Help me price/make a system please!

[Punto]

Hey there guys, basically i'm off to university in a week and was planning on getting a pc for ~ £1000 but having talked to a few people i've decided to move onto a 939 instead of a 754 and make my computer that little bit more future proof so i've pushed (and i mean pushed!) my budget to £1300-1350. Basically i think I know the basics but wanted you guys to give me any advice you could, especially when it comes to specificity. ie. what gfx card brand etc!

Was planning on a Socket-939 board (what's the best one at the moment?) with the 3500+ Athlon 64,

a 17" TFT (again no clue, such huge price variation as well),

a 6800GT (help on what brand and where in stock would be nice)

1024mb Ram (what type, brand, where, help!)

the nec3500 and another standard dvd-rom,

Antec Sonata Midi Tower with 380W PSU (will i need to buy another higher powered PSU? any other quiet case recommendations?)

Audigy 2?

160gb Samsung Seapoint x 2 (320gb)

No ideas on what heatsink to get, want my case to be quiet tho, just use the stock one?

I havent priced it up yet because there's quite a large variation in price between brands of ram / mobo / gfx card / tft screen. If anyone could help i'd appreciate it.

[Punto]

thinking about the glacier 6800GT and either the LG 1710b or the Iiyama Prolite E-431S for the monitor, any advice would be much appreciated.

[mike_w]

If want something future proof, then you might want to wait for PCI Express. PCI Express is replacing AGP for graphics cards, among other cards, and will probably be around for a while to come. Although AGP 8x is still fast enough for any of the cards out now, it should make your system last longer since you could upgrade the graphics card in the future. On another thread, I think somebody (sorry, can't remember who) said nForce4 boards for Socket 939 with PCI Express should be out Q1 of 2005.

As for the Geforce, a GT/Ultra is a decent card, providing good performance along with plenty of features such as Shader Model 3.0. There's also ATi's X800s (especially Pro/XT) to consider. I would personally go for the Geforce because of the features, but to be honest they're both such stupidly fast cards you won't go wrong with either of them.

It seems that your budget is quite high, so I suppose you want top notch RAM - in which case, you might want some Crucial Ballistix (straight from Crucial). It's supposed to be pretty fast, and not too bad a price for high performance RAM. Of course, you could save money and just go for some cheaper stuff, like Corsair Value Select from Komplett. It's cheap, from a decent company, lifetime warranty and the timings aren't too bad (CAS2.5). The more expensive stuff probably doesn't provide much a performance boost (5%?) for £70 or so, but if you want the best then that's what you have to pay.

Edit: One thing to remember is that buying just below the top of the range, instead of the bleeding edge, will save you a fair amount of money, with little performance hit. For example, a 6800GT costs a fair bit less than a 6800Ultra, but the GT isn't too far behind anyway, not to mention the fact you can probably just overclock it to Ultra speeds anyway.