Recommendations for Gaming Build

[mwatkins]

With the help of this board, I was able to build my main computer back in 2006. Consisted of an Asus A8N-E Nvidia Board later upgraded in 2007 with AMD Athlon 4200+ Toledo and EVGA GeForce 8800 GT graphics card. Had recently started hearing high pitch sound I suspect coming from the Antec 550 W power supply and one day on startup had smoke from somewhere in case. Have since pulled board and everything except RAM and Video card using out of case test outlined in stickey with two separate power supplies (one out of box and another from the computer I am using now). Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Have swapped video cards with same result. No obvious signs of burning.

Since it sounds like board or CPU has gone bad, I am looking for motherboard, CPU and graphics card recommendations. Probably looking at a cap of around $150 for each, but don't mind if there are cheaper price points out there. Primarily used for gaming, video and internet. Unfortunately, things change quickly and I'm no longer in tune with latest and greatest and would like to tap the resources of those are. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Since I originally had OEM version of XP and had already upgraded CPU, am thinking about getting a WD Black 500 GB HD and try the Windows 7 release candidate as some one here have recommended.

Thanks so much.

[Alaron]

Welcome back to PCMech.

Would you like to go with Intel or AMD?

For the former, check out the Asus P5Q, Intel E8500 and DDR2-800. For AMD, the Phenom II X940 is a popular chip, and I'll let someone else recommend a board for it.

The Radeon HD4850 would be a good fit for the video card.

[Force Flow]

The e8400 is a bit less expensive, so you may want to look at that instead of the e8500.

[Khalil]

I agree there really not much difference between the E8500 and the E8400 not sure why they even bother. Those are the best dual cores out there. For a Quad Core the best bang for the buck is the AMD 940 Deneb.

[mwatkins]

I think I'm going to stick with AMD for this build. Based on what Khalil has recommended in another thread, I'm looking at this so far:

ASUS M4A78T-E AM3 AMD 790GX HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail

SAPPHIRE 100269SR Radeon HD 4890 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFire Supported Video Card - Retail

G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F3-10666CL9D-4GBNQ - Retail

Western Digital Caviar Black WD6401AALS 640GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - OEM

and trying to decide between AMD Phenom II X4 810 2.6GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Processor Model HDX810WFGIBOX - Retail or AMD Phenom II X4 940 Deneb 3.0GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM2+ 125W Quad-Core Black Edition Processor - Retail.

Is the 940's $50 price difference worth it? Same issue with the video card, is there a better value card out there? Any other suggestions? Thanks so much.

[Force Flow]

Unless you're doing CPU intensive tasks, I would probably fall back on the lesser model. There's no difference in cache, and that is usually where there's the most significant bump in performance in CPUs with similar clock speeds.

[Khalil]

I love the 810 It works just as well as the 940 in most things we do with it. We have one on display in our showroom, we have blu-ray running on a 60" LCD and that CPU plays movies on and on 10 hours a day without a hitch while folding@home

[mwatkins]

Thanks, everyone. I think I'm going to move forward with the 810. I'll let everyone know how it turns out. Thanks again.