EDIT: Please see my post below for my NEW setup and questions!!<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by jimbodan on 02/27/05 06:12 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

I personally have had the 160GB Maxtor and I returned it. The WD's are better in my opinion.

Get the good memory. It's worth having memory that can run at low timings. You don't necessarely need the LED lights though unless you're overclocking or just want it for looks.

I personally think you PSU is overkill but I don't have your setup so I can't be sure.

Unless you're an audiophile and have a really nice set of speakers I think the onboard is more than enough. Can you hear the most minor of differences when you listen to different audio systems?

Onboard ethernet is fine.

No, it's not worth the extra $500. Overclock if you want that extra performance. If you have the money why not get two 6800 Ultras?

Raid 1 would give you 160GB or redundant storage. Raid 0 will stripe the array and give you the 320GB, but remember that if one drive fails the whole array is lost.

As far as burners, consider lite-on as well. I love mine.

Your MB comes with firewire so don't get a card. Modem and floppy drive? Do you really need these? The floppy drive might come in usefull for your raid drivers but there are ways around this if you want to figure it out. If you don't want to bother use a floppy drive but your old one should suffice.

ibuypower.com. Check resellerratings.com and see how they do. I recommend mwave, newegg, monarchcomputer, and zipzoomfly.

cooling should be fine unless you want to overclock or you want to reduce the noise.

As far as motherboards are concerned, consider the <A HREF="http://www.dfi.com.tw/Product/xx_product_spec_details_r_us.jsp?PRODUCT_ID=3469&CATEGORY_TYPE=LP&SITE=US" target="_new">Lanparty NF4 boards</A>boards as well. I have their Ultra-D and so far I like it. There is a review at anandtech. I don't believe it comes with Wi-Fi though. I have a card for that.

<i><font color=red>Sex is not an old woman's idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.</font color=red></i>

Thanks for the advice, I'm going to look into monarchcomputers instead of Ibuypower.

One more question, if I get the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SL OR the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe

Do you know if I still need to buy a RAID controller? Or does that motherboard have it built in?


<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by jimbodan on 02/26/05 02:56 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

All of those boards have onboard RAID.

<i><font color=red>Sex is not an old woman's idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.</font color=red></i>

Thanks! Good to know that, now I can save a bit more money

I'm going to be building a very similar system myself, so I feel free to pass on my thoughts about your proposed setup.

1) I don't recognize that power supply. Is there something stopping you from considering an Antec TruePower 500+ watt unit?

2) In my opinion, no, there isn't a reason to pay $500 more for the 4000 chip. However, the 3700 chip is not a lot more money ($100 or so) and that makes more sense to me. Or do what I'm going to do: buy the 3500 socket 939 chip and upgrade to a dual-core chip when they're released. They'll be going into socket 939, as far as I know (at the moment).

3) I'm going for the GA K8NSXP-SLI-939 board. More ports and more bells and whistles. Yes, it means you don't buy an outboard LAN card. On the board I want, there are TWO LAN ports. Onboard LAN, in this case, actually gives better performance than a LAN card, since the LAN port is on the system bus structure of the mobo. The board in my current system is a GA-K8NS Pro socket 754 and the onboard sound is a lot better than I thought it would be. I had bought the same sound card ou're thinking of, but ended up not using it. I'll put it into the nest system, instead

4) Don't waste the chance to put two 200 gig drives in your system. Or even two 250's. The sweet spot is around $100-110 per drive. 200's are in that spot now. Also, I'd get Seagate drives (SATA II) for the 5 year warranty.

5) If you get the GigaByte mobo, you have no need of outboard RAID controllers. The controllers and connectors are already onboard- both SATA and IDE.

6) If you feel you need Wi-fi in the system, then make it external by buying a LinkSys USB/Wi-fi adapter. It allows much more flexible antenna placement, which is always a good thing.

Personally, I'm going for four 250 gig drives for my upcoming system. I just like lots of room for growth (and games). I've had my GigaByte-powered system in place for a couple of months, now and have zero problems. I really love it. Then throw in the dual BIOS and online updating and it's hard to imagine a better setup.


<font color=green>****</font color=green> Never Assume <font color=red>ANYTHING</font color=red> <font color=green>****</font color=green>

Thanks for the response peartee.

I've kinda changed my setup a bit, I decided to go with Monarchcomputers instead of ibuypower so the components have changed a bit, here is what I'm currently leaning towards:


Case: - Thermaltake SViking Mid Tower Cas
Power Supply: 535W - Enermax EG565P-FMA REV.2.0 ATX
Case Fan: - 80mm - Thermaltake 80mm Ball Bearing DC
Motherboard: Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe nForce4 SLI Audio/GB
Processor: - AMD Athlon 64 3800+ 512K (939)
Thermal Grease: - Shin-Etsu G675 Thermal Grease
Heat Sink Fan: - AMD Certified Opteron/64/FX Heatsink Memory: DDR (400) 3200 - 1 GB (2 pcs 512) Corsair
Hard Drive: SATA - Western Digital (WD2000JD) 200 GB/
2nd Hard Drive: - SATA - Western Digital (WD2000JD) 200 GB/
RAID Setup: - RAID 0 (Zero)
RAID Controller: None
CD-ROM/DVD-ROM/CD-RW: - DVD-ROM - Lite-On SOHD-167T 16x DVD 48x C
CD-RW/DVD-RW: - DVD-RW - NEC ND-3520A/GNB 4x-DVD+R DL/16x
Floppy Drive: - Mitsumi 1.44 MB 3.5" Floppy Drive
More Storage: - Card Reader - Enermax ECR-A7-S 7-n-1 Alum Sound Card: - Creative Audigy 2 ZS 24BIT/5.1/IEEE/MIDI/
Video Card: 190670- x2 eVGA 6800 GT 256MBDDR3/PCI-E/TV-Out/Dual
Modem: - QuickConnect 56K V.92 PCI Modem


That's the current system, my main questions now are whether to use the onboard audio or get the Creative Lab Sound Blaster Audigy-2 ZS card.

The other big question is which motherboard to get, either the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe nForce4 SLI Audio/GB or the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI nVidia nForce4-SLI mobo.

I believe the Gigabyte mobo has built in Wi-Fi, I'm not sure if the other one does or not? Which mobo would you guys recomend?

Arethere any big problems you see with my configuration that I'm missing?