Request for comments

[low351]

Well it looks like I've been let loose in the candy store, at least in a limited capacity. My wife wanted to buy an iMac again, and I convinced her to let me build her a PC for $1000 rather than spend $2k on the iMac. Don't get me wrong an iMac is great, but what fun is it? There is nothing to do but use it... No upgrading, modding, tweaking etc...

So I'm going to canabalize some parts from my Elite330, unfortunately that means undoing my very recent cable management but hey, I'm getting the case a few of you suggested, the CM690 so it's worth it.

Anyhow here is my parts list for your comments... I still have a budget of $1000 screen included so I can't go wild. I have a PSU and an optical drive so I didn't miss them.

I'm going to pick up the Samsung 216BW for $250 at futureshop and then these parts from NCIX. What do you think?

[JD]

Missing a video card? A HD3850 would work nicely, or if you can afford a bit more, 8800GT or HD3870.

I would personally go with a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L and a E2180 or E4400 and then do some overclocking. Or even a better CPU depending on how much you want to spend. E8400s are rather nice.

EDIT: Oh, what PSU do you have?

[low351]

Thanks jd, I've got the video card, an HD2900PRO which I'll be transplanting, also my PSU is the OCZ GameXsteam 700W. I suppose I should have mentioned that I'm planning to put the 5000+ in my old case with the M2A-VM motherboard and move my 6400+ to this board.

In fact if I had this board to begin with I certainly would have gone for the HD3850 since I believe it's better card then the 2900 series.

I picked the M3A MB because it looks like a good bridge from the 6400+ to a future Phenom upgrade and I can supposedly use the Muskin 6400 in it and then when I upgrade to the phenom it can take 1033FSB memory.

[JD]

Ah okay then.

Well the only other things I'd change, though there's nothing wrong with your choices, are:
Heatsink: Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme with your choice of fan (Noctua NF-P12 does nicely)
OS: You might want to grab the 64bit version now instead, in case you do move to 4GB of RAM at some point.

You could just get 1066MHz RAM now, it should still run in the board, you'll just be downclocking it, rather than buying 800MHz and then getting 1066MHz.

[low351]

Thanks JD! Those are exactly the kinds of comments I was looking for, I didn't consider running the ram underclocked and it makes sense. I'm going to place my order and see what the diff in cost is for the faster ram.

[sswilson]

If you plan to OC at all, you won't be concerning yourself with underclocking the ram. Just bump up the multiplier to get yourself into 1066 (or higher... :) ) range.

[low351]

Thanks for the help guys. I placed my order. With that nice discount on the CM690 and the Scythe thanks to HWC deal with NCIX.

[Eldonko]

Looks good, other than the AMD stuff hehehe. Just kidding, have fun!

[Ugly n Grey]

If you have fast RAM with a BE edition chip, just pump up the FSB and take advantage of it. at 3.2 GHZ with high FSB I get a lot faster Spi than 3.4 with low fsb when I start cranking up the RAM and tightening down the latencies. Underclock the RAM? That guy should be taken outside, painted in honey and left for the bears! Blasphemer!!!! (j/k, really). I can run my cheap OCZ SLI's (RAM) at 540Mhz (1080DDR2) no sweat with quite decent timings so I'm sure you can do much better with better RAM on that 6400 BE. High FSB and tight timings seem to be the happy joy joy point with x2's from an actual useage perspective. a couple hundred MHz on the CPU clock is wasted if that baby isn't fed data fast enough.

[low351]

Thanks Ugly, I ended up sticking with the mushkin's.

The Crucial ballistix look good

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.p...Y&promoid=1088

but before the MIR I'd have to drop twice what I'm paying for the mushkins and there are reviews stating that they can be pushed over 1000Mhz by dropping the timings to 5-5-5-15. That's the same as the ballistix.

I'm still waiting on my order but once they're in I'll update and let you know what happened.