I'm thinking about Building a new system from scratch.
If money was no object (I wish), but speed,reliability and support were;
What would you recommend.
Also, what is the best type of memory to buy?
I dont think there are any huge differences in speed between MBs
though some may OC better. Frankly I like my Chaintech VNF4 which is a
NFORCE4 Ultra chip board and has everything I want except built in
firewire and I got a card for that for 10 bucks and frankly I have no
use for it at the present time but maybe in the future I will. Its
less than 100 bucks and was on sale at Newegg for $85 a few days ago.
I was ranting abit about possible problems a little while ago but that
turned out to be bad memory sticks. Ive heard Chaintechs service is
OK too. If you want to super safe ASUS and ABIT are the largest makers
I think of MB. Ive RMAd boards to both and ABIT has the best RMA
service, ASUS seemed a bit more reluctant but they are well known and
have OK support. The SLI boards are the most expensive but have come
down a lot Ive seen an ASUS I think it was for $159 recently. I dont
really need SLI so its no big deal to me though one person hinted that
the SLIs can use the new dual cores coming out . Dont know if thats
true or not.
Ive used cheap mem and havent had any problems until recently.
Recently some Kingston , even a new stick has been giving me problems.
I got an RMA stick for my older 3200 Kingston and so far it seems OK
but Im going to put it through another day of Memtest86 in a few days
cause my bout of bad mem or incompatible mem has made me so freaking
paranoid. If you get a subtle mem error it can TRASH YOUR DATA, And Im
talking about getting say gigs and gigs of data over weeks and then
finding out maybe some or all of it is SCREWED in subtle ways . For
instance various music files now cant play at all. Various programs
dont work right, etc. You dont know whats screwed so you end up
trashing everything.
Right now Corsair, Crucial , Mushkin have all been on sale finally for
pretty cheap. Its not their best sticks obviously but Im sure they are
decent. Kingston, Patriot, Centon , PNY and many more firms Ive never
heard of were and are on sale recently too. But like I said in the
past Ive had ZERO mem problems. Recently Ive been plagued with them
and so have some neighbors for some reason. Ive also noticed that all
the stuff recently on sale 3200 is CL 3 whereas in the past when I
bought 3200 on sale it was CL 2.5
I'm beginning with a wish list.
Motherboard
Memory
Video Card
Motherboard - get any namebrand nforce4 board Ultra or SLI. There are
decent VIA boards out too. The nforce4s all use PCI e for video. Then
get a venice core 939 3000 or 3200 AMD 64 CPU.
Memory - get any decent cheap 3200 sticks. If you want to OC get
higher than 3200 sticks but the price really soars then . Of course if
money isnt a consideration then go for it. I now receommend testing
the ka ka out of the sticks you get though. Let them go through
memtest for one day.
Video card - 6600gt is the mainstream card that everyone is getting in
the past was around $200 or so. Its been on sale recently. Someone
mentioned a recent $169 or so price. The next step up is a 800XL ATI
which I have or a 6800gt. The 800xl is a good deal. Recent rock bottom
prices were around $260 or so for the 800xl - msrp is 299.
