New System Need Ideas's

Looking good. Unless you are planning on doing RAID-5 I would get one large drive instead of 3 80gb drives.

That looks awesome. May I suggest one of these dvd burner drives http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...be&InnerCata=5
Here is the actual website http://www.lightscribe.com/ no more messy labels or my poor handwriting.

i'd recommend that you go with just 1 dvd burner. No point in having 2. Then you can get a cheap dvd-rom for the other drive if you need disc-to-disc copying. If not, then just get 1 drive, and wait for HD-DVD or BluRay drives to become popular, and upgrade with that later.

I'd also recommend nvidia right now for your video card. Either a 7800GT or 7800GTX will wipe the floor with that X850, for not too much more money. (the XFX OC'ed 7800GT can be had for $419, and prices should be going down)

Also like ewolff said i'd go with just 1 or 2 bigger drives, instead of 3 small ones.

I've never heard of sicuro, are they a good speaker company? Sometimes it might be better to get quality 2.1 speakers instead of cheap 5.1's, depending on your needs and preferences.

Also, do you really need the audigy gamer? IMHO its a waste of money, since mobo audio is usually good enough for most people.

Gaming system you say? Three letters ... SLI. Three more characters ... A64.

The only thing that I would do to make it a better gaming system is run S939 A64 on an SLI board with dual nVidia 6800GT cards. If not the dual 6800GT cards in SLI, evena single 7800 would cream the x850. Also, run a couple Raptor drives. If you still need more storage space, maybe add a third large IDE drive. As others have suggested, having two burners is a waste unless you will be burning multiple discs at once. You can do on the fly recordings with a cheap DVD-rom and a burner and save a little cash to put into other pieces.

SLI does mean an extreme boost in performance. Do a little researh on it. It is not like dual core processors. The two GPUs act as one. Framerates on SLI systems arenot double a single same GOU, but are not far from it.

As for the raptors, that's why I suggested adding the third larger drive if you needed the additional storage space. HDD speed is the bottleneck on most modern systems. The added performance on the raptors closes that gap.

There are tons of A64 mobos that support PCI-E. Any SLI board for starters DDR2 adds very very little performance boost. The on chip memory controller on the A64 coupled with just regular DDR gives MUCH lower memory latency than a P4 with DDR2.

In short, if a gaming rig is what you are after, an SLI A64 should be your only choice. Performance will be off the charts compared to a single GPU P4, or a good bit better than an SLI P4 (all other components similar of course).

Side note: one recomendation on an SLI board for this setup: DFI DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 SLI-DR. It is kinda high at $175, but an awesome board, in particular for a gaming rig.

How about this config. 2,202.00 from the Egg


ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Venice Integrated into Chip FSB Socket 939 Processor Model ADA3200DAA4BP - OEM

CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model TWINX2048-3200PRO - Retail

eVGA 256-P2-N537-AX Geforce 7800GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card with Battlefield 2 full version - Retail

Western Digital Caviar SE WD3200JD 320GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM

Two NEC Black IDE DVD Burner Model ND-3540A - OEM

Thermaltake XASER, Armor Series VA8000BWS Black Aluminum/Steel ATX Full Tower Computer Case - Retail

LG L1951S-SN Silver/Black 19" 12ms LCD Monitor - Retail

CREATIVE Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS 70SB035000000 8 (7.1) Channels PCI Interface Sound Card - Retail

Thermaltake W0057 PurePower ATX 12V 2.0 500W Power Supply - Retail

Logitech THX Z-5300e 280 Watts RMS 5.1 Speaker - Retail

ZALMAN CNPS7700-CU 120mm 2 Ball Cooling Fan - Retail


Some notes on this config. I went with the A8N-SLI for a few reasons. Number one, if you ever decide to go SLI, you have the option. Number two, this board is LOADED. 10 USB ports, Dual Gigabit Ethernet, and 8 SATA ports. If you ever decide you want lots of storage, this board will give it to you. And with the Armor case you will have plenty of room for drives.

