BUilding / Buying New Bits For A Mates Rig

[EvilMunky]

Hey all,

im building / helping my mate build his new gaming machine and need a bit of help. I havent read or had anything to do with the new processors so just wanna ask a few questions.

He has about £900 to spare.

I was thinking on an AMD 64 3000+ 939 socket Processor
A high end motherboard - probably Abit / Asus / Gigabyte
High end Grafix Card with Nvidia Chipset. (must be nvidia - dont suggest ATI please)
1 gig of Nice speedy ram (im assuming its 400mhz now for the new processor?) Probably Kingston / Corsair
Couple of 200 gig SATA Disks
Panasonic DVD Dual Layer 16x writer
Audigy 2 (unless the onboard sound is good)
Hes getting a nice Thermaltake case and has a decent power supply sorted out already.

Anything else ive missed?

What are your guys suggestions on the graphix, memory, cpu and mobo????

All help greatfully received.

[-mb-]

With that budget you should be able to aim higher than a 3000+ I think. Maybe a 3200+ or 3400+.
An nVidia 6800GT 256MB. (Manufacturer "au choix" - look at cooling solutions and software bundles, mechanically they're the same; only Gainward make overclocked ones)
1Gb of DDR400 would be good. Kingston HyperX, Corsair XMS, OCZ, Crucial BallistiX, or GeiL Golden Dragon.
Seagate Barracuda V 7200.7 range are fast and quiet.
LiteON and NEC are great value optical drive makes.

[EvilMunky]

Cool.
the 6800gt is a PCI-E card ???? if so what mobo???

[Vimeous]

If you're going for big hard discs you may want to consider stretching to a pair of 250Gb Maxtor DiamondMax 10's. They have 16Mb rather than 8Mb cache which may be of use.
I'd also suggest considering NCQ capable drives (some retailers have stopped supplying non-NCQ regardless) but unless Silicon Image release NCQ support for their 3114 RAID chipset it'll be unattainable as noone else seems to be adding support for AMD based motherboards at the moment. (NForce 4 boards should rectify this)

Whatever motherboard you settle for make sure it's a more recent NV250 or NV250GB NForce 3 chipset rather than the NV150's. Of course if you're looking at PCI-Express gfx cards you'll need an NForce 4 based board anyway. Waiting for one of those will also open the door for the next generation of SoundStorm on-board audio chipset which should be one of the best onboard chips available.
Bear in mind if you're going to use the machine for hifi as well as games a separate PCI-based sound card will suffer significantly less electronic pick-up from the motherboard than an onboard device.

Happy hunting!

[Marcos]

I was looking at roughly the same budget/requirements, Im going the shuttle route but here are the components:

A64 3000+
1GB Crucial RAM
160GB samsung 8mb 7200rpm (Or i may bump that up to the 250GB 16mb cache maxtor if its quiet enough)
ATi 9800Pro or 6800nu
A decent DVD-RW drive that will handle all the recording/playing needs

As its a shuttle i dont have to think about PSU, case, motherboard or cooling

Oh, and i was going to get a 17" TFT in there too