Lets make a list and check it twice.

[vicaphit]

Well, I am going to be building a computer in Jan/Feb. I have never done this before and would like to compile a list of things that I will need to build it.

The only thing I have so far is a PSU, obviously, so I need EVERYTHING else.

Here is a list of things I know I will need, and what I plan on buying:
Case: Antec P182 Gun Metal Black (not dead set on this though)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 29025#spec
Motherboard: No Clue
RAM: No Clue
CPU: Planning on Intel this time, since AMD hasn't been holding water recently.
Hard drive: WD or Seagate 500gig
DVD R drive: Sony or LG or something cheap
Video card: XFX 8800gt if I can find it around $200 (I know I missed the boat on the dell website, I am kicking myself now)
Heat Paste: Arctic Silver
Operating System: Vista premium atleast.

I don't want to go over $700 if I can afford it after my tax return. I can also hold out longer for the video card and buy that later on so we don't have to take that out of the $700. I have a 7600GT that will last me a few more months.

Anything else I am missing, or any recomendations for any of the items I'm not sure about?

I want to plan this out perfectly so I know what I want when I am ready to buy.

[kenc51]

Mobo = Any mid to highend ASUS P35 / X38 DDR2 board
Memory = If you can afford it, good quality DDR2 800 RAM or if you can, PC8000 = Micron D9 IC's is what you want
HDD = Seagate
Paste = AS5 is v-good but I personally find it loses performance and tends to degrade over time. I use AS Ceramique on things like the gfx & chipset as you don't tend to remove those heatsinks for years.
AS5 for the CPU though

CPU = Wait until mid FEB and you'll get the best CPU. If buying now, get a E6750 and upgrade to quad core this time next year. If budget doesn't allow, get either a E6550 or a E4600 and overclock the hell out of it

[stopthekilling77]

Mobo = Any mid to highend ASUS P35 / X38 DDR2 board
Memory = If you can afford it, good quality DDR2 800 RAM or if you can, PC8000 = Micron D9 IC's is what you want
HDD = Seagate
Paste = AS5 is v-good but I personally find it loses performance and tends to degrade over time. I use AS Ceramique on things like the gfx & chipset as you don't tend to remove those heatsinks for years.
AS5 for the CPU though

CPU = Wait until mid FEB and you'll get the best CPU. If buying now, get a E6750 and upgrade to quad core this time next year. If budget doesn't allow, get either a E6550 or a E4600 and overclock the hell out of it

i highly recommend the E6750. fast out of the box, and faster after a few tweaks!
pair it with a Thermalright U-120 Extreme and a good fan - very much a cost-effective and high-performance cooling solution.

as with the motherboard, i agree with ken. these 680i boards run too hot. case you chose is great, i love any antec P series. make sure you check out the many kinds of Arctic Silver before you settle on AS5, it might not be the BEST choice now. im doing the same thing with my 7800GT, waiting for a good opportunity to get a vid card (but with me i'm in debt right now so even if i had a good deal in front of me all i could do would be to stare at it...)

anyhow choose a motherboard that meets your needs, and then the ram will be an easy choice!

[stev]

Why Vista anything ?!?!? You'll need to fork out more money for ram.

[vicaphit]

I plan on 2 gigs of ram anyway, I never used all of it when I had vista running.

The most I have ever used at once was 1.5 gigs

I was looking at the Asus boards, I will check out that board again. What chipset is best for Intel, I know only AMD right now.

[kenc51]

I plan on 2 gigs of ram anyway, I never used all of it when I had vista running.

The most I have ever used at once was 1.5 gigs

I was looking at the Asus boards, I will check out that board again. What chipset is best for Intel, I know only AMD right now.

Intel chip sets for Intel CPU's!
Currently P35, until the BIOS for X38 matures more.

[vicaphit]

Intel chip sets for Intel CPU's!

well, yeah...

I only know stuff about AMD right now, and I will be going intel next, which I know nothing about anymore.

[martini161]

is this going to be for gaming? if so i would recommend a 680i mobo. newegg has a good one that i use for around 120 bucks after mail in

[stopthekilling77]

is this going to be for gaming? if so i would recommend a 680i mobo. newegg has a good one that i use for around 120 bucks after mail in

if you're worried about heat though, i'd recommend the P35 chipset.

[dgood]

I liked the nforce 650i sli boards when I was building friends their gaming rigs when the c2ds were new. Those aren't the best anymore I guess, but I loved them, and they always worked great for over clocking.

[kenc51]

All I have to say is

"Intel chip sets for Intel CPU's!"

[vicaphit]

Is there anything I am missing from this list that is esential for building a computer?

Now I am still considering the AMD Chips. Would the E6750 run faster than the Athlon X2 6400+?

they are about the same price, and the E6750 runs at 2.66ghtz while the 6400+ runs at 3ghtz.

[ibleet]

The E6750 is the better overall CPU. It also has better overclocking ability and runs cooler.

[Methious]

I just put in an Athlon X2 6400 black edition on an Asus M2N-E (looking for a better board now), at first it ran a lil warm for me (using a nMedia PC Icetank) but after a day it ran at 36C idle, 50C full load torture test. Most of the guys here seem to be intel peeps. It seems the intels over clock easier faster, the highest over clock I got stable on the 6400 was 3.520 (10%) strangely enough no temp increase on mine. Ran it for 24 hours torture testing (Orthos,Memtest) and showed stable. Then I saved it to bios and went back to 3.2 GHZ cause nothing was lagging at 3.2.

