Building New Comp, Options
 

OK well im going to be building a new comp soon (for games) and ive been consitering going pentium instead of AMD, because you cant get ddr2 slots with AMD(least im pritty sure). would you guys rather have more ram or faster ram?

im looking to spend 2000$ or less, noneed for monitor atm~ would love any input

AFAIK, there's no reason to buy DDR2, yet. Negligible speed increases. I would go for a gig (at least) of pc 3200 ram- your choices for ram can easily range from about $150-$450 depending on how much cash you want to fork out. (In answer to your question, I would want to have more AND faster ram :)). Grab an AMD Athlon 64 939-pin, or an FX 939 pin. These proc's are gonna last you for a long time, hopefully. I definitely wouldn't buy Intel right now. Video is a tough call. Perhaps wait a bit until a PCIe solution comes out for AMD motherboards (I thought it should have been here by now..). Otherwise, I would buy a 6600 GT AGP. All this, plus all necessities, shouldn't put you back much more than $1000. You could easily go for a top of the line processor or a better videocard if you want to pwn your enemies better or something, but I wouldn't. Buy a lot of ice cream sandwiches.

err thats what it was, cant get pcie for amd, or mabyit wasnt meh. anyways i was thinking about spending like 400 or so on ram, so basicly i was thinking realy fast 1gig or just an assload of slow. thanks for the input, oh and im building it to play MMORPG's, eq2 eqlive maby some WoW, realy ram /vidcard intensive games ><!

I built a very nice AMD64 3000+ system for ~$800
I ordered everything from newegg, the site is great very fast on everything.
1GB PC3200 Corsair ram (go with 1GB you wont be dissapointed)
160 GB HDD
AMD64 3000+
Soltek MoBo
Cheap case (Still looks very nice though)
Asus Nvidia 5700 LE video card (Nice card, wish i would have spent more though)

One suggestion is don't go cheap on the graphics card. Mine was ~$125 and I wish I would have spent more.

~Zach

Btw, you can get PCI-e on a socket 939 MoBo...this is the beauty of the NForce 4 chipset. Check it out, the motherboards start at around $200 and you may have to wait a week or so for them to be released.

http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...ogle&scoring=p

~Zach

im definately getting 1gig of ram or more, but i was debateing on if i should say, get 1.5 or maby even 2, or just realy nice quality 1gig~ definately not skimping out on the vid card, was planning on getting all my stuff from newegg also heh~ socket 939 is AMD? thought it was intel~

$2000 is an absurd amount for building your own PC. You're gonna have a top of the line ownage machine with that kind of money.

AMD Athlon 64 3400+ Retail - $271
Soltek SL-K8T Pro - $115
Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000 RPM SATA Hard Drive - $150
1 GB PC3200 Corsair Value RAM - $145
eVGA NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT AGP 256 MB - $400
Case, CD-RW, Floppy - $150
Enermax 350w PSU - $60
Cables - $30

$1321 TOTAL

You could even "upgrade" the processor even more since you have like $700 leftover. This setup that I made would be unbelieveable in gaming. You can't go wrong with an Athlon 64 and 6800 GT combo.

-Lasereth

If you wanted, try the "XMS" series or something for RAM. That is, if you wanted. Value will do you just fine (it does me). Oh, and pulled off the first site that froogle search pulled up:

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040601/index.html

Check it out for yourself....That site is EXCELLENT for hardware reviews. No bullshit, hands down.

I also agree with Lasereth. For $2k, you could wait for a mother board with the NVidia SLi technology (should be on the NForce4 boards i believe). It enables multi-gpu's on your motherboard. Could you imagine 2 6800 Ultra's?? You can set up the video cards up to manage the video to one monitor, here's an excerpt from an article on Tomshardware.

Check the article out here: http://graphics.tomshardware.com/gra...123/index.html


~Zach

sounds to me like AFR would run alot smoother to me, or just generaly work a little better. um i just mean i have alotted myself up to 2g to spend and i myself was kinda planning on useing round 1500, and getting 2gigs of ram exc. um i dunno when im getting the money (inheritance, house needs to be sold, exc) and im not realy wanting to have to wait to get one, as i have no computer atm (well, useing a friends 400mhz wuwu!) no one even consiters useing a pentium chip? ive always been partial to AMD and everyone blindly agrees that AMD will run games faster (honestly no ones ever shown me much proof, dispite intel posting higher numbers, i know for the numbers AMD is far quicker, my friend had an intel 100mhz faster, same vid card same ram as me and we would lan the same games and he would always run slower, even if i was hosting) anyways, intels get pritty high numbers and i know a few ppl that run the games im going to be running and they say there 3ghz+ chips do fine? eh, just something i was thinking about.