paul w

Right,

My pc keeps giving me grief and as its 5 years old and stuff is so cheap i'm gonna build a new one,i dont do games only internet,some accounts and want to put dvds onto vcd and old vids onto vcds.

Spec is below,please could you give me any advice on this as i've never built 1 before although i can do most things and have upgraded a few things in the old 1.

Any advice much appreciated.

Cheers Paul



512MB PC2700 333 DDR DIMM MEMORY MAJOR GENERIC

120gb 8mb Maxtor drive

ARTEC 16X DVD 48X CD-ROM IDE RETAIL BOX ARTEC remove

athlon 2400

Got burner and capture card

Motherboard needs onboard sound and vid,have not decided which one yet,anyone got any thoughts.

Corgi

Why not buy the XP2500 which can run at the same speed as the XP3200 IIRC and you can buy a Asus A7N8X-X on Ebuyer for £28 at the mo with onboard sound and lan, bargain!

Mr.Cookie

i go for crucial
personally i always use western digital drives so no opinion on the maxtor's
why not buy a dvd writer, not much price difference, liteon one is an 8 speed write -+r, pioneer 106 4 speed write good drive and circa £85
Personally i'd go with a xp2500

Motherboard i'd go with a Asus A7N8X deluxe has onboard sound, video and gigabit lan

Si

Recaro

I agree with Mr Cookie.

I've got the Asus A7N8X motherboard, I'd recommend it. As for the hard drive, my slave is a 120GB Maxtor Diamondplus and I've had no problems with it.

vmax

Why build your own from scratch. From what you have said you use your computer for. You do not really have the need to be picky about your components. Dell are doing some really good promos at the moment, Buy a headless dimension or something.

Food for thought

Geezer

Thought of going Intel instead of AMD? The 800FSB ones wipe the floor with ALL of the Athlons, and have just come down in price alot, so make a very tempting proposition. They run cooler and quiter as well.

Geezer

paul w

Thanks for all the replies,

I dont want to spend alot on it,that is why i'm gonna build my own and that spec will cost £275 odd,and i think it will be way over what i really need so gotto stop somewhere.

Is Lan to do with linking up or broadband,what is raid and is 512 2100 ram really much different to 3300,would you notice it.


Thanks Paul

Mr.Cookie

Paul

Lan is Local Area Network, that board i said about came with a NIC (Network Interface Card) built into the motherboard, although they can be bought seperately for PCI slots, usb and possibly firewire (not looked not seen so don't know )
NIC can be used to connect to web depends on your broadband isp connection method.
Raid (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks) is for using two identically sized hard drives to either get very fast data transfers, by writing/reading from both drives simultaneously as one drive or as a constant backup by mirroring drive a on drive b.


Si

Mr.Cookie

Ps

Lan is your network your side of internet

Wan (Wide Area Network) Web side

DominicA

Do as Corgi and others have said, get the xp2500 and the asus board, the maxtor is a great drive, get 512MB 3200DDR from crucial. This will not cost you a lot of cash. Check komplett.co.uk for prices. It is a MUCH better spec than the one you were planning.

madfiddler

When I built my last PC, I used a combination of Komplett, and Ebuyer. Between them, they were the cheapest

andymar00

the chepest is not allways the best way to go with unknown brands you can have problems with compatability and drivers this is not allways true but somthing to consider, as for motherboard i would go for latest spec you can aford to allow for future expansion and upgrade

Andy

EvilKyote

I dunno these people who only do internet and accounts and can get away with cheap components!

spent almost £1200 so far on my new pc which is almost finished, just waiting for final components to arrive!

Thermaltake Xaser III supertower case (black)
Thermaltake 480Watt Butterfly PSU
2x RGB Coldcathode / Clear silent fans
5x Clear / CrystalBlue LED silent fans
Intel P4 3.2Ghz 800FSB, HT technology
Gigabyte GA-8KNXP Motherboard
1Gb Kingston HyperX PC3200 400Mhz Dual channel (800Mhz) DDR RAM
Hecules Ati Redeon 9800 PRO 128MB DDR 8xarg GFX CARD
2x 200GB SATA Maxtor Dimondplus9 7200RPM hard disks
2x 80GB IDE Maxtor dimonplus 5400RPM hard disks
2x Samsung SM352-B 52x/54x/24x/16x CD-RW/DVD Combo (Black)
1x Sony DWU-14A 4x DVD±RW ReWriter (Black)
19" 1600 x 1200 Flat screen CRT monitor



Gonne be sweeeeeeeeeeeeeet when it's all finished!

EK

edited to say,

not to forget my MS wireless intellimouse explorer

[Edited by EvilKyote - 1/13/2004 4:04:09 PM]

chiark

WTF are you going to use to fill 560GB?

Second thoughts, I don't want to know...

EvilKyote

LOL

the 2 200gb hard disks I am gonna setup on RAID1, so really it will appear as 1 200gb drive rather than 2 separate 200gb drives.