New Comp

well im considering making a new comp and was wondering wat you guys thought of the performance vs. cost of the parts i have chosen.

Core2 duo e6420
Radeon x1950 pro
1gb ddr2 RAM
160gb Sata HDD
19" LCD
Windows XP Home

The whole system will cost around US$1200.


Also some suggestion on a nice cheap Motherboard would be good. Thnx

For motherboard I'd say the DFI Infinity 975X (Socket 775) will do you nicely. I don't have one as I'm an AMD user but all the people I know with one say it's a great board for the price.

Also, why not stick another 1GB in there too? You can pick an OCZ 2GB PC2-8500 pack up for £150 these days.

hmmm, im looking for something a bit cheaper though, somewhere below the $100 price range. And also which would be a better CPU to got for? AMD's x2 or Intels C2D?

Intel Core 2 Duo definitely. and about the ram, 1gb is pretty much below average now, so i'd recommend 2gb.

and grats for choosing XP. less compatibility issues than vista (at the moment).

I dunno if you have the money, but a Intel core 2 quad would surely make your PC the bomb! Though not many applications nowadays would fully utilize such multi-threaded system. Prepare for the future you see.

thnx for the advise guys, ya since the C2D's are gonna be dropping in price soon i think ill go for 2gb RAM. Quad's too expensieve for me

lol well i was gonna go for vista, but after hearing so many reports of compatability issues with games i think ill stick with xp. Maybe get vista when sp1 comes out

AFAIK those compability issues are only from upgrades, not fresh installs. My Vista( fresh install ) works fine.

for the ram make sure that your motherboard supports the clock speed it runs at, because the ram that was mentioned above i dont belive is supported at its clock speed, you could easily get away with 1 gig of memory but its still nice to have 2 gigs ( though mobo's as of now cant utilize more than roughly 2.5 gigs of ram but it can support much more )

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820220144

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820145589 << i reccomend this provided that your motherboard you choose will support it i have just one of those and it works beautifully

Not a bad system you've got picked out there, though I would recommend upgrading to 2GB of RAM if you ever want to upgrade to vista.

On a side note, vista isn't really as bad as people make it out to be. My system is roughly the power as the one you're building (a little less, actually), and it runs Vista like a champ. There are some issues with driver compatibility, but that's the fault of the manufacturer more then Microsoft, since the beta and RCs were out for damn near 6-8 months before the OS even hit the market, and they were just too lazy to try making drivers for it (*cough CREATIVE cough*). Admittedly, the new WDDM driver model is something people have to learn to program around, but even so, some companies haven't even tried, and that pisses me off...

Ok, enough with the rant. System looks good to me otherwise *thumbs u*

Ohh, one more question though, what's the LCD your getting, out of curiosity?

If you mean the board and RAM that I mentioned then it's fully compatible.

not sure about which lcd atm, still looking around for the best deal. And is there much of a performance difference between say a $100 and $200 stick of RAM? or is it just reliability?

If you don't plan to overclock (and I mean really push, a lot) a midpriced value ram serves your purposes just mighty fine. You don't generally want to go to handpicked Corsair or Ocz sticks that cost doubly or thrice as much. Performance difference is negligible, say about 1-2%. Better to invest that money in a godly power supply, which is prolly the component with the most longevity besides your display.

975 mobos are btw older technology than ones with 965 chips, I'd look for AB9 from Abit, or some PB5 series from Asus, for example.

Well i found 2 motherboards which i cannot choose between.As far as overclocking goes with only using stock cooling, which board would be the best buy?

http://www.nzoczone.com/product_info...roducts_id=141
(used in toms overclocking guide part 3: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/...-guide-part-1/)

and

http://www.pcpoint.co.nz/product_inf...293be6ed40a3f6

Both are solid choices and won't be the bottleneck if you overclock with stock cooling only (I don't think you can push FSB over mobo's limits, it's the cpu temp that will set the limit). However, there's something wrong with the pricing - AB9 should be 10-15% less expensive, not 1.5 times as expensive as Gigabyte ds3. I didn't bother looking up exchange rate for nz$, but I think you definetly should with Gigabyte model if it's 180$ vs 270$ tag on AB9. Is the first price exempt of taxes? And if so, how much would it be after that?

I personally have AB9 pro, which is a slightly improved version (in terms of SATA and USB ports) of AB9, but I'd have gone with the lower specced AB9 if it had not been a good offer making the price difference negligible.

And get the futures quad cpu instead of todays

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/11/...ield_released/

ok well i think ill go with the ds3 thnx