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Building a new computer

Started by Zearoth, October 04, 2006, 15:18 hrs

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Zearoth

Hey everyone. Not sure if you guys remember me but I was on here awhile ago posting about how I built my first computer. Well now its time to build myself another one, but this time with decent parts. :P

Anyways, I'm building this computer mainly for gaming and just overall performance, but I want to stay within my budget of about 1200-1400 CDN. This is just for the system along so it should be plenty. The last time I researched computer parts like the mobo, cpu, etc was about a year ago so when I checked newegg and tigerdirect I was COMPLETELY LOST with all this new stuff. Wow, so much has changed!

So right now I feel pretty noob right now and I got to get back to finding out what all these things mean and do.

Anyways, I'm here to ask you guys for a starting point to where to get started. I mainly want to focus on getting a good combination of a motherboard, CPU (AMD preferrably) and a video card. The rest hasn't changed much and I think I will be able to pick the ones that fit best with my project. Any help or suggested builds would be appreciated!

Thanks
"Hard work pays off in the future... Laziness pays off now..."

freelance

am2 is the newest socket type out by amd and (in the uk) is by far the cheapest for mobos and cpu's. you want a pci express graphics card (dont know if there are any agp am2 mobo's out there) and ddr2 memory, which i belive again is the only format supported by am2 :) if your going for performance then get a sli motherboard (2x gfx cards) and a amd fx processor.
ok so the following is my pc:
asus M2N4-SLI, athlon X2 5000+ cpu, geforce 7600GT , 80gb MAXTOR SATAII hdd, 4gb ddr2 ram, silverstone edumon (google it and u'll find it!!!) sata dvd rw dual layer, 6x usb 2, and tv card (with video recorder ps2 etc)

Buffalo2102

What freelance said but I would hesitate before recommending a SLI setup.  There are plenty of new high-end graphics boards that will out-perform the current mid-range SLI offerings and in a lot of cases will be cheaper.  Also, the graphics card market is moving very fast at the moment with the arrival of quad SLI and Direct X 10.  SLI will likely be overkill for most users.  You can always buy a SLI board and use a single card until you need SLI but it is likely that the market will have moved on again by the time that happens.
Vista x64 Home Premium. Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Abit IP35, 4 Gig Kingston HyperX PC8500C5 DDR2, GTX260, Creative X-Fi Extreme Gamer, Antec 900 Gaming Case.

Ace

Waiting will always change the playing field dramatically; now that there are two dual core offerings out that both "work" there's already the quad-core in the plans.  Only thing I'd add, in having just bought an SLI mobo, is that the whole point is to MATCH your video cards exactly (same brand, same model..) if you're going to run two.  So, if like me you pick up say an eVGA 7600GT KO nvidia card then you have to get another one, if you're going to expand later.  So my quest becomes watching the price of that, and should it hit a "sweet spot" ($60 or so) maybe pounce and double them up.  Probably the main decision now is to go with the new Intel core-duo chip or the AMD X2 duo or an AMD 64 single (plus knowing what your board supports if you change that).  Like with the SLI arrangement, the DDR2 requires two identical memory sticks, to share that load.  And we've noted here how the price has jumped for that since I picked up my 2 GB (2 1GB sticks) of 6400 Patriot memory for mine.

Ace; shopping is fun.  And don't wait, even if Scuzzy says you should.
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