Hey Lasereth, thanks for the guide, it helped immensely with my last purchase. Now I need to lean on you for help with the second one.
I'm putting a productivity PC together for my wife. Her 10 year old Gateway Celeron 466 box is finally being replaced!
The new boxen will primarily be your Email/Word/Exel/Outlook/Firefox/with-occasional-foray-into-downloaded-TV-show-episode-watching-box.
Extr33m3 fully hax0red PWNT JU!! performance won't be necessary. However, I still want to make a smart purchase.
The overall box budget is about a G. I've got a parts list all done at $1,271.23 and am putting together a "pared down" list.
The board is PCI-X, primarily because I want socket 939 and that upgrade path. With PCI-X I'm finding myself completely unfamiliar with the graphics cores.
I tend to like ATI.
My first pick, primarily from a PCI-X/256mb search criteria was the SAPPHIRE Radeon X700 256MB DDR PCI Express x16 Video Card - OEM for $103.
I have no clue how this compares to the Sapphire 9800XT 256 AGP card in my box. That's part of my problem, I can't find pages comparing PCI-X products to what I'm familiar with.
Under consideration today is the SAPPHIRE 100118 Radeon X550 128MB 128-bit DDR PCI Express x16 Video Card - OEM for $65.
Link to that one.
Since the whole purpose of the "pared down" list is to get things down to thier minimum cost level, I'm also trying to figure out if the X550 is going to be a foolish way to save $40, and I should just rather buy the X700 and cut costs elsewhere.
Any help is most appreciated, and I will check back if you need me to provide any parts list type info.