Thinking of building a computer - review potential components

[Rankenphile]

So I'm going to be building a new rig in about a month. I'm doing some preliminary windowshopping on NewEgg and have put together the following computer.

Keep in mind, I'm nopt on a huge budget, I want to keep the total build under $1500, ideally as close to $1000 as possible for the initial build. I will be upgrading in parts down the road - second vid card, additional stick of ram, sound card, etc.

With that in mind, please give me your thoughts on the following components:

COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UW Black Computer Case

ASUS A8N-SLI Premium ATX AMD Motherboard

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ 1GHz FSB Socket 939 Processor

GIGABYTE Geforce 6800GS GV-NX68G256D-B Video Card

ASPIRE ATX-AS520W BLACK 520W Power Supply

Western Digital Caviar SE 200GB 3.5" IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive

CORSAIR XMS 1GB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM

Rosewill R912E Black 19" 8ms LCD Monitor

Microsoft Windows XP Pro

Your thoughts? Again, I'm on a budget and can't afford to go all out, but want to be able to game on this rig for at least a year or two, and it seems to me I've left enough room for upgrades and such down the road that it should make up for it. I just want a new rig to be able to play ELder Scrolls: Oblivion and the occasional BF2 game, among other greats coming out soon.

[public_eyesore]

if i was you, i'd try and spring the extra cash for a 3800x2 proc and a 7800gt, otherwise everything looks great.

[Rankenphile]

You know, for the extra $250 that would const, I'm not convinced I would see the jump in performance to justify it. I know the 7800 is a hulk, and I'm still thinking about doing it, but geez, that's a lot of extra dough to toss down for a video card. I'm leaving the SLI slot there so I can always get a second 6800GS to match, which should really help the performance, about 6 months or so down the road, once they become much cheaper and the cost/performance ratio becomes a bit more realistic.

I jsut don't want to spend too much on this rig - I'm just now getting out of debt from my surgery bills, my bills from Christmas and a recent HUGE shopping trip for cabinetry, so I don't want to dig myself too big a hole right off the bat.


Also - what are the differences between the letter sets that follow the numbers in the 6800/7800 series video cards (GS, GT, etc etc)?

[OvRiDe]

On the hdd selection.. I would consider this one.
Same capacity and its 3.0GB/s SATA II. Since the mobo you picked supports it, and its only $3 more. There is a 250GB version of the same drive for $103. Also I believe the letters on the end of the 6800 boil down to clock speeds of the GPU, but Im not 100% on that.

I also agree with public_eyesore on the X2, I hear the latest Q4 patch enables multi processing support, but it does add $100 to the processor allotment..

[Rankenphile]

Cool, thx. That HDD is awesome, that will work well.

What do you guys know about WinXP 64? Is there a noticeable performance improvement? I've heard horror stories about driver issues and such, but haven't found any really good reviews or articles explaining the differences.

Is it worth getting now, or should I just wait for Vista to roll out and stabilize?

[Malignus Wingnut]

Ehh, you've got a while until the 64 bit era REALLY starts. Go ahead and stick with XP for now, as it will still be supported for a while.

As for the whole video card debate, it's something I went through when building my new computer. I finally opted for a 7800GT and I have to say there really is no comparison. The performace of it completely justifies, to me, it's cost. Look into eVGA's line of 7800Gts, mine was 295 dollars, and they have promos for free stuff all the time.

the 6800GS will handle the games you listed just fine, however if an investment for the future is what you want, go for the 7800. You can also wait until the 7900ultra is released, at which time the 7800 line price should drop by a good 50 dollars...along with every other line below it.

Also, under the processor debate, dual core processors are currently only the choice for people who plan to do audio/video editing. In gaming the single core processors blow them out of the water.

[hxcguitarist]

by spending about $6-$10 more on the ram you could have a much better cas latency and timing, i.e. this cruicial ram HERE

Edit: i forgot to mention that it is also in dual channel, which aslo increases performance to a certain extent

[Rankenphile]

by spending about $6-$10 more on the ram you could have a much better cas latency and timing, i.e. this cruicial ram HERE

Edit: i forgot to mention that it is also in dual channel, which aslo increases performance to a certain extent

Good to know. Thanks.

[hxcguitarist]

np! just want to help out!

[public_eyesore]

Also - what are the differences between the letter sets that follow the numbers in the 6800/7800 series video cards (GS, GT, etc etc)?

ultra
gs- pci-e version overclocked will beat the ultra, but these are all stock
gt
nu
le
xt

its only 100 bucks more for the 7800gt than the 6800gs, and its as powerful as 6800gs in sli.