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Okay, so I've been seriously looking at building a new system for some time now, maybe the better half of last year till now - and I'm about to come into some money in a little, so I'm thinking about this a lot harder and more, now.

I've NewEgged all my stuff, simply because in the $20 I overpay over scouring PriceWatch and other places, I get guaranteed FedEx service (unlike a lot of shady shops that don't say how they're shipping, and my local (and I use that term loosely) UPSs delivery hours are 'When:Tim's - Not:Home, solid return policy, and other Big Name (TM) incentives.

Anywho, here's what I have. I'm supplying my own optical and hard drives (have two 40GB drives, and a DVD+-RW and CD-ROM drive), case (I guess, I can't find anything good - see Curcuit Board for my post), and other misc parts (like screws and duct tape.)

Motherboard - I've thought about this for some time, and decided I'm going to go with a PCI-E based display adapter. Aside from the fact that 16X sounds twice as fast as 8X (), I'm guessing that AGP is being slowly phased out, and the next-after-next generation of video cards should ship PCI-E only. Hence, my decision.

For the motherboard, I'm going with the FOXCONN "NF4UK8AA-8EKRS" nForce4 Motherboard. I decided on nForce4 because, again, I want this to last me some time, and at the same time be ready for next-gen hardware. It's also the cheapest of the lot, and not much different in specifications.

For the Processor, I'm going with the AMD 64 3000+ (1.8Ghz). This is a nice chip that I can overclock to 2.3-4 Ghz easily, boosting it to ~3500+ speeds. Regardless what Apple's campaign was in '99, speed does matter.

For the video card, and this was probably the toughest choice for me, I'm going with the Rosewill nVidia GeForce 6600GT (128MB) PCI-E with S-Video out. An overall solid card. I don't usually use more than one display, so this will be able to natively acommodate one VGA and one DVI display (when I upgrade, eventually) without those stoo-pid adapters. I'm quite embarassed to say that out of the similar spec video cards, same clock, ram size, everything, the graphic on the heatsink swayed me towards this card. Yes, how n00bish, but it is pretty.

For the memory, I've decided the less than a gig would do nothing but insult my efforts. For this, I feel the Kingmax MPXD42D-2 512MB DDR400 pair will do quite nicely. I've looked at the heatspreader models, and if heat is really a problem (which I don't think it will be), I will get those later. However, again, this is CAS 2.5 memory that was the cheapest of the bunch.

Then, to power all this, I don't think my 300 or 350W PSU will do the trick. To replace it, I'm looking at a couple other PSUs. In this, aside from Wattage, the cabling is very important to me. I'm looking for sleeved cabling preinstalled onto the PSU wiring. I freaking hate all those red and white and yellow cables getting into everything and everywhere, and they really do block air from circulating properly. So, the choices are:

The Winner so far is the Rosewill (again) 500W Black on black PSU.. The cables are wrapped in black heatshrink, and it has black molex connectors. You can't see this in the pictures, but the reviews say that. (I trust them, personally. )

The Runner-Up is the Rosewill 500W Black on black PSU. Yea, I know. This one's $5 cheaper, but it also has a cheap silver plastic knob controlling the fan speed, instead of a more solid switch. Also, the top one's finish is better. I think for $5, cosmetic looks can decide the fate.

Like I said before, the rest of the parts I already have, and am using right now.

The grant total for what I'm buying: $644.56

Ouch.

I guess it's worth it, after all, I expect this to be a beast of a machine, able to handle anything I throw at it for the next two-three years (how much I expect it to last me) at which point I will have a real job and will be able to get myself a nice, new G6, quad Cell-chip @ 6 or 7Ghz each.

So, what do you guys think? Any questions? Comments? Replacements on my buying decisions (which I'm looking for most of all, because many people doing a little research usually yields better results than one person doing a lot.) or any other qualms?

I'm happy to read your comments.



-Tim