$750 budget build

[TheNewbie502]

trying to get something to put together b4 I head out to college. $750 bucks, needs to be better than this POS sony vaio I have. Perferably I want it to play half life 2 and WoW

[Katreat]

Do you need keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc, or is the $750 just for the box?

If you just need box, then something like this might work:

Antec SONATA II w/450Watt SmartPower 2.0 Power Supply = $100
ASUS P5B = $125
Core 2 Duo E6300 = $183
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 320 HD = $90
CORSAIR ValueSelect 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 667 = $140
Optical: LITE-ON Black 16X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW SATA DVD Burner = $45
Card: EVGA GeForce 7600GT = $110

That is $ 793 before shipping, although I think a couple of rebates will balance that out. The C2D are also taking a price drop late April if you can wait. That is a little more than a budget build. Those are all quality parts and it is very upgradable for the future. If you need monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc then it will be hard to build something in your budget.

[TheNewbie502]

yup, just building a tower, got everything else. I guess Windows XP adds an extra 100 bucks to it

[Brassman101]

Well if your "retiring" your old machine, you can use your copy of windows xp from that on your new PC. 1 licence 1 active machine.

[DropPoint]

Originally Posted by Brassman101 Well if your "retiring" your old machine, you can use your copy of windows xp from that on your new PC. 1 licence 1 active machine.

What my buddy does is call MS tech support and tell them he reformatted his HDD and needs to reinstall Windows, and they will give you a new key.. Not sure how this works but hes done it many times and they haven't caught on.. Not like hes selling them or anything, but it's not Illegal..

[glc]

You can't reuse XP from a Vaio.