I went with an OEM processor and the Zalman heatsink because it cools better than stock cooling and it will look a hell of a lot better than the stock fan. When you go with a window, looks have to be a consideration

I changed the PSU to the 500w ThermalTake modular psu to minimize cable clutter and because it is a good PSU. I have the 680w (non-modular) version and it powers my system very well.

The 7800 GT is probably the best bang for the buck card out now. It whoops pretty much everything out now, including my SLI's 6600GT's. It also allows you to go SLI when the prices drop if you ever see a need. But honestly, on a 19" screen the 7800 may be overkill as a 19" only does 1280x1024.

I went with the Audigy ZS instead of the gamer because the only difference is that the gamer card comes with bundled games, and not always good ones...

For the memory, you could switch to 4x512 instead of 2x1gb. This would give you an easy overclock on the processor to 3500 speeds. With 4 sticks of memory, the memory drops to 333. Bumping the memory back to 400 in the bios gives a nice 200mhz overclock without much effort.

A couple of points after reading some of your last posts.

1. DFI. Unless you plan on getting into hardcore overclocking, stay away from the DFI boards. Their Nforce 4 boards are notorius for being stubborn when it comes to memory and psu's. But if you get the right components, they overclock like a BEAST.

2. Cases. If I were to buy a case right now, it would be the Armor or Cooler Master's Stacker. They are both outstanding cases in function although the Armor has more of a bling factor to it. The stacker gives you the ability to have two internal PSU's and a LOT of drives. Not to mention it can be converted to BTX.

3. Raptors. I thought about putting one 36 for the OS into the configuration but I decided against it. Unless you are doing a lot of disc writes (encoding) the only benefit is faster loading times when the game needs something on the drive. But then the game would need to be on the Raptor too and then you run into space issues. That is why i have two 73gb's in Raid.

http://www.avault.com/hardware/print...review=wdr74gb for a brief comparison of the speed increase the raptor will give you. It does way more than improve access time and load times. No matter how much memory you run, you will still be using the page file. Even trying to disable it in the advanced properties doesn't completely disable it. It helps a TON when gaming. Most modern games utilize the page file pretty heavily for textures.

As for the "future proofness" of SLI, it has been around unchanged for a good while now (in technology time anyway). There is no reason with the budget you are on to a) not build an SLI system even if only using one card for a while b) not use the raptors. Anything short of those two things is a waste of money on a gaming rig.

Pretty much agree with Thunder.

You are in kind of an akward price gap though. For a gaming/performance rig, just a scosh more buying power can net you a lot more performance.

Re: Processor. AMD stomps Intel for a long time now. I strongly recomend even a modest dual-core setup from AMD for future-proofing if nothing else. The AMD dual-cores are stomping the Intels atm (google em, Tom's Hardware has a comparo, so do others), and I'm pretty comfortable with Intel continuing to bungle things in the future as well.

Re: The drives, yeah, a set of raptors in a raid is pretty much required if you want to run the OS and a few games from the drives. 74gb alone isn't too much space. However, 2 of those and a large drive, spinning at 7200rpm for backup and storage of less used data (mp3s, movies, porn , w/e) would be optimal, but probably puts you over what you want to spend on drives.

Re: GPU. Yeah, one 7800gtx will get you all you need atm, especially with a less than max-res monitor. Keep an eye on 1600x1200 19' monitors though, supposed to be on the brink there. Anywho, snag a 7800 and you can always SLI it later.

My suggestion is to open up your pricerange a little (what is it, a few extra hours at work? Throw in the OT buddy!) or just snag two raptors, raid em, and worry about backing up later in life. How likely are they to fail in the first 6 months anyway?

Try googling monarch computers, they'll throw together your processor, mobo, heatsink, and even RAM if you want for competitive prices, and even throw in some free software for ya. Think they're trying to snipe some business from Newegg, and that makes em a motivated seller!

Are you talking CRT's? All 19" LCD's are 1280x1024.

you forgot to add the floopy drive, mang. i'd recommend 5.25" 360k.