I'm finally upgrading our gaming 2 year-old PC.
I'm taking the case, screen, keyboard, mouse, optical drive, and PSU from the existing gaming PC.
Here are the components I'm considering. I could probably do cheaper by buying all around, but I like Newegg, and I like getting everything in one place.
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L250S0 250GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM $74.99
Open Box: ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 Socket 939 ULi M1695 ATX AMD Motherboard - OEM $35.99
XFX PVT42EUDE3 Geforce 6800 XTreme 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card - Retail $129.00 ($95 after rebate)
BUFFALO Select 1GB (2 x 512MB ) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model DD4002-K1G/BR - Retail $76.99
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Venice 2000MHz HT Socket 939 Processor Model ADA3200BPBOX - Retail $135.00
Total: $428.96
What do y'all think?
Thanks for the input.
Well, first off, depending on what you value your time at, it could be that simply going to NewEgg could simply win up being the best option; I would know, having spent a few hundred hours comparing prices over the past months... Most of the time, NewEgg
does come out on top.
As for the components you've selected:[*:4945a2ed11]
Hard Drive: some people like Maxtor drives; I'm not really one of them. Admitedly, while I've never had a Maxtor drive fail on ME, they've failed pretty often on other people; my guess is that Maxtor drives particularly dislike heat. (I've never had any opf my HDDs fail, BTW) I personally recommend sticking to only three brands: Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital. (WD) However, it's really your choice.
[*:4945a2ed11]
Motherboard: That's a particularly solid board, although I still urge cation when deciding to get an open-box component. That model does boast solid reliability and gaming performance, suprising for a non nForce-based board. However, isn't that the model that comes with both AGP and PCI-express? Granted, it might be the cheapest, but to me it would just seem funny getting the one good S939 board with both slots, when I would never use the AGP slot.
[*:4945a2ed11]
Video Card: exactly what model "suffix" does it have? It implies that it's an "6800XT," which is NOT good; it may have GDDR-3 memory, but it has 8 of its pixel pipelines disabled. For that price range, I can't help but think that there might be some better ideas; it seems that he X850XT and 7600GT would be better. (see further down for more on that)
[*:4945a2ed11]
RAM: Buffalo is more of a third-party brand. As such, you can't really be sure who's supplying their chips. Although you're likely not going to have any problems with it, most people prefer memory from more known brands like Corsair, which always use chips made by Samsung, the best maker of RAM chips.
[*:4945a2ed11]
CPU: Although technically "old," You still really can't go wrong with a Venice-core, especially if you're on a budget. The only improvements you could really make here would be if you were comfortable with excessive overclocking, or were ready to buy a more expensive chip.Now, perhaps the real puzzling debate here is on the video card; people are quick to give the crown in this range to any one card, but the two favorites are the X850XT and the 7600GT.
However, it's tricky to compare them, because they differ pretty drastically, and in ways that have clear effects on performance, but differences that go both ways.
I think that it would come down to what games you intend to play, and how you intend to play them. The 7600GT's main strength is its SM 3.0 support. This is something that the X850XT doesn't have, and there's no way to compensate for it.
On the flip side, the X850XT may SEEM to be slower, by virtue of being clocked, in the core and RAM respectively, at 520MHz and 1080MHz, compared to 560MHz and 1400MHz for the GeForce 7600GT. However, clock speeds only tell half of the story; the 7600GT has only 12 "pixel pipelines," (it's really an outdated term, but it works enough for discussion here) while the X850XT has 16. Likewise, the X850XT has a 256-bit RAM interface, while the 7600GT's is only 128-bit; in other words, in spite of the clock speed difference, the 7600GT has only some 65% of the actual RAM bandwidth (speed) of the X850XT.
Either one will be good enough for today's games, and even tomorrow's games. However, it should be noted that the 7600GT will be stronger at lower resolutions, as well as more texture-intensive games (like
Quake 4 and
Call of Duty 2) while the X850XT will be best at higher resolutions (due to its higher memory bandwidth) and more shader-intensive games, particularly those that use SM 2.0, like
Oblivion. (
Oblivion is suprisingly ATi-friendly; that X850XT might give a
7800GTX a run for its money)
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