f13.net

So far this is what I've got:

CPU: Athlon 64 3000+ RETAIL BOX $189 - Apparently it's easily overclocked and runs really fast.)
MotherBoard: ASUS K8N-E Deluxe NIVDIA nForce3 250Gb w/ 8-ch Sound  $152 - I just chose this because ASUS hasn't done me wrong. Any other suggestions?
RAM: Stumped. Want to have 1 GIG. Who is best bang for your buck?
Video Card: Do I really need to scrap my 9600XT? Or am I better off waiting?
HDD: Will I really need SATA? Or should I stick to regular IDE?

For the most part the computer will be running games. Second to that would be Photoshop/Dreamweaver. Aside from all that it'll be running the regular junk (MSN, Word, Outlook, FireFox..etc.) I doubt my having a DigiCam really changes what I need to add into my PC.

Get the Athlon 64 3000 or 32000 socket 939 chip.
And get a nForce 4.

That combo is pure love.

I'm not rolling in money, damnit!

You should, it's fun.

Then don't upgrade now. The dual-core Athlon 64's will be running on socket 939. It is not worth buying anything else right now if you intend on upgrading again in the next 2 years.

AMD Athlon 64 3000+, 512KB L2 Cache, Socket 939 64-bit Processor - Retail $155.00 (http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductdesc.asp?description=19-103-501&DEPA=1)

CHAINTECH NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra Chipset Motherboard For AMD Socket 939 CPU, Model "VNF4/Ultra" - RETAIL $109.00 (http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-152-049&depa=1)

Hahahahah, Nix just got pwned.

Wait for the new ATI x800 line to come out.

Best I could find at a canuck store was this chaintech: http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1219243&Tab=2&NoMapp=0
It scares me. It's partly called the "Value Edition"...

[EDIT - Shockeye] bbCode isn't THAT hard.

You aren't rolling in money!

Who said I wanted to buy it? Just all I could find that was close to Shockeyes suggestion. Newegg gets nice prices. In US. After shipping and conversion, not worth my time to even consider newegg.

Then have a friend in the US buy it and ship it to you. You just send him a check. I'm sure it will cost less. Shockeye's right though, go nforce 4 and socket 939.

What schild and Shockeye said on the cpu/mobo. Just make sure it has the features you want, and will need in the future. Also, dual channel is a must.

For RAM, go with either Corsair's XMS series, or something from Crucial...best RAM out there IMO. Especially thr XMS stuff....they come in paired modules that are supposed to perform better than just using 2 seperate sticks.

What they said on Vid Card.

SATA is not really neccessary...but if you wanna spend the money, and the board supports it, sure.

You could do well with a lot less...but if you're building from scratch, you should go all-out.

Are the X800 PCI-E or AGP?

As for SATA - For the extra cost is there any significant difference? Or is it minimal enough to not warrant me bothering with it.

I built my newest computer a few months ago and I really like the SATA drives.  They don't cost much more, maybe an extra 10 bucks on a $150 drive.  The cabling is nice and they "feel" faster, although that is probably just an illusion. I had to go through some pain installing windows as they required the "Hit F6 to install raid" drivers portion. Even though I didn't use raid my motherboard/windows couldn't find the drives without the diskette.  I would go SATA since you will probably be taking the hard drive to your next computer and they might have phased out the parallel-ATA by then.

I think the verdict is still out on the PCI-Express stuff. It might just wind up being another one of Intel's duds.  If you want to go that way then you have to rethink everything, and if you're on a budget it's not the way to go because the only cards which work with it are the newer higher end ones. The x800 is AGP from ati but I imagine there might also be a PCI-E version, it also very expensive.  I got a GeForce 6800 (http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=12476&vpn=BFGR68256GTOC&manufacture=BFG%20Technologies) that I'm very pleased with, and that ncix.com site has a Vancouver office so you don't pay duties and deal with all the customs stuff, just click on the Canadian flag in the upper left.

And like Shockeye said you should definitely go with a socket 939 motherboard.

