Originally posted by: RCflyer
i have been readin these forums alot and i need help. i got a great deal on 1 gig partiot pc 3200 ram ocz 520 and a tt tsunami. i have 700 for mobo cpu gpu hdd and os. this come willbe used for light gaming, i dont need extreme graphics, and every day use as well as video editing. so have some fun i have no idea if i should go P4 or AMD. and i need a good VERY stable system STABLE IN THE MAIN PRIORITY. thanks guys fo your time and help
The OS really makes your budget a lot smaller than it looks, since XP Pro is $140. You could get XP Home for $90, but in the long run it's probably not worth it. It'll be a long time till everybody's using Longhorn, so you might as well have the better version of XP. If you see this computer as disposable (you'll be getting rid of it along with the OS in a year or two), then you'd probably want to save $50 and go with XP Home, but you'll probably upgrade the system several times and keep the same XP discs.
As far as hardware, it really depends on how much gaming you want to do. AMD is definitely the way to go since they're the fastest and the cheapest for most things, and stability hasn't been an issue for a long time. Video cards can start getting expensive really fast, so you should probably be more specific about what you mean by "light gaming."
A Socket 939 Venice CPU is probably where you want to start with that kind of budget. The 3000+ (Venice 1.8, 512K cache) is $154 and the 3200+ (Venice 2.0, 512K cache) is $198. If you want something better than that, you should probably jump all the way up to the 3700+ (San Diego 2.2, 1MB cache) for $329 because it's not much more than the Venice 2.2.
As far as motherboards, an NForce4 Ultra is what you want, and since you're doing video editing you want firewire.
Here are all the boards at NewEgg that meet that. EPoX has the best deal there with
their $112 board. It's a good brand and stable, and even a good overclocking board if you were into that (although it doesn't look like you are). I don't see how you'd justify paying more for the MSI or ABit boards. The EPoX board seems better (or at least good as) the more expensive ones.
The video card is the hard decision. The cards to look at are:
Radeon 9600 128MB: 4 pipelines at 325MHz, 6.4 GB/sec bandwidth = $70
GeForce 6600 128MB: 8 pipelines at 300MHz, 8.8 GB/sec bandwidth = $115
Radeon X800 128MB: 12 pipelines at 392MHz, 22.4 GB/sec bandwidth = $190
Radeon X800XL 256MB: 16 pipelines at 400MHz, 31.4 GB/sec bandwidth = $280
Radeon X850XT 256MB: 16 pipelines at 520MHz, 34.56 GB/sec bandwidth = $450
Those are all good DX9 cards and they can all play about anything as far as "light gaming" is concerned. I've played FarCry and Doom 3 on the Radeon 9600 and it's perfectly playable in 1024x768 if you don't have the settings maxed out. The $190 X800 is the best bang for the buck right now. It just depends if you're going to be playing enough games for that to be much more useful than the GeForce 6600. I'd be sticking to the $115 GeForce 6600 or the $190 Radeon X800 in your price range, though.
The Radeon 9600 and GeForce 6600 are also passive cards which makes the system quieter.
The hard drive can be another difficult choice. If you're going to be doing video editing, that's one of the few times when a RAID could actually help because of the higher sequential transfer rate. Higher plater density also gives you higher max transfer rates, so you might want to consider a newer 133 GB/platter drive like the Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 line instead of a regular 80 GB/platter model. The top of the line (and also the drives with 5-year warranties) are the WD Raptor 74, the Seagate Barracuda and the Maxtor MaxLine III. Go to StorageReview.com for a much more in-depth breakdown of performance.
Here are a few different ideas to get you going.
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Retail
$153.99 (newegg)
mainboard: EPoX EP-9NPA+Ultra
$105 (ChiefValue)
video: Sapphire Radeon X800 128MB
$189 (newegg)
HDD: Seagate 160GB SATA 7200.7
$89.99 (ZipZoomFly)
OS: Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2
$133.99 (ZipZoomFly)
$671.97 delivered
That's a good place to start. You're getting the really good video card, but you might want more hard drive space if you're doing a lot of video editing. This is the best gaming choice.
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Retail
$198 (ZipZoomFly)
mainboard: EPoX EP-9NPA+Ultra
$105 (ChiefValue)
video: GigaByte GeForce 6600 128MB
$113.99 (ZipZoomFly)
HDD: Seagate 250GB SATA 7200.8
$133.95 (ChiefValue)
OS: Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2
$133.99 (ZipZoomFly)
$684.93 delivered
Here's a faster CPU and bigger hard drive (that's also 133 GB/platter), which would be a better system since you're not a hardcore gamer. This is probably the most balanced option.
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Retail
$153.99 (newegg)
mainboard: EPoX EP-9NPA+Ultra
$105 (ChiefValue)
video: GigaByte GeForce 6600 128MB
$113.99 (ZipZoomFly)
HDD: Seagate 160GB SATA 7200.7
$89.99 (ZipZoomFly)
HDD: Seagate 160GB SATA 7200.7
$89.99 (ZipZoomFly)
OS: Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2
$133.99 (ZipZoomFly)
$686.95 delivered
And here you're going for the SATA RAID, which would be the best video editing system. You'd also need a floppy drive to install the SATA RAID drivers.