Help on my 1st selfbuild

Hi i have a Mesh pc (sig) of which i have included additional components ie 6800le/HD/Ram and a few others so i am confident on taking on this task!:( as i only have a budget of aprox £400 to 500 i am hoping to include these from my old pc 6800 / Maxto rHD (200gb) / audigy 2 plus i will also keep my CRT 930 D/pro and my mouse & 5-1 spkrs so that will keep costs down!...I will need it for (in this order) Video editing, Gaming & Multimedia. I also want a future proof system so i will need to keep my AGP 6800le as to keep costs down so i will probally need one of those new mobo's "SLI i think" which has best of both worlds! WHICH DO YOU RECOMMEND? And as for CPU i've been told to get AMD 939 "i think" WHAT DO YOU THINK? a As i am not that nimble with my 'shovel' like hands the case will need to be quite big and with a sliding tray to make it easier to access the mobo! SO WHICH CASE WILL BE OK FOR ME? Hope you can PS help me with something thats hopefully not too complicated to put together! Cheers in advance!:) :)

is that pc causing you problems? its not exactly stone age if you can maybe best to wait till the new year and see what happens to the market? If your set on buying this weekend then Scan have loads of Asus boards on deal of the day prices from £80 all are good. What socket is the graphics card? AGP? if it is then you wouldent be able to carry it over to a 939 board as they are pcie. 939 seem to be the best bang for buck a 3000 venice will clock rather nicely but get what u can afford. Cases er no expert Lian Li will probably something but they will cost bomb.

there is the ASrock Dual SATA2 board on socket 939 with both pci-e and agp support so you can keep your old card but still be fairly futureproof

you should be able to get a new mobo and some other goodies....might be worth waiting as one of the other replies suggests....

...No no probs with my pc at present just feel i may as well upgrade now and maybe sell what i have rather it go on me as it is 3 yrs old! :( And yes i will wait until after xmas,good idea.. perhaps sales will be cheap!:) How long will it be before the Dual AMD proccesssors go below the £200 would it be worth waiting or is there not that much difference between 1 & 2 cpu's?:confused:

Also what case do you think will be ok for me "remember not that nimblewith me fingers"!:rant: And it dont need to be too ponsy just a nice windowless black or silver one with good access and airflow! And then there's the PSU, what do you think there!:)

i was looking at the Asrock dual cpu Mobo but was a wee bit worried it was too cheap and was hoping some newer ones would be out !

ASRock are not too bad to be honest - cheap but not so that the stuff is really bad.
At the mo not a massive difference between single and dual cores. But there will be soon dual core is the future but maybe prices are a bit steep to justify it right now. An athlon 64 or opteron will do fine at this time. Antec make good cases Sonata 2 great case with a 480w psu (maybe 430w cant member for sure). Or maybe get a Coolermaster case (maybe expensive) or a Cheap little Chenbro gaming bomb with a tagan or a Seasonic PSU? just suggestions

Cheers Zu!
So the psu that come with the sonata are of good enough quality?
Re cpu; What i dont want to do is buy a new sytem and after a year it will be really slow compare to a dual cpu's!:undecided

Antec stuff is very good quality kit as long as it has enough W's for your rig it will be fine. If you want to go cutting edge and u do lots of CPU intensive tasks (like video editing) then maybe getting a dual core now would be the best idea for u, i only really use my pc for gaming and general free time stuff so a dual core for me would probably be overkill - tho it sounds nice!

.........I do play games (BF2,CSS,COD2 etc) and also do video editing (adobe prem) and photo editng(adobe cs2) which is quite slow on those 2 progs but not really that slow. What i was gonna do was maybe upgrade to 2 GB Ram (1x1gb) i thought that might fasten it up a bit!:undecided But you think buying a 'Dual' would be better and stay with 1GB? Also was going to do a clean install as that probally is causing a lot of it as its been 10 mths since the last reformat!:Oops:

When I built my system (my first build) I got the Akasa Eclipse, expensive but VERY VERY nice, I cannot express how nice this case is, everything in it can be removed, all the panels, hard drive racks, the motherboard tray can come out, its such a nice case, the airflow is pretty good but you don't get any fans with it but you can pick up a couple of cheap ones of about £5 for the pair (very cheap if you dont mind the noise).

I think 2GB is now becoming the standard, using CS2 with 1 gig isn't too slow on a 3700+ but it could be better I find. Have you considered going for an Opteron and trying to overclock?

You can pick up an X2 3800+ for £230 from scan, and get the rest of the stuff, including 2GB of their Elixir RAM, the Coolermaster Centurion case, Akasa 460W PSU and the ASRock 939DUAL Motherboard for a little over £500 which is a tiny bit over the top end of your budget but for the overall spec of the system it isn't bad.

939 are the way foward imo and the akasa cases are huge but gd as for motherboard ether dfi or asus both companys sli boards are great but the asus premium was a bit disapointing

DFI for a first build? Maybe over complicates things? Asus would be OK but if u want agp and PCIE ASRock is the only way to go at the min. More ram will never hurt (except maybe the wallet!) If you game at large resolutions then yeah get more RAM if not stick with 1gb and get more when needed, we are kinda close to a change of the threshold of what amount of RAM is needed at the mo. People playing BF2 have said u need 2 gig but others have 512 and says its fine

....I think it may be worth spending the extra £100 or so and going with the dual ( X2 3800) "save me upgrdng in the future) and going with "madafo's" choice of mobo:):thumbsup: but as for the case i am still out on that!:undecided what i am hoping for is a good built in psu "keep costs down" ! £500 seems pretty good to me, and i should get £2oo on myold pc as i am going to put in my old 120gb maxtor & 9800se in with it!

The daft thing is most decent cases dont come with a PSU you tend to have to add your own in. U might get away with a 400w PSU but it may be safter to have a bugger PSU from a name manufacturer. Antec are one of the few that put there own PSUs in but if u dont like them and still want a case what about some of these?

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=137411 - its a full tower so it will have loads of room not mega expensive either

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=137812 this one costs a bomb but its godley

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=127841 if this is a direct copy it will have room!

Others Chieftec Dragon - big case pretty unspecial lookin', Lian-Li PC-6077A.,
Warrior Gamers Case has a 450 psu tho probably not a good one - this lot are from aria.co.uk

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Originally Posted by wannabgeek

....I think it may be worth spending the extra £100 or so and going with the dual ( X2 3800) "save me upgrdng in the future) and going with "madafo's" choice of mobo:):thumbsup: but as for the case i am still out on that!:undecided what i am hoping for is a good built in psu "keep costs down" ! £500 seems pretty good to me, and i should get £2oo on myold pc as i am going to put in my old 120gb maxtor & 9800se in with it!

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I've got a 3800+ and must say that once you've tried dual core you'll never be able to go back. It's just nice to be able to do 4 things at once and not have the PC slow to a crawl. You dont need apps to be multithreaded either - windows itself will just happily assign apps an affinity to one core or the other depending on which core is least heavily loaded at the time. :)