New rig

[emul8]

I am building a new computer so far i have the following

Thermaltake V1000D Xaser III ATX Case in Blue with Side Panel

Intel Pentium 4 "Northwood" 3.0GHz (800FSB) with HT Technology - Retail

Abit IC7-MAX3 "Canterwood" (Socket 478) Motherboard

Maxtor DiamondMax Plus9 Serial ATA 80GB 8MB Cache

MSI DR8-A 8x DVD±R/±RW (Black)

nvidia fx 5600 256mb graphics

samsung 52-32-52 cdr

lookin for PSU thought about thermaltake butterfly + RAM thought about Corsiar xms pro 1gig dual pc3200

Any advice welcom

[Korky]

im not playing the system down at all but I see u have decided not to splash out on what is really the most important piece of hardware for gaming, that gfx card doesnt match up to the cpu+mobo combination uve came up with.

[emul8]

its what i allready had

[Kezzer]

lmao, i see so many of these threads, it's crazy

[emul8]

Sorry Kezzer just trying to get a little help here.

[Ady168uk]

my 2cent,

get a enermax psu with manual fan control, but if you after BLING then the new butterfly PSU's are fine..meant to be quiet I think.

Forget about 1gb of ram, get 512 ddr400ll or ddr500, sell off your current GPU, with money saved from ram get yourself a 9800pro.

This solution should give you better all round performance, cos atm that GPU is big time bottleneck.

[funnelhead]

Setting up a new rig is a big deal. It makes people nervous, so it's understandable that they they seek a little affirmation here. Kezzers right though, so perhaps some kind of sticky " Hexus users recommended " Sticky could be in order.... like the A-list from Pc-pro etc. I understand there would be some disagreement between egos....but with proper categories i think it could work. ( high end / mid / Value + intel / amd / amd 64) It would at least give people an idea of what they should be looking at....

On the other hand some people love giving advice ...... and the mods do have to have GF's too......

My advice - keep the graphix card - it'll be fine for a couple of months until the big boys (doom III etc) come out. use that time to put some money aside then help yourself to a next gen card.

As for ram....1gb will be handy for games pretty soon....upp to you whether you get it all now, or wanna get 1 stick of 512 now, another in a couple of months along with a GFX card.. That way would let you get a faster stick. But then Memory prices go up as well as down.....aint life a bitch?

In posts like this it helps if you mention what you will be using the rig for and how much you intend to spend....

F

[emul8]

CHEERS FOR THE ADV.I HAVE ORDERED THE BUTTERFLY and the dual mem got till june to get gfx and monitor
I appreciate the advice thks funnelhead Ady168uk and Korky

[funnelhead]

lol, you have no monitor ?

good luck with everything though..

[DeludedGuy]

Looks good apart from the GFX card, get atleast a 9600XT 128, much better than the 5600.

[emul8]

I have a monitor .My son gets my old rig in June

[BlueBot]

I wish my dad would give me a rig, he just complains about all the clutter I make on his desk, as well.

As most people have said, your video card will certainly be the bottleneck, but if you don't game much then it ain't a problem. Also, as someone else has said, the new ATi's (R420's) will be coming out in April (I hope!!!), so wait until then to get a video card. Imagine the price of the 9800xt's when the new cards come out, they are already fast approaching the £300 mark, lovely.

Steve

ps IMHO the more RAM the better, when I built my last rig everyone told me that I didn't need a gig of RAM, they were wrong, in the end I upgraded to 1.5 gig...

[Mark@SCAN]

People are gonna laugh at me here but for the same money and a little waiting i'd swap the CPU for a prescott version. Same price but more features and better hyper threading, Should be available first week of March

[funnelhead]

lol, prescott !!

performance is roughly similar between then 2 cores, with the enhancements barely compensating for the longer pipeline.... but you'll get less heat and a higher overclock out of a northwood.

If thats your bag baby

if not it wont make much differnce at all which core you get...

[emul8]

i complain about my sons clutter aspecialy old games filling up my hd
and not being able to get on the computer

[BlueBot]

hehe, I can imagine that would get annoying. Luckily my dad has gotten a Dell X600 on the company, so he can't sit in front of the tv and do whatever he does on there...

Steve