G1625S

It's time for a new computer and I'd like to try and put a system together myself. It may not be the cheapest way (or maybe it is...) but I'd really like the experience. Any suggestions on motherboard/cpu combos? I'd rather not have built in graphics/sound on the MB. I've got an old-ish ATX case with, I think an a-bit BE6 MB and a pIII. The only thing I can use is the case, prolly, and mybe the power supply. Anyway, suggestions are appreciated!
Greg

mikmaze

for a simple money saving standpoit I would suggest going with AMD based system. That decided Iwould go with a 939 pin motherboard, as your need grows you may want to switch to a dual core chip and the 939 will make that possible. Power supply can make or brake a system, any high end video cards will eat power, and perfomance tweaking can jeopardize stability if a cheap supply is used, 480 watt antec is about the minimum I would suggest getting. Hard drives are getting enormous, deals and rebates bringing even 300 gig drives down below a hundred bux, go for as big as you can afford, while watching the speed and cache of the drive, speed above 7k rpm and cache at or over 8mb. As for ram, a gig is standard these days, I run 2 gigs due to some pretty huge digital imagry work, Watch when buying ram to get DDR ram, not DDR 2, you will find 2 priced lower but the amd system do not use it. As for an optical drive dual layer dvd drives are falling in price and its nice to have should you ever want to cram an ungodly ammount on a single disc, As for a video card, unless you are a hard core gamer you won't see any advantage spending big bux ona latest greatest vid card, ebay has tons of 6600 series cards that will run almost anything with no problems. For sound you can find all you usually need in an onboard solution, same goes for the network card. A nice addition for hte front panel is a media card reader, for 20 bux ya get a place to pop in your digicam card and zap back and forth photos. The one disadvantage of building your own is not having all the free software that comes bundled in todays machines. it can cost you quite a bit of money buying software and operating systems and office suites. Good luck, you will elarn a lot.

G1625S

Thanks for the info--that definitely gets me going in the right direction! Now....where should I shop?
greg

Begle1

Well, after building one-off custom PC's for a few months, I had a pretty good mind about what the best way to put things together was...

Of course that was two years ago, and I have since gotten out of the PC buisness... (Which is good, since at one time I had the price and statistics of every available computer component memorized.) So (un)fortunately I have no longer have any idea what the best of anything is.

But what I do know is that if you give us the price that you are willing to pay, and the list of things that you want to be able to do, we can figure out what the best stuff is that you should buy and where you should buy it for the cheapest price.

Figuring out what pieces work together requires some knowledge, but putting them together is a pretty simple 10-60 minute process anymore...


(Thinking back on it, I was getting paid three times as much building PC's as I am now cleaning pools... Maybe I should get back into that buisness...)

G1625S

I'm looking more for stability than performance. Most of my time at the computer is spent here at DTR We like to work with the photos/video from our digi camera, but nothing too demanding. I'm somewhat active with a racing sim (GPL), but anything that's up to date should handle that without a problem. I'd like to get more into web-design. Basically, if I can handle some mid-grade digital editing software, play my racecar game and surf DTR and do it for, say, 500 bucks, I'd be happy

ChrisLib

I built the machine I`m using now about 2 years ago, it`s a P4 3.0g 1g ram etc, I got all of my stuff from http://www.newegg.com/ on the advise of a good friend. I did some price shopping and they were pretty good. I talso alllowed me to "one stop shop" wich makes things a little easier. I have had great service from newegg and would buy from them again.

Xonid

I second newegg.com, it's a good one-stop shop.

If your using your old case, and putting new stuff in it, make sure it can accomodate the heat. The newer CPU's and graphics cards can heat up good.

I also like browsing www.monarchcomputer.com. It's a good site to mix and match components and compare prices.

mikmaze

The one thing I will say about Newegg is that if you live in a state where they can collect sales tax that kills their price advantage, here in NJ they collect it and 6 % adds up. One word of warning, Tiger direct should be avoided like the plague, terrible service history on their rebates.

