A PC building advice thread. How novel

I’ve gotten the following recommendation from a friend on what I should build, I offer it here for critique. At least I’m not starting from nothing with “What should I build?!”

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego …$223.00
Asus A8N-SLI Premium …$166.99
OCZ EL Platinum Revision 2 1GB(2X512)…$167.41
XFX PVT42GUAD7 GF6800GS…$195.00
Lian-Li P6070APLUS…$159.00
Antec TruepowerII TPII-550 550W…$ 89.99

I think the prices he was quoting were from Newegg, which is where I’d likely order from. I’m pretty set on AMD, and so likely that processor, everything else I’m pretty flexible on. The only thing I’m bringing over from my old PC are the DVD and hard drives. Any obvious problems or recommendations from this setup? I can go a little higher in price, I was thinking maybe on the video card, but I’m not sure.

Looks good. I’d be happy playing 1024x768 games on it and doing some photochoppery between program builds.

A few notes:
Your power supply is overkill by about 100W – I run a nine disk RAID fileserver using an Antec 480W – but hey, no one ever died from having too much power. Except a few heads of state, but that’s not the kind of power we’re talking about here.

Did your old PC have a SATA hard drive? If your answer is no, you should buy a new SATA hard drive for your boot drive, and turn your old hard drive into a data drive for pr0n storage or something. SATA hard drives are faster than the old parallel cable hard drives. Your boot times will be snappier.

Processor-wise, you could get an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ or 4200+ and delve into the realm of multi-core computing. Going multi-core may push out the obscelence of the CPU by about a year (and I’m pulling that number out my gut).

Pay a little more and get a 6800GT.

Fair point, but I got slightly burned by either a bad power supply or not enough power before, so I’m erring on the side of too much this round.

SATA is the plan, but I can push that off a paycheck or two. Right now I have two drives, using the smaller one for booting, so it won’t kill me to use it for booting on the new system for a month or two and then just convert it to storage as well when I can spring for a nice SATA.

What kind of price hike is that gonna be? Will that need a new mobo as well?

An Athon 64 X2 3800+ (manchester core) is $299.40 at ZipZoomFly.

Your motherboard is compatible.

XFX PVT42GUAD7 GF6800GS…$195.00

btw, there was a $5 price increase on this recently. Newegg wants $205 shipped. Zipzoom saves you $5 here.

ZipZoomFly saves you $1 off these two items as well (because Newegg has expensive shipping). So, that’s like $7 credit towards a possible cpu upgrade or a drink + tip at a really expensive bar.

If you’re not going to upgrade your CPU, you should still buy it from ZipZoomFly, because ZipZoomFly has your Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego for $214.70 shipped. Newegg wants $235 for it this week.

Lian-Li P6070APLUS…$159.00
Antec TruepowerII TPII-550 550W…$ 89.99

I have that mobo with a X2 3800+ and a gig less RAM (and a 500GB SATA drive). It’s very nice and very fast - I’m glad I took the plunge to go dual core.

All I’ve ever heard is praise for Newegg, especially about returns if you get bad hardware. I’ve never heard of zipzoomfly till this thread, have I just been out of the loop? Are they reliable, good customer service and all that jazz?

Yup. ZipZoomFly, Mwave, and Newegg are the “big three”. There’s also Monarch Computer, which I think has been taking mwave’s place.

QT3 Threads:

[url=http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=22972]
Newegg still a good place to shop?

[url=http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=13312]
Newegg and who else?

Sweet I was looking at the 4400+ 64 x2, looks like they’ve gone down in price.

Chiming in with the X2 crowd. If you ever multitask, you’ll like it. Well worth the price delta. And games will be supporting dual-core soon enough.

GS is definitely the bang-for-the-buck vid card right now. (Destarious, it benchmarks the same or slightly better than the GT, despite the disparity in some specs.)

Thanks for the info guys, everything’s been ordered except the video card.

I went with th 3800+ X2, opted for 2 gigs of ram, and got some Lian Li case that I don’t think is the exact one mentioned in my first post, stuck with the same motherboard and powersupply.

For the video card, I’m going to Best Buy to pick up a BFG 7800 GT in the morning for $300 (if I remember to send the stupid rebate, $350 otherwise).

Thanks for the heads up on ZipZoomFly as well, I ended up ordering from there and NewEgg. Next stop, Battlefield 2! (or maybe I’ll disappear into City of Heros again once I have a stable machine)