Building A New AMD-AM2 Gaming Rig...

[MouthNCo]

Hey Guys~

First, a little background about myself, just to give you an idea of my experience so it may be easier to talk to me. I've been building my own computers for roughly 5 years, and have had great success. While in college, my roomate spilled a pitcher of college all over my tower "on accident" while I was gone, so it soaked in and my system fried. When that happened, I just became discouraged and got out of the game of building computers. However, I am about to get back into the mix, and figured I'd ask you guys what you think.

My current roll to build off of is roughly $1200-$1600. Right now, I have some ridiculous pile that I am only using because I found it in my trunk and it seems to work, so whatever new rig I build is going to increase performance that will be noticeable, so I'm not worried about that. I'm building my new rig mainly for seroius gaming, involving games like HL2, BF, WoW, B&W, etc. However, I also need to have alot of storage because I am constantly running out of hard drive space right now with a 160 gig hard drive.

Now, to the parts.

Seeing the new AMD-AM2 socket processors was quite a pleasant suprise as I was looking for parts this morning. Great timing for building a new system. I'm mainly going to go to this opposed to the 939 sockets because of the ability to use DDR2 memory, finally.

Case: Thermaltake Armor Series VA8000BWS (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811133154) - I'm really not sure about where to go with my case, but I prefer the full towers, and this case just appealed to me because it's black and has the side window so I can see the guts. Runs: $150

PSU: Thermaltake W0057RU-01 PurePower TWV ATX 12V 2.0 500W Power Supply (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817153031) - Not sure if 500w is neccessary, but we can determine that as I start posting the other parts, but I feel comfortable having a little bit extra wattage because I have had systems fail before due to not having a big enough PSU. Runs: $130

Motherboard: MSI K9N Neo-F Socket AM2 NVIDIA nForce 550 MCP ATX AMD Motherboard (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813130050) - Lack of motherboards for the AM2-socket at the moment, obviously, but Biostar and Gigabyte are the only other options out right now, but I hate Biostar and the Gigabyte motherboard only comes with 1 PCI Express slot, while for $3 more this one comes with 2. I also don't have the funds to buy 2 video cards at the moment, and honestly don't see myself needing to go over the top in the future, so I am getting the cheaper board since I don't need SLI. Runs: $83

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2000MHz HT Socket AM2 Processor (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103637) - For $60 cheaper than the 3500+, I'm only sacrificing .2ghz, which I'm willing to sacrifice as I will *hopefully* be overclocking at some point. The L2 cache in the Semprons is lower, so meh. Not many options out for it right now, so this is the one I'm going to go with. Runs: $140

Hard Drives: Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822144701) - I prefer WD hard drives because I've had the same 160 gigger for 3 years now, and while it is sluggish at times, it has never died on me, thus...I will stick with what I am happy with. This hard drive has a 16mb cache which is gas. I would've loved to go to a 10,000rpm hard drive at this capacity, but I simply can't afford it. I do need this big hard drive though, as it's basically one of the more vital things to me. Runs: $90

Memory: Kingston HyperX 1GB (2 x 512MB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM Unbuffered DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820134011) - Motherboard supports DDR2 memory, so since I have an AMD processor that finally supports it, I'm going to go for it. No real sway to Kingston, just thought the price looked good for what I was getting. It's dual channel, obviously. Runs: $160

Video Card: Geforce 7800GT 256MB 256-bit (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814150108) - I've read alot of people talking about the 6800GS, but I think that was mainly for people who were planning on running an SLI build, but I could be wrong. In any event, this card is VIVO supported, but if anybody can think of a better video card for me to use, throw it at me. Runs: $290

DVD/CD Burner: Not sure where to go with this. I know there are many options out there, and I'm not sure what to look for / where to start looking, so if someone can just throw me something optimum, that would be great. I want a dual setup for this though, so probably a DVD/CD burner and a regular drive, or another burner.

As far as keyboard, mouse, sound card, monitor, I already have that taken care of. Right now, this build is roughly $1100, barring the burner. If I'm missing something, just let me know, but otherwise, I think this is a solid build. Let me know what you guys think about this, make suggestions, etc. If you need anything else regarding information, please just say something and I'll let you guys know. Thanks in advance.

[786ARS]

you can spend $260 on a 7900GT http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814150150
otherwise good. BTW are you are not planning on o'clocking that much go for this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820220095
2GB for $140 (after rebate)