hightouch

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May 5, 2006
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I'm looking to build a custom system for the first time this summer and have a budget of around $1200 (w/o monitor or speakers, which I already have). Are there any good builds out there you all would suggest?

Currently running a Pentium 1.7M laptop, ATI 9700M, 1GB Corsair RAM.

I do a lot of heavy graphic design and some gaming (think Oblivion). This isn't nearly powerful enough for some of the print designs I'm doing (anything over 8" starts to slow it down exponentially). If it works well, I'll also be putting Windows Media Center on this new thing to hook it up to my 360 and TV.

Here's basically what I'm looking at right now plus a case and whatever else you all suggest.
Check it out.
 

mesarectifier

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Mar 26, 2006
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I agree with Prozac, the 3800 makes more sense at this budget so that you can spend more on other more important things.

2gb is a MUST, also try to find a board that has 4 DIMM slots - when Vista arrives you're gonna want the ability to upgrade to 3gb or 4gb so you don't experience a performance HIT when upgrading to the 'new' OS. So go with a 2x1gb setup rather than 4x512.
 

steveosazninvazn

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Mar 22, 2006
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I've taken Graphic Design at my school for nearly 9 months now, and from my experience, you're going to need a nVidia Quadro video card, those are designed for Graphic Designers and so forth, a big monitor would help too, but since your budget is only $1200, you could just stick with what you have now. Definitely get at least 2GB of RAM, but I think a single core processor would suffice, unless you plan on running Photoshop and Illustrator at the same time, in which case you should get a dual core CPU, both Intel and AMD should be fine.