Help with putting together a $600ish system

[Helevitia]

I'm helping a buddy and my brother put together a system and since I upgraded 6 months ago myself, I am now out of the loop.

I'm thinking it is a good idea to start with AMD64 rather than the Athlon at this point? You folks agree?

Neither one of them will be overclocking or doing anything fancy. The big difference between the two is that my brother plays video games and wants to play the latest and greatest.

So, what are good, cheap, solid motheboards at this point? Since I always stick with Asus I am not good outside of my little Asus world.

I know a lot of you get SIS boards. Any recommendations?

What about AMD64? What speed? 2800? 3000? 3200?

Also, should I go for 512MB or 1GB of RAM?

I'm thinking DVD burner too.

They both have keyboard/mouse/monitor.

All help is appreciated

Dave

[Helevitia]

What do you think of Asrock motherboards? I know a few of you have mentioned them on MURC.

What about this one:

GIGABYTE "GA-K8NS-939" NVIDIA nForce3 ULTRA Chipset

[UtwigMU]

- S754 - avoid as it's dead end platform.

- nForce4 is the way to go, because it's the only chipset currently supporting PCIe. I'd really go PCIe over AGP with new Athlon64 build so nF3 and AGP VIA and SiS chipsets are out. The PCIe SiS and VIA boards haven't appeared yet.

You can go AGP to cut costs, but you will have to buy new videocard and motherboard on next upgrade.

- SLI is waste of money generally as not all games are supported and you're generally better off buying faster single card. Only interesting if you plan to run 2 cards for 4 monitors. Look at Foxconn for cheap nF4 non-SLI motherboard as most of the top names are SLI and carry a price premium. If you plan to stick with Asus K8N-E nF4 Deluxe SLI is nice, but expensive.

- You want the 90nm Winchester core Athlon64 at affordable pricepoint. 2.0GHz/3200+ is therabout.

- 1GB of RAM (either way get 2 sticks for dual channel) is beneficial. I'd rather have slightly lesser videocard/CPU and GB of RAM though.

- DVD burner - NEC dual layer is priced nicely and works.

[az]

The Gigabyte NF4 (non-ultra, non-sli) board is priced very competitively, IIRC.

Do they need new case, PSU, harddisk, FDD to?

The Arctic Cooling Silencer64 coolers are very cheap and work well, and aren't very loud.

AZ

[Helevitia]

Nforce4 seems a tad too much. Why not Nforce3?

The cheapest Nforce4 mobo I see is $125.

Yes, they need case/psu, hdd, fdd as well.

Dave

[UtwigMU]

nF4 = PCIe
nF3 = AGP

[Helevitia]

Oh, and why go for PCIe over AGP? I don't see any reason for a budget system to go PCIe at this point. Do you?

[GNEP]

Recently put together pretty cheaply an nForce4 socket 939 system using

- FoxConn/WinFast NF4K8MA-KS nForce4 Micro ATX (northbridge HS is a bit on the noisy side but I'm going to replace it from my box of old heatsinks as soon as I get a chance, although will have to do a bit of hacksaw work as it's under end of the graphics card). Stable so far, and was the only microATX s939 PCIe mobo I could find, and what's more was bloody cheap.

- Winchester core Athlon64 3000+

- Zalman CNPS 7000 Cu that I had lying around

- Antec Phantom (passive) PSU - bit of a luxury this one but it's perfect for the particular configuration I've got this system in (aimed at being as quiet as possible but still a good performer, as for this system case-wise it's pure bodge-job )

- Gigabyte PCIe 6600GT (the passive model)

- a gig of 3200 RAM I had lying around but one of the sticks turned out to be bad so it's only on 512MB at the mo until I move memory between machines

- Maxtor Diamondmax 10 SATA 200GB - was pleasantly surprised at how quiet these ones are - the 250GB and 300GB ones are noisier I think but they do have 16MB cache

- a random 120mm fan I had lying around, running on 5v, and in a bit of an odd place.

- random DVD drive (I can't be the only one with a stack of various optical drives piled up in a cupboard )

erm, I think that's it. It would appear to run anything I can chuck at it with ease.

[UtwigMU]

This depends on upgrade pattern and existing videocard. If you don't need PCIe, you can also consider SocketA/mobile Barton, which should be even cheaper.

[Helevitia]

Upgrade pattern is once every 2-4 years for both buddy and brother.

[RC Agent]

Let me throw in my opinion.

Motherboard: ASRock K8 Combo-Z
CPU: AMD 64 3000+ Retail (Socket 939 Winchester core)
DVD Burner: NEC 3520
Total so far from newegg: $302.48
Memory: 1 GB PC3200 from www.crucial.com (2 x 512 DIMMS): $150+tax
Leaves you about $150 for a vid card.
I say ATI 9800 Pro 128MB for about $125ish *giggles*

How's that???

[Wombat]

Why risk a combo board if they're going to start out with a 939 processor?

[RC Agent]

It's not a nforce chip. And it's cheap and good enough, IMO. Why do you say that a combo board is a 'risk'?

[Wombat]

Because it's more metal, more trace, more noise. More things to go wrong.

[az]

The Asrock combo board scored really bad on stability in the last c't test I read (which - granted - is from last year).

The gigabyte NF4 mobo I spoke of was 99EUR at the end of last year, is that too steep? I think PCIe is the way to go for a new system now, and IIRC you can get cheaper video cards for PCIe than for AGP for the same price.

AZ