New System, Comments and Crits Please!

[RavenNight]

Hi!

I'm helping a mate build a new system, mainly for audio and design stuff, no gaming worth speaking of. The budget is as close to £300 as possible. This is what I came up with:

Mobo: Asrock 775 DUAL-VSTA £37.35
CPU: Pentium D805 £67.56
RAM: 1GB Corsair XMS DDRPC5400 £92.77
PSU: Hiper 435W £35.12
Case: Coolermaster Centurion £38.72
HDD: 160GB Hitachi Deskstar £39.83
TOTAL: £311.35

He has all the other stuff, monitor, keyboard mouse, Optical drive etc. Anybody got any ideas for improvements (pref. from Scan)?

[shaithis]

For only another £80 you could swap that terrible CPU for an E6300 (Core 2 Duo)...

Otherwise, I would consider socket 939.

[ExceededGoku]

if its audio and design i would definitely look at either the AMD64 or the Core 2 Duo

[awm]

The RAM might not be the best choice. To take advantage of modern hardware you need 2 matched sticks for dual-chanel mode. This doubles your memory bandwidth so you want to make sure to take advantage of it. My suggestion would be to get 2 X 1GB of value ram (from a reputable brand).

[Dark Horse]

The RAM might not be the best choice. To take advantage of modern hardware you need 2 matched sticks for dual-chanel mode. This doubles your memory bandwidth so you want to make sure to take advantage of it. My suggestion would be to get 2 X 1GB of value ram (from a reputable brand).

In theory it improves things but in practice the difference is pretty minimal. Ram prices are already high so 2gb would be an extra £60 or so putting it well over budget.

It doesn't look like that board has onboard graphics so you may need to look for another board.

[RavenNight]

We already have an old GeForce 2 we'll be using for a stop gap with the goal of shoving a 7300GT in there after a couple of months.

We chose the RAM we did given the elevated prices at the mo, it made very little difference from the value to the decent stuff so we went for this to give a little more room for OCing.

[nvening]

You can save £30 by getting an Antec Case with a hal desent 350w PSU

[kalniel]

What Nvening said. Buy a case that comes with a PSU, otherwise you're all fine - ram is a pain at the moment, but should it fall again the value select will be cheaper than XMS (it just isn't at the moment).

[harry1]

that cpu isnt that bad at all i think, dual core isnt it?

[danjamin]

Yeah, it is, and it's a great overclocker

[harry1]

thats what i thought, custom pc said so anyway lol.