Its been said but what the hey, i'll vouch for it.  I just finished buidling my PC maybe 2, 3 weeks ago.  I went nForce4 and 939.  Got an AMD XP 3500+, 2GB Corsair DDR400 (512x4, a mistake i didn't realize until later :\) and a GeForce 6800.  I also went with SLi enabled video cards and motherboard...so when my 6800 only costs $100-200 I can just get it cheap

AGP versions of the X800 and X800XL will be out in the next few months. If you're looking for a new videocard that won't break the bank, I suggest waiting for those to hit.

Better than that 6600 GT that everyone was raving about last month?

Very much so. Here's some benchmarks of the XL PCIe version (http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_radeon_x800_xl/). And here's some X800 stuff (http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/powercolor_radeon_x800_bravo/).

Here's HardOCP's preview of the X800 XL (http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzAw).

I also have 2GB Corsair 512x4, what mistake are you referring to?

The X800 has better overall performance but is also about $100 more expensive compared to the 6600GT for PCIe cards on www.newegg.com, though the X800's are 256 MB cards vs 128 MB cards for the 6600GTs. So the 6600GT still has a better performance/price ratio -- i.e. with the X800 you are paying about 60% more (though again you are getting more memory) for roughly 15% better performance.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2290&p=7

Probably that he filled up all his memory slots so if he wants to expand beyond 2 GB in the future he'll have to take out some of the memory. There is a disadvantage with going with 1 GB DIMMs, though, which is that you can't find them with as fast timings as you can the 512 MB ones. E.g. you can't find 1 GB DIMMs that have the 2-2-2-5 timing like you can for the 512 MBs.

The X800 and X800XL for PCIe are high in price right now. Once the AGP parts come out they will be hitting the price-point that the 6600GT is at and then another point slightly above.

I was intending to go with 1GBx2 instead of 512x4.  Just in case I someday wanted / needed 4GB of RAM

(Hey, its more likely than needing two video cards and I paid extra to be able to use that someday)

I got a SATA drive recently. They really aren't that much more than IDE and the cabling is fucking fantastic. I absolutely fucking HATE IDE cables. The SATA is half as thick, and easy to push on there, instead of those fucking ham hock sized ribbon cables. For cabling alone, I'd go with SATA. I had little problem with the drivers on diskette to install windows with. Download the SATA driver for your MB, put it on a diskette, hit f6 when WindowsXP asks for a RAID driver, enjoy the love. The speed increase is decent.

For this alone I'd buy a SATA setup. I loathe IDE cables. I've gone through about 5 of them because my case was invented by a retard who decided the gap between the MB and my drive bays needs to be minimal. Every IDE cable I slap in there gets so horribly crimped it stops working after a couple months. The one in there now is currently going. Stupid cables...

X800 or the GT? I'm becoming something of a graphics whore for all my games. The whole point of this new box is to be able to play most games on the higher, if not the highest, settings. After upgrading to the computer I'm running now I realized I was missing alot of teh shiney. Big difference moving from a GeForce 4 MX 440 SE to a 9600XT. I'm also wondering if it's worth it to get a card with input. I just bought a slimline PS2 and I'd like to be a lazy prick and play my PS2 where I play my PC. I remember a couple years back people were telling me that cards with cable/AV input were a bit slower due to the extra shit put on it to work with the input. I have no idea if that was BS or true, but either way, is that something I should look at when considering a graphics card with input?

ATI announced today that X800 XL AGP cards are now shipping.

Goodbye 6600 GT, your coffin has arrived.

We were disappointed with the performance of the SATA drives we bought. I have a 160GB ATA/133 that gets 46MB/s and the new mirrored 80GB SATA only gets 47MB/s. Both have 8MB of cache.

From my understanding this is a mistake because you no longer run in dual channel mode with more then 2 chips.

That's only true if you have one of those funky 3 memory slot dual channel motherboards.

ATA-133 has a max transfer speed of 133 MB/s which today's IDE drives are nowhere close to reaching during any transfer that isn't completely contained in the hard drive cache (even the 10,000 RPM Raptor can do about 70 MB/s at best). So Serial ATA's max transfer speed of 150 MB/s is a meaningless advantage at the moment. For most people it really is all about the cabling. There are some people who might be interested in the "Native Command Queueing" capability of Serial ATA, which can give better performance under server conditions, but that's only just starting to become available in drives and controllers.