Half Life 2 Orange box was smokin on it, 95% on core0, 80% on core1 temps 44C to 46C, bang for buck it's a pretty good deal ($179 over on newegg), mobo I'm currently scraping cash for is an ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe/WiFi-AP AMD 790FX, as you can see it's the new 790fx chip set, pcie 2.0, Wifi router built in, 4 pcie 16x slots, 2 pci, (2 X pcie 16 @16X, 3 X @ 16x 8x 8x, 4x @ 8 8 8 but it's doubtful 4 large cards would go on it.), Apop just mailed one to another staff member to test with a Phenom CPU so hopefully soon the review will be out. You can gaze at one over here: http://directron.com/m3a32mvpdeluxe.html, at $229 and change, Supports HT 3.0 so going to phenom is no prob for future update.

Later on I'll fire up sisioft sandra and bench it and compare to E6750 if you want, I believe the 6400 runs at 3.2 though. The only noticeable difference I got last time was multimedia ran a little low cause of my crud geforce 7300 GS. On a 780fx chip set, with an 8800 geforce I'm betting it'll be smokin enough to make me happy for a while.

[stopthekilling77]

Is there anything I am missing from this list that is esential for building a computer?

Now I am still considering the AMD Chips. Would the E6750 run faster than the Athlon X2 6400+?

they are about the same price, and the E6750 runs at 2.66ghtz while the 6400+ runs at 3ghtz.

maybe this will put it in perspective. pair an E6750 with a Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme and this is what you get with MILD overclocking.

p2.JPG (109.58 KiB) Viewed 8731 times

i'm slowly upping my OC, although 3.10Ghz is nothing to scoff at. hope this helps!

EDIT: also please notice that this is at full load as i'm running F@H. kthx. -ian

[Methious]

Well I fired up Sandra Pro 12 and ran benches on the X2 6400, the closest I could come to the 6750 was the E6800 for comparison, In general the X2 6400 @ stock 3.2 GHZ, on a nforce 570 chip set (Asus M2N-E), and the comparison chip set was set to ASUS P35 so it might be a little apples and oranges. Both memory types were ddr2 800, and I set the hard drive on the comparison to a Raptor 10K drive (mine was 2 x raid 0 160 gig sata 2)

The multimedia score the e6800 cranked out was considerably higher than the X2 6400, the memory performance of the X2 was much higher than the e6800 (on die memory controller so I expected that), arithmetic performance was about a tie, and the raid array 25% better than the raptor though raid does better in benches than real life, at least it doesn't sound like an airplane prop lol. Really though I had a raptor in an antec full tower heavy steel case and it wasn't all that noisy.

About the time it finished the better half walked in, be glad to run the test again and post the combined performance pic if you want.

Better Multimedia or better memory performance (less filling/great taste?) I went for the higher clock speed of the X2 for performance gains for gaming. Plus for what it's worth bragging rights on having the fastest processor AMD makes. I'd like to try the fastest Intel after they get the prices down.

[stopthekilling77]

Well I fired up Sandra Pro 12 and ran benches on the X2 6400, the closest I could come to the 6750 was the E6800 for comparison, In general the X2 6400 @ stock 3.2 GHZ, on a nforce 570 chip set (Asus M2N-E), and the comparison chip set was set to ASUS P35 so it might be a little apples and oranges. Both memory types were ddr2 800, and I set the hard drive on the comparison to a Raptor 10K drive (mine was 2 x raid 0 160 gig sata 2)

The multimedia score the e6800 cranked out was considerably higher than the X2 6400, the memory performance of the X2 was much higher than the e6800 (on die memory controller so I expected that), arithmetic performance was about a tie, and the raid array 25% better than the raptor though raid does better in benches than real life, at least it doesn't sound like an airplane prop lol. Really though I had a raptor in an antec full tower heavy steel case and it wasn't all that noisy.

About the time it finished the better half walked in, be glad to run the test again and post the combined performance pic if you want.

Better Multimedia or better memory performance (less filling/great taste?) I went for the higher clock speed of the X2 for performance gains for gaming. Plus for what it's worth bragging rights on having the fastest processor AMD makes. I'd like to try the fastest Intel after they get the prices down.

i dont think i do so bad with my Intel chip, check this thread out http://forums.legitreviews.com/post79336.html and go to the last page. not too shabby if you ask me :D

[Methious]

Nice Bandwidth good performance increase! Highest I've gotten mine is 9100 stable. Intels going to an on die memory controller soon (can't wait to see them) so performance memory wise should be getting even better.

Don't get me wrong I love AMD and Intel! Ever since my first computer a Commodore 32, since then I've had almost every major model, 8088, 8086,286,386,486, skipped 586, P1 p2 p3 and p4, and most of the AMD K series, the thunderbird, athlon, athlon xp, athlon 64, and the X2. Some celerons, some Durons, some semprons. The problem is I liked them all (Just ask my better half she let me buy them lol).

Right now I got AMD, next year maybe Intel. My theory is: If ya can't love the one ya want (cause you haven't got it), love the one ya got. I mighta swiped that from a song lol. I am jealous of the over clocks Intel is getting though.

[vicaphit]

I'm not a big overclocker because I don't know much about saving OCs to the BIOS, or changing the BIOS for that matter. I might compare boards, and if I find one I like, and it happens to be either chipset, I will go with the board and a CPU to match

[kenc51]

Intel 0wns AMD currently!

Get a E6750 chip, it's faster than anything AMD can bring to the market, and in some cases WAY faster!

Seriously, My first post on this thread is what you want! Even if your not into overclocking (yet)

Ken