My 4 year old laptop is starting to show its age. Within the couple months i'm going to put together a midrange system, nothing hardcore. So far i've picked: Asus A8N-SLI Motherboard Athlon 3800+ x2 Antec 450W case with 120mm case fan That's what i'll get in my first order. The second order will be: Ram - Not sure what to get, any suggestions? Video Card - Probably going to go with a 7800GT, Looking around the 300-350USD mark. DVD Writer - Probably an LG or Samsung Drive Hard Drive - 250GB Segate. Has anyone used a Raptor Drive? Are they worth the price. The last piece is the LCD monitor. Any suggestions for that?
You want some SD DDR RAM, PC3200 to PC4000 from OCZ, Geil or Corsair. Good choice of GPU. Raptors are fast. I notice a real difference over other drives with mine, will need to buy a few though to get the storage you want. Not good with monitors particuarly.
Ram - Ballistix PC4000 (1) 1GB, Ballistix PC4000 (1) 512MB Video card - ATI X850XT PCI-E (Around $320) DVD Writer - LaCie LightScribe 16x DVD+/-RW internal drive ($71 to $82, you will love yourself for this drive, laser etches labels while burning) Hard Drive - Definately get the Seagate Barracuda SATA drive (If your mobo supports SATA-II get the Western Digital Caviar (300 MB/s and 16mb buffer, compared to typical 150 MB/s and 8mb buffers found in SATA-I) Monitor: Samsung SyncMaster 730B 17" LCD, 1280x1024 max, 1 15-pin D-sub connector (Standard VGA), 1 DVI-D connector, dot pitch: 0.264 Mm and it comes in black ($299)
If he's getting a dual channel chipset shouldn't he be getting 2 sticks of identical RAM ? Also, it's a Western Digital Raptor, not a Seagate ... <A BORDER="0" HREF="http://www.supercars.net/PitLane?displayFAQ=y"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="pitlane/emoticons/tongue.gif"></A>
Which is why I edited to Barracuda <A BORDER="0" HREF="http://www.supercars.net/PitLane?displayFAQ=y"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="pitlane/emoticons/smile.gif"></A> He can, but 2 GB may be a little much right now. Put the 1GB on the first bank and the 512 on the 2nd bank.
Then it doesn't do duel channel. Besides 2 GB isn'øt too much anymore with games like Doom3, Q4 while you have a ton of other programs in the background.
http://tinyurl.com/7zch5 for the vid card. same price as a normal 7800GT, but its OCed, come with Lifetime warranty, a shirt, and teflon mouse feet.
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1476861&CatId=1560 How much better is the X850XT over the 7800GT? Also what's the response on the monitor?
forgot you were canadian. tigerdirect.ca has it for $473 canadian, overpriced. uhh. amazon has it for $400usd. there is currently a $30 rebate apparently.
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=16412&vpn=256-P2-N517-AX&manufacture=eVGA&promoid=1066 $390 CAD for this one. This is the one i'm leaning towards right now.
I really have no personal preference. The main reason i'm asking iss because the 7800GT blows away the 6800 Ultra and I thought the 6800 Ultra was very comparable to the X850.
8ms Another correction, the X850XT *PE* is the price I had. Standard 540 MHz core speed and 590 MHz memory speed. Has been safely overclocked to 675 MHz core speed and 625 MHz memory speed with water cooling. Its just my personal preference to use ATI. 3DMark05 tells a completely different story, 7800GTs usually score in the 7,000 range on good systems, the XT850XT PE scores in the mid to upper 6,000 range on good systems. Both of those numbers are from stock units, as I posted above, the XT is fairly overclockable.
Nice rig so far and here's my input. Ram - 1GB Corsair. Video Card - ATI X800 Pro. DVD Writer - I prefer Samsung over LG. Hard Drive - I have a 120gb Western Digital and it's decent.