G1625S

Thanks for the tip on sales tax. 8.5% here in NY And thanks everyone else for all the info It seems plugging it all together is fairly straightforward, but component selection is a bear with the technology changing every 18 minutes or so...

Timmay2

If youre looking for stability choose an intel board and intel chip.

BC847

Another vote for NewEgg and AMD.

As a shopping aid ~ http://www.pricewatch.com/

----> http://www.resellerratings.com/index.pl <----- USE THIS!

durasmack

The market must be flooded with work then..... round here cleaning pools is $40/hr work.......

I have gotten better than that servicing PCs but not buildin em......

-Trey

Jim Lane

You get what you pay for. I only use Intel motherboards and on occasion maybe high end Asus.
Stay away from the cheap boards like ECS, Gigabyte,
It is unacceptable to have a computer fail or be unstable requiring reboots when I am running as network or DVR servers, I also use Intel CPU/s.
My current system I an Intel 955XBK motherboard and I am using my old 3.8 ghz 800 mhz. LGA775 processor from my last computer.
You also need a healthy power supply (I have 650 watt) and don’t skimp on the cooling, use the Intel fan at least. I lost a fan and the CPU died a very quick and painful death melting components on the motherboard. I now use liquid cooling with an external radiator.
Check out this underground government test, I can see my $600.00 processor going this way.
http://www.wimp.com/processor/
Ram is cheap and the more the better, I only have 4 gig dual channel so programs run fairly fast.
Video cards depends on what you are going to do with the computer, I do video editing so I got a ATI all in wonder PRO and it works fine for me but there are a lot of really good ones out there now especially for gamers, but a lot of the cheaper ones use the system memory instead of onboard, aggressive video also requires a lot of power from your power supply.
Hard drives are really cheap now; I looked at some Seagate 500 Gb drives tonight for $289.99 with a $40.00 rebate.
Also on hard drives, if you value your data, don’t get a cheap drive get a good one. I have best luck with Seagate, followed by Hitachi/ IBM, then Fujitsu, then Western Digital and I have had more Maxtor drives fail in the field losing peoples data.
Seagate has a 5-year warranty, Hitachi 3 year warranty while Western Digital and Maxtor have a 1-year warranty. I always buy a 5-year instant exchange on my drives and you can trade up.
To keep my data safe, what I do is have multiple drives where as “C” drive is only populated by the operating system and all of the data files are stored on the remaining “D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, & N drives.
I, J, K, L, M & N are partitioned on a 400 gb drive times 2 on a raid array.

I have almost a clone of this computer except for the hard drives, video and a 3.2 Ghz CPU I am running for my surveillance DVR,
Both computers run 24/7 ,DVR automatically reboots every 30 days and I reboot mine when I remember to.

Building a computer is real easy to do; if it does not fit then it doesn’t belong there.
But building a computer where everything works in harmony requires a lot more skill. Some hardware simply refuses to work with certain motherboards and chipsets.

If you are having issues with your hardware or software, try checking into the README files for your installed software and you will find a list of Issues and Incompatibilities.
Symantec WinFax Pro does not work worth a darn on Abit boards but never skip a beat on Asus boards.
I like Windows 2000 Professional over XP Professional anytime.
Jim

Begle1

So $500.00 for just the computer, or do you desire a new monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers and printer with that as well?

Ph4tty

You can find barebone systems on ebay for near or at the price you'd pay to build one. They'd include case, power supply, mobo, cpu then you add memory, HD's, video card,...

Newegg is a great site and you can get everything you need there. I'm pretty much on the same page as the above posts. Maybe a Asus mobo w/ 939 chipset and a sempron processor with a 1/2 gig of DDR, then reuse your case. Check the output of your powersupply- it might need to be upgraded ifs its only 200w =\ A couple extra fans couldn't hurt while you're at it With the 939 when it comes time to upgrade again just replace processor with a athlon 64, add memory,...