Cheap system core upgrade

[EricT]

My younger brother's sytem is broken, and he needs a new computer badly. He's a college student, and therefore is practically broke, and he's also a gamer. So I am trying to build him a cheap system that is still going to have respectable performance.

We are going to use the hard drive, DVD drive, etc from the old computer to save money. I suspect that his PSU is no good, so we want to get a new PSU/case. His old system is a pre-made, and the case has all kinds of funky air ducts, so we are ditching that as well. It's also an AGP system, which makes the video card obsolete.

Here's what I came up with, if you have any suggestions to make cheaper without too much performance loss, I'd appreciate it. I tried to pick stuff just before the elbow of the cost/performance curve.

Cost is about $500+shipping after mail-in rebates.

GIGABYTE GA-EP35-DS3L LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard

CORSAIR Dominator 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)

Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 Wolfdale 2.53GHz

EVGA 512-P3-N801-AR GeForce 8800 GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card

Antec Sonata III 500

 

[EricT]

Thinking of changing video cards to this one:
GIGABYTE GV-RX387512H Radeon HD 3870 512MB

It's about $30 cheaper, equivalent performance, and quieter. In fact, at this price I may even get one to replace my noisy 8800 GTS.

 

[Wolfshadw]

Only two real concerns with your component selection.

The motherboard you chose only has one PATA connection port (typical these days). You won't be able to use more than two PATA drives from your old system (I'm guessing both the hard drive and optical drive(s?) are IDE).

You don't need DDR2-1066 RAM for this system. You can certainly go with slower (and cheaper) RAM. Remember, the FSB is quad pumped (1066/4=266) and memory is double pumped (1066/2=533 or 533/2=266). If you intend to overclock this system, I'd recommend DDR2-800 (still cheaper than the DDR2-1066).

With the money saved, maybe upgrade to a better processor or graphics card.

-Wolf sends

 

[EricT]

Thanks Wolf.

Yes, the current drives are both IDE, and they'll both be upgraded before too long to SATA, so I'm not too worried about that.

I will go with DDR2-800 instead of the 1066, thanks for that suggestion.