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[Titan]

Hmm... my "old" computer has a 3,2 P4 HT CPU...

AMD sucks muhahaha

Naah.. it's sweet with HT.. 2 tasks floating perfectly..

Tried to burn a DVD and play sims2.. worked fine..

Had Mp3 on in the background

[evilded]

Yes I'm planning on buying 1024MB of RAM. This might bring me into some trouble with older games but then so does XP that I will have on there and it is not meant to play old games but the very newest.

Man, if u want to play old games, just shell out like 100 bucks and get a p133 or something, along with your new machine of course...

[Rogue]

I prefer ASUS motherboards, so if I am on your place I would get ASUS motherboard.

Everything else seems fine in your plan, except that I would get one 1 GB instead of two 512MB. (More room for later updates) You did not mention what kind of HD you like to get (SATA is nice option) and what kind of case. For system like that you need enough power, and a lot of fans. (Or some better way to cool everything down) Perhaps some nice full tower?

[The Niles]

I choose the MSI board over ASUS because of the inclusion of FireWire on the MSI board but your right the ASUS boards are nice as well.

I have not completely agreed on the HDD. I do want SATA as it will speed up loadtimes. I have an Antec Case as I said. It's a pretty good one but not the best. It has 350Watt of power which should be enough for everything in there. Your other suggestions make sence but for one thing. My budget is limited. Getting a full tower is out of the question and 1GB of RAM is preferable to getting 512MB twice but again it cost more. 1GB should be sufficient for a long time. By the time I want 2GB the prices will have gone down enough for the cost not to be an issue anymore to replace the lot rather then expand what I have.

[Rogue]

Antec makes really nice cases (I missed that you'll get that one, I am also using their full tower with 5 fans + dual fan in 420Wpower supply).

I got 1 firewire port on my ASUS motherboard, 6 USB2 ports, 1GB NIC, AGP (3X), AIC'97 sound (need to replace this) and it comes with 2 ATA controllers + SATA raid controller (I am using it with only one SATA disk, but planning to get another one and use it in stripping, which should cut the speed in half.

Reason I choose ASUS is that they got on board protection for overheating, which already once saved my CPU (don’t use original CPU fan, get some nice ones).

Not sure about RAM prices where are you. Here price for two 512 and one 1Gb is not that much different.

[The Niles]

Always use the origional CPU fan as it increases the warenty by a year (from two to thee years). Besides I am not going to overclock the thing so I should be fine with that one.

1GB is about 30%-60% more expensive as using two 512MB sticks.

I was thinking of using either the Epox 8KDA3+ (not ASUS, remembered it wrong) or the MSI K8N Neo Platinum as both were tested very well by AnandTech. I choose the MSI version because it has the firewire port.

I get the feeling you have a slightly higher budget for building your PC then I do for mine LOL .

[Rogue]

I would not say so, as my last big upgrade was about $660 (case, cpu, motherboard, memory and HD). That was a year and half ago, but the online store that I got stuff from is closed now. At that time I made 3 computers in this range (last one was mine). I never overclocked my computers, just for some reason fan on my CPU got bad, and mobo shut down before CPU was overheated. I replaced fan and it works well now.

Is this motherboard you are talking about? How much you will pay for it? Here is MSI mobo. Both of these have some video chips on the board.

I had some problem with MSI mobo (clock speed was unable to handle XP2000 processor), and I returned it.

[The Niles]

It looks like those are the two but neither has onboard graphics. The MSI board is 104 Euro right now.

wait the MSI board is different. The one I want is the MSI K8N Neo Platinum not the FSR. Not sure what the difference is.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc....-130-457&depa=1

This is the one I want.

[Rogue]

Indeed nice mobo. Like that 8x USB2 and 3Firewire ports and 4x SATA ports.

Keep us posted if you get this stuff. I would like to know how good it is.

[The Niles]

Will do. I should be ordering it this week.