My son and I want to build a decent gaming computer. I have replaced
hard drives, video cards , sound cards. etc but have never built one
from scratch.
I like the A7N8x deluxe with a AMDxp2600, I am hoping someone can
give me a good config (recommendations) to get one running in the
$500.00 range minus monitor.
IE video card, case/power supply, memory etc..
thanks much for your time..
rdrdude
It has been my experience that you don't save money by building your own,
so while it is good to have budget targets, don't be surprised when the
credit card bill comes in at the end of the month, that your target
isn't met. What usually happens, is the next grade of hardware up from
the one you are shopping for only seems to be a few more bucks, and
those bucks add up.
I tried using a spreadsheet to control this, during my last project
(a computer given as a Christmas gift). It took me a month of
fiddling with the spreadsheet, as I found that promising leads turned
out to have gotchas in shipping costs or other issues. It takes a long
time to get all the items you need on the spreadsheet, and arrange
it such that you deal with as few companies as possible (to save on
shipping).
It sounds like you already know what you want, so from Newegg we get:
XP2600 $104
A7N8X-e Deluxe $115 (no, I have no idea what the -e does for you)
PC3200 CAS3 2x $61 (2x512MB CAS3 Sleaziest supplier on pricewatch.com)
or PC3200 CAS3 2x $87 (2x512MB CAS3 Crucial)
or PC3200 CAS2.5 2x$115 (2x512MB CAS2.5 Kingston, $119 at Mushkin)
Case ~$100 Antec Plus660AMG case (incl supply) estimated cost
Keyboard $ 20
Mouse $ 4 Bargain bin
-----------------------
Subtotal w. $87ram $517
(Note - I use newegg.com just for their search engine, as I an Canadian
and they don't ship to Canada. My use of their search engine is not
an endorsement
I chose to put 1GB of ram, but what you use may depend on the operating
system you plan on using. I assume as this is an upgrade, the OS will
be reused. Perhaps with Win98SE or the like, you could live with 2x256
sticks or 1x512 if they happen to be cheaper. The WinXP machine I put
together only had 512MB in it, which seems to be fine if you are only
doing one thing at a time.
I am assuming in my choice of ram here, that the processor multiplier
is locked (but I saw a post tonight with a method for unlocking), and
that you will try overclocking the FSB to get a little better performance.
Memory bandwidth is only of importance if you are using Photoshop,
video editing/rendering/compression/transcoding etc., and for gaming
it might not be quite as important as for some of those tasks.
Whether the memory is CAS3, CAS2.5, CAS2 makes a difference, but it is
not the kind of difference that justifies doubling the purchase price
of the memory. At DDR400 rates and higher, some of the losses are
hidden by pipelining during memory access, so if every dollar counts,
I'd rather put the money into a kick ass video card than into the
memory.
As far as the dual channel thing goes, on the A7N8X boards that have
dual channel, the processor is really only ready to use one channel's
worth of memory bandwidth, so the dual channel only buys somewhere
around a few percentage points of performance. Since buying two stick
of N/2 sized memory is generally the same price as one stick of
N sized memory, there isn't a penalty for buying the amount of memory
you want as two sticks. They don't have to come as a "dual kit",
and the price of "dual kits" now is pretty well matching two single
sticks anyway. (On the Intel system I built, the difference between
single channel and dual channel operation is perceptable.)
So, right now, we have a computer with no monitor and no video card
for around $500.
If you look on newegg.com, there are several different ATI 9700 cards
for about $200. ATI 9800 cards are around $300. Whether you buy an
Nvidia card or an ATI card, be very careful to read reviews and gather
as much info as you can on whether quality memory is being used on the
video card. I've read a couple of posts about some disreputable practices
by Gainward on their video cards, and many of the video card vendors
try to shave nickels off the manufacturing costs at the users expense.
There have been video cards on Newegg, for example, where the video
cards were dying within the first three weeks of purchase (and as far
as I can tell, those products were discontinued by Newegg, so that
they could remove the customer reviews from sight).
Some people will swear by Nvidia cards, but with the latest batch of
FX cards, I have a hard time identifying a "sweet" card that meets
a reasonable price/performance figure. For example, in the past, I
would have recommended a GF3 TI200, or a GF4 TI4200, as they were
good performers and reasonably priced compared to similar ATI products.
But with the FX cards, so many of them aren't "ultra" in any sense
of the word, that I'd sooner wait for the next generation, to find
out if Nvidia gets a clue about marketing.
You can visit Tomshardware.com and his video section - there are a few
"jumbo" reviews that have frame rate charts for the various families
of cards. It won't take too long using the Newegg.com search engine
and the Toms charts, to figure out which card you can afford and which
one gives good gaming performance.
HTH,
Paul
