It's about time to be buying some new hardware. I feel that a new system is the best way to go at this point. I got some good life out of my current setup, but in order to get with the times I need SATA, PCI Express, DDR2, etc. I'm pretty out of the loop, but I have been reading around trying to get a general idea as to some cost effective options for the various hardware components. The following criteria must be met for the system...
Cost: As cheap as possible, but I would like to keep things to no more than $800 or so including an operating system. Yes, I think I will actually buy it for once.
Usage: I will do some gaming. I'm not hardcore about it, and I don't need maximum eye candy, but the ability to handle new and upcoming games in 1440x900 (Almost the same number of pixels as 1280x1024), which is the native resolution of my monitor.
I do listen to a lot of music and watch plenty of movies, both DVD movies and MPEG4 encoded movies. I'm not too worried about this, as even my current system can perform these functions just fine. However, onboard sound probably won't cut it.
Plenty of browsing the web. I like the multitask just about everything else with this, as most people do.
A little bit of media encoding, mostly WAV to MP3 encoding. Not much in the way of video encoding, though I occasionally end up doing some MPEG2 to MPEG4 encodes, though these are few and far between.
Storage: I need a decent amount of storage space for music, movies, shows, etc. However, I'm willing to burn up some DVDs to back up episodes of certain things like anime.
Noise: I like a pretty quiet PC. It doesn't have to be silent, but I'm not trying to have a wind tunnel sitting on my CPU.
Overclocking: I will probably do some, but I generally keep it mild. I don't tend to overclock the CPU more than 10-20% beyond stock. Basically, I see what I can get without toying with voltages, or maybe raising than 5-10% over stock rated voltages.
Here's what I've whipped up from Newegg (All I need is the box and an OS):
Processor: Intel E4300
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3
Video: Sapphire X1950PRO 256MB
Memory: Mushkin DDR2800 2GB (2x1GB)
HDD: Samsung 400GB
Sound: Creative Audigy SE 7.1
DVD-RW: Liteon 20x/12x
Case: Antec Sonata Lifestyle II
OS: MS Windows XP Home SP2 OEM
Let me know what you think. I realize that things will probably change in a couple of months when I actually purchase the system, but I figure this will give me a baseline and I can edit as needed based on any changes in pricing landscape that occur in the next few months.
Thanks in advance!
Cost: As cheap as possible, but I would like to keep things to no more than $800 or so including an operating system. Yes, I think I will actually buy it for once.
Usage: I will do some gaming. I'm not hardcore about it, and I don't need maximum eye candy, but the ability to handle new and upcoming games in 1440x900 (Almost the same number of pixels as 1280x1024), which is the native resolution of my monitor.
I do listen to a lot of music and watch plenty of movies, both DVD movies and MPEG4 encoded movies. I'm not too worried about this, as even my current system can perform these functions just fine. However, onboard sound probably won't cut it.
Plenty of browsing the web. I like the multitask just about everything else with this, as most people do.
A little bit of media encoding, mostly WAV to MP3 encoding. Not much in the way of video encoding, though I occasionally end up doing some MPEG2 to MPEG4 encodes, though these are few and far between.
Storage: I need a decent amount of storage space for music, movies, shows, etc. However, I'm willing to burn up some DVDs to back up episodes of certain things like anime.
Noise: I like a pretty quiet PC. It doesn't have to be silent, but I'm not trying to have a wind tunnel sitting on my CPU.
Overclocking: I will probably do some, but I generally keep it mild. I don't tend to overclock the CPU more than 10-20% beyond stock. Basically, I see what I can get without toying with voltages, or maybe raising than 5-10% over stock rated voltages.
Here's what I've whipped up from Newegg (All I need is the box and an OS):
Processor: Intel E4300
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3
Video: Sapphire X1950PRO 256MB
Memory: Mushkin DDR2800 2GB (2x1GB)
HDD: Samsung 400GB
Sound: Creative Audigy SE 7.1
DVD-RW: Liteon 20x/12x
Case: Antec Sonata Lifestyle II
OS: MS Windows XP Home SP2 OEM
Let me know what you think. I realize that things will probably change in a couple of months when I actually purchase the system, but I figure this will give me a baseline and I can edit as needed based on any changes in pricing landscape that occur in the next few months.
Thanks in advance!