkyext...cle.php/3633106