Can I please get some help with a rig upgrade

[chnsawalex]

I am looking at upgrading my current pc. Basically the situation I am in right now is I have a new case with my old PC parts in it. So I have all the drives case and possibly a PSU that will work. I recently bought an AMD Athlon 64 3000 processor from a friend for about $80 and that?s what got me started. I have been looking around for parts and reading some reviews and here is what I have come up with. One other thing to keep in mind I want to keep this on the cheap and quiet side.

These are all links to Newegg

Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-K8N Pro-SLI
Really could use some help with selecting a decent socket 939 mobo for around the $100 price range. I chose this one because it had no loud chipset fan and I am not really planning on over clocking so the heat shouldn't be an issue.

Edit: I almost forgot I am looking for a mobo to have support for the front panel audio connector on my case. I was unable to find much info on this for this mobo so any info would be great.

RAM: CORSAIR XMS 1GB (2 x 512MB)
No big reason why I chose this other then it looks like decent memory for the buck.

Video Card: GIGABYTE Geforce 6600GT
Again bang for the buck and I need a PCI-E card as my old card is an old AGP Geforce 4 TI 4200. I do plan on doing some gaming but I don?t do major gaming just Warcraft III and probably some first person shooters once in a while. I do more gaming on my Xbox(1).

CPU Heatsink + Fan: ARCTIC COOLING Silencer64UltraTC 92mm
I need to get one because I just have the CPU chip and nothing else. I am also debating on getting arctic silver but since I won?t be doing over clocking I figure the included compound will be fine.

Power Supply: The PSU that came with this case
That?s what I have right now. Will I need to upgrade the PSU or will that be fine?

Thanks for your help in advance I greatly appreciate it.

 

[diapickle]

Don't plan on overclocking much with that PSU.
For the same or slightly higher price you can get a 6800nu or 6600GT, 256MB RAM on a slow 6600 is useless.

 

[nonilley]

Does your mobo have to be SLI?

If not look into those Epox ones I heard they are nice. But I got a biostar and it's got a GOOD package. Not many people have them yet but they are very nice.

Also the 6600 with 256 mb ram is not worth it when for just a tad tad more the 6600 gt is right there. While it only has 128mb of ram it's a very solid card.

For psu I got a fortron from Newegg very very solid performance.

 

[chnsawalex]

No I dont need SLI at all I really dont plan on buying 2 of the same video card when I am not going high end with it in the first place.

 

[nonilley]

What about overclocking?

 

[chnsawalex]

No overclocking planned in the near future.

Also due to recommendations I have updated the video card to a 6600 gt.

and I am also now looking at this Motherboard: EPoX EP-9NPA+Ultra

Thanks for the advice so far.

 

[nonilley]

I looked at that one for a while, but in the end I went with the biostar, it had a GREAT package and very very comparable. Not many people liked them but the new Tforce series is very solid. I got a Tforce4u from newegg it's 92.00. Very good board.

 

[allanon1965]

ECS KN1 Extreme MB is what I have, in fact I have 2....one in mine and one in my wifes, and you know hers must work perfect or I will never be able to rest till it does(and I get plenty of rest ) its a good board with front audio and a host of other features including dual core support after a bios flash which is done with windows, it works fine! the only problem I had was an incompatability issue with Kingston ddr...I use Kingmax in both, 2 gigs of dual channel in each and they really work great! along with the gigabyte 6600gt 128mb video card in mine and a FX5750 gigabyte in the wifes, no problems! I got both of them from newegg a few months ago....100.00 range they use the Nforce4 chipset, some people said it had a loud fan on the chipset, but thats BS, neither of mine make any noise at all...

 

[imported_killuminati]

either get the 6800GS or x1600xt .
or worth buying the 6600GT now .

Peace & ciao !!!

 

[halw]

Have you looked Asus for 939 Mobos?

 

[chnsawalex]

The Asus mobo's I looked at I read some reviews where people were having a lot of problems. With everyone's advice its making it even harder to pick a mobo I was hoping to get this stuff ordered this weekend. I guess I will just do some more research. thanks again everyone.

 

[Kyle W]

I'm in the same boat. I'm thinking about the Epox EP-9NPA+Ultra or one of the Asus but it seems some people get boards that are dead out of the box or they are great. Didn't know motherboards were such a gamble.

 

[chnsawalex]

Incase any one was wondering, it?s been a week or so since I have had my rig. I ended up with the Epox EP-9NPA+Ultra mobo which came in an awesomely cool looking box . Other then that I got every thing else up there other then the PSU I stayed with the one that came with my case for now. I also bought a new hard drive, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 SATA NCQ 3Gb/s 160GB (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148105). I think I am going to get a 2nd one and a PSU in the next couple of months once I recover from the damages.

I had no problems with this setup so far. One piece of advice is if you have an old XP cd I would recommend you slip stream sp2 into it. This article (http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2_slipstream.asp), made it very simple to do. The reason why I am saying this is because I tried installing the new nforce4 drives off of NVIDIA?s site and then sp2. There was an error with USB 2, I figure out it was just windows and not my mobo after reading NVIDIA?s site. I formatted and reinstalled windows from scratch last night just to have a nice clean install from the ground up. Oh almost forgot one other thing. When installing windows make sure that unplug all other HD's if installing windows on the SATA and have another IDE drive plugged in. The IDE drive in windows registered as C and my main SATA windows drive was set to D. Good thing that with this setup windows take about 10min to install so its wasn't a big deal at all. Yeah I love this upgrade from my old 1 GHz Celeron rig.

 

[Bobthelost]

Ditch the PSU as soon as you can, it is not worth risking all of your components with the cheap piece of crap that they will have shipped with it. I did once upon a time, and after it exploded i'm never doing it again.

 

[w00t]

ditch that ram waste of money get corsair value or ocz value get the 2.5 cas latency stuff.

that psu is crap generic pos

other than that looks okay to me.

 

[chnsawalex]

I was looking at this (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817104954) psu from recommendations people were making around anandtech. I also might look around retail stores to see what they have. One major question is what brands should I look for and what brands should I stay away from that would make it extremely helpful in finding a psu if I look around retail stores.