building a new PC, old one RIP on me

[Dave McFly]

about 2 weeks ago my computer that i sometimes leave on over night but put it in sleep mode was turned off. i hit the power button and it came on for a split second and turned off again. I held down the power button and it turned on but started smoking from the motherboard. I took it to a local PC guy in town and said the CPU fan quit and it fried the CPU and cooked the motherboard too. I have been wanting to build a new system from the ground up and now i had my chance.

1st I decided not to use my old case it was falling apart and the front audio jacks never worked right and the front USB ports were WAY at the bottom of the tower and hard to get to, so i got THIS case from a PC shop in town for 50 bucks.




as you can see the front audio/USB jacks are much higher up and can be covered by a flip up panel.

I am getting a new motherboard from Gigabyte and a AMD 64 Dual Core 3200 (2.0ghz) processor with heatsink and CPU fan.
2 sticks of DDR2 800mhz 2 gig ram (4 gigs total) for it

Once I have them installed in the tower case I am plugging in the following:

Nvidia 7800 512mb PCI-Express video card
Soundblaster 5.1 Audigy LS sound card (same one in my old tower that was fried when the board died)

Stuff carrying over from old system:

160 gig maxtor HD (windows and drivers)
320 gig Western Digtal HD (media, pictures, video, mp3s etc)
floppy drive (old one was white i swapped it for a black one at the PC store to match)
LiteOn DVD R/W drive.

I cannot WAIT for my motherboard cpu/fan and memory to arrive .

[Sizzox]

Cool I was thinking about building my own the other day then got to thinking it would be a waste since I'm going to be going to college in the near future and am going to need a laptop so It would be a wast but I hate looking at laptops because I know what I can build a desktop for and with seeing what you get in a laptop for the same price makes me cry. So I dont know what I'm going to do yet. Have fun building yours though.

[Dave McFly]

thanks, i get my parts via UPS on friday. my old machine was good for the time.

Old PC specs:

MSI motherboard with Intel Celeron 2.93ghz
2 sticks of DDR 512mb memory (1024mb total)
Nvidia 5200 256mb 4x/8x AGP video card
Soundblaster Audigy LS 5.1 sound card (new PC will have the same make/model card)
Maxtor 160 gig HD*
Western Digital 320 gig HD*
Lite On DVD R/W*

*parts from old PC going into new PC .

[balonywolf]

Sissoux, I totally hear you on the stock laptop vs custom desktop dilemma. I went through that about 15 months ago. Ultimately, I went with the desktop. I love the capability, but I sometimes miss the freedom the laptop provides, especially since I have a wireless router for the house.

[Camaro_Corvette]

I am also planning my new pc build. At the moment mine is running off of minimal equipment. two gigs of ram, hard drive, worlds cheapest motherboard, and on AMD Phenom Quad core. As you can see I got the processor I need. In my current financial state, I am going to have to buy one piece at a time. Naturally making my PC outdated by the time it is done, but it will be damn fast. I'm still looking for the perfect motherboard. Till then, what I have will have to do.

[Dave McFly]

try here

www.pricewatch.com

I got my Gigabyte motherboard with a AMD 64 Dual Core 2.0ghz CPU, and 2 sticks of 2 gigs of memory for like 114 shiped .

[delius]

I bought the 17 inch Gateway F series laptop from best buy...only pay about 40 bucks a month. It has the 9800 Geforce M in it...which was a big factor for me...since i like to play GPU and CPU intensive games. Core 2 Duo 2.53 Ghz. with 4 gb ram. 160 gm 7200 rpm (I want solid state)

But it beats any desktop under 1200

[manimsoblack]

I just built (like two days ago) a comp for a coworkers mom
AMD Athlon 64 x2 5000+ 2.6GHz
2GB Crucial 667MHz RAM (that runs stable at 800 but not at 667 )
ASRock N61P-S MicroATX mobo
WD 160GB HD
Rosewill Card Reader
LG 22X DVD±R DVD Burner
and an HEC mid tower with a 485W PSU
$285 shipped

Originally Posted by delius

I bought the 17 inch Gateway F series laptop from best buy...only pay about 40 bucks a month. It has the 9800 Geforce M in it...which was a big factor for me...since i like to play GPU and CPU intensive games. Core 2 Duo 2.53 Ghz. with 4 gb ram. 160 gm 7200 rpm (I want solid state)

But it beats any desktop under 1200

I could put in a 9800 GT $130 (w/ COD4)
4GB OCZ Reaper 1066MHz RAM $65
19" LG 2ms Monitor $180
Unnecessarily high-end gaming mouse (G5) and keyboard (G11) $110

and it'd still cost <$800 so no it really wouldn't.

[Sizzox]

I think I might go with a Dell Studio 17 or something because I want a bigger screen on a laptop because I hate small screens. But I will prob wait until summer or fall to buy a new laptop because at the rate new technology is coming out and the rate prices are falling for the technology, what I get now will be like 200 bucks cheaper by then haha.

[MerF]

Newegg or bust, folks.

[MrIcky]

Originally Posted by MerF

Newegg or bust, folks.

Seriously, this is true. Good luck with your build .

[balonywolf]

I've used a few sites, and agree Newegg is the best to use.

[Sizzox]

I like newegg and tigerdirect. I just bought some stuff from newegg the only thing I didn't like was it took way to long to get to me almost a week.

[Dave McFly]

got my memory sticks yesterday, and got a email with a UPS track # and my board cpu/fan come in friday. and I plan on using the built in audio video on the board until i get new video and sound cards. my board has PCI-E instead of the older AGP. I am looking at new cards, the one I really like is this:





Nvidia 8600GT 512mb PCI-E video card has VGA,DVI, AND HDMI output . I can get it for 62 bucks shipped . it should play almost any game i throw at it .