OT: If You Were Going To Build A New PC

[Thermodyne]

$500 will get you this. Reliable name brand board, gig of ram, reuse your disk readers/burners-case-PSU-. New PSU, add $30. Very mid level, but good foundation and decent 8X vid card. Add 2 new case fans to make it $500.



Qty Product Description Unit Price Extended Price
Hard Drives

Hitachi 80GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive, Model HDS728080PLA380, OEM Drive Only
Item# N82E16822145082
Status: In Stock

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$63.00

$63.00

Memory (System Memory)

BUFFALO B-Line 184-Pin 512MB DDR PC-3200, Model MS4002-512MB - OEM
Item# N82E16820150619
Status: In Stock

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$39.49

$78.98

Motherboards - Intel

ASUS "P4P800 SE" i865PE Chipset Motherboard for Intel Socket 478 CPU -RETAIL
Item# N82E16813131484
Status: In Stock

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$97.00

$97.00

**This item is warranted through the product manufacturer only. what's this?
Processors

One Day Sale, Ends 4/5/2005 5:30 PM PST
Intel Pentium 4/ 3.0E GHz 800MHz FSB, 1MB L2 Cache, Hyper Threading Technology - Retail
Item# N82E16819116171
Status: In Stock

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$180.99

$180.99

**This item is warranted through the product manufacturer only. what's this?
Video Cards

Sapphire ATI RADEON 9250 Video Card, 256MB DDR, 64-Bit, DVI/TV-Out, 8X AGP, Model "579" -OEM
Item# N82E16814102392
Status: In Stock

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$59.00

$59.00

Product total: $478.97

[Sivran]

Not bad Thermodyne. That Radeon 9250 though, they didn't have anything better? The 9250's rather old. Then again.. video cards are a helluva racket..

[Thermodyne]

Nothing better in that budget range, unless you catch a promo. IMHO, the vid card is easy to update, so is a place to cut cost on an initial build. Also, he could get a comparable NVIDIA card if he prefers that flavor. I put most of the money in the CPU and Main board, as they are the parts that tend to stay in service the longest. One of the biggest mistakes many people make is skimping on the main board. They save $50, but end up with an unstable system. If I was going to push it a little higher, then I’d add another SATA drive and set the pair up as a stripe set. That would give him a noticeable increase in performance. The Vid card only comes into play with a few high end games, and certainly is not needed for SE. If he has concerns about rendering, then we need to have a talk about Vid cards that would break his budget twice over all by themselves.

[NullAshton]

I'd like to put my computer inside a refrigerator. Think of how fast I can overclock it

[Thermodyne]

The fridge can’t deal with the amount of heat that an OC’s pc puts out. Outside in the dead of winter works, just keep the hard drive warm. Liquid polypropylene pre chilled to around 0c works, and is cheap. Fan and dryer duct to winter air works too. But NO2 is the Boss http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20031230/index.html Some real serious OCing going on with these guys. My personal best is 2.9GHz out of a 2GHz Northwood chip air cooled with a Swifty. Just couldn’t get it stable at 3.0 for the coveted 50% OC/air.

I havn’t done any Oc’ing since the Fall of 03, I’m still using the system I built then. But this old box put some serious numbers up for back then. It’s cooled with the stock cooler that AMD shipped with the sample CPU. Couldn’t get anything else back then. All I did was over volt the fan.

http://groups.msn.com/ThermodynesPlace/fx51244ghz.msnw

[Thermodyne]

Here’s a good demonstration of what a stripe set of Raptors will do for performance. Look at the storage performance number in the lower right.

http://groups.msn.com/ThermodynesPla...oto&PhotoID=28

Now that XP64 is final, I might have to move my stuff off of this box and see how it does on 64 bit. Perhaps even invest in some water cooling

[Caduceus]

Liquid cooling, hilarious (yet interesting) Thermodyne... I triple-dog dare you to lick the computer case. LOL

[Sivran]

I have an Athlon XP and a Sempron running on ECS (ie cheapo) mobos. Gotta love them mobo/cpu combos at Fry's. Neither one is unstable, so either ECS is better than people think or I have insane luck--I'm the guy who gets month-plus uptimes out of Win98SE, after all.

Then again, I don't overclock.