Well i revised my original plans significantly, and i have arrived at what i think will be a killer rig for the $ I'm spending. Thanks for all the help from posters replying to my posts and replying to others'!! Houston, we are go for launch!

Here it is:

Q6600
Gigabyte GA-X48-DS4
Western Digital Caviar RE2 WD1601ABYS 160GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive OEM
Mushkin 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 800 Model 996587
Pioneer 20X DVD±R DVD Burner Black SATA Model DVR-215DBK OEM
Antec 900
CORSAIR 750W PSU
XIGMATEK HDT-S1283
XIGMATEK ACK-I7751 Retention Bracket
Arctic Silver 5
ATI 4870
Vista 32
An extra SATA cable
Zip ties

Anything Im forgetting (I have keyboard, mouse, printer, monitor, speakers, food, etc.)?? Anything recommended for changing??
PSU already ordered, because of a big sale price. Op system already purchased. HD will be raided later on probably. Monitor is 17in and will be upgraded to 24in.

This is it folks! The final blueprint for my first homemade rig ever! If i screw this up im out like $1350 with a struggling economy and no lunch money!!! Ahhhh!!! Wish me luck, or more importantly give me some final advice! Thanks!

- Hypnotico

I'd say get 64-bit Vista. It'll make better use of your processor.

Also, I'm not sure if you listed one there, but you may want a 3rd Party cooler for that 4870. Same for your Q6600 if want to OC it and get some bang for your buck.

you should have gone with vista 64. otherwise you wont be able to utilize all 4 gigs of ram. Your motherboard should come with a sata cable already, why do you need an extra? Looks good otherwise.

Agreed with the cheese on both points.

That HD costs $67 (including shipping from newegg) for 160 GB and I don't think it even has PMR. The WD6400AAKS is 4 times bigger and costs $95.

Where is everyone getting the 4870s from? Newegg has them out of stock.

Also, does anyone know of a good VGA cooler to look at for the GPU.

Thanks.

I think Thermaltake has some good ones, go check out their website.

Zalman VF-1000, for example. Not sure it fits the 4870, but it does a great job with the 4850.
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inqu [...] nts-3dmark

Wait a bit until the drivers are patched, you might not need an aftermarket cooler after all if the stock fan is controlled properly.

dont know about the vista64 idea, i have vista business 32bit and 6gig of mem and sp1 made it see the lot
32bit is cheaper and has less problems with drivers so i would go with that, xp64 is my other op and it works better.

but if you need vista i would go with the 32bit , since mine sees all my mem, dont know if its just cos its business though

That's so weird... It's theoretically impossible to access 6 GB of RAM with 32-bit addresses. That is, 2^^32 is 4 GB, that's the most you can address that way. I'll have to research this.

Might it have something to do with the paging file? (that may sound like the dumbest thing ever, I don't pay much attention to memory issues)

Or maybe it's just SP1 stupidly displaying the total amount of RAM found, even if it can't access it all. I remember reading about that, apparently it now says 4GB if you have 4GB but you still can't access more than 3.5 or whatever, like before.

That would make more sense, one way to find out would be to open a bunch of huge docs and see how much ram it says it's using (not % of course)

I agree with aevm. Right now a major supplier in Canada has the 640 GB Western Digital on for 85.00. Why not spend the extra 20.00 to 30.00 and get a very large and very fast hardrive.
Other than an after market PCU cooler so you can take advantage of that motherboards overclocking features, I'd say it looks like you have a very nice build on your hands.
Good luck with it!!!

Thanks for the responses! Im thinking going 64-bit on my next rig in ~1.5 years. Nahelem, DDR3, 45nm processor, performance mobo, liquid cooling, etc. Right now im at entry level.

The reason for the extra SATA cable was because if I get 1 with the mobo to use on the HD, wont I need another for the optical drive also?

I will look into more cooling for the 4870, I will see what they do about the fan speed first though. I have read plenty about problems with this card and the 4850 regarding the fan speed.

The HD im about to buy does have PMR. I went to the WD website and read that. What im looking for in the harddrive is speed. I am not ready to buy a velociraptor or better though! HDs like this one seem cheap to me so I figured it is the best one I can find that is not outrageously priced. Do you think the WD6400AAKS is faster? I notice so many people getting this HD. I think people get it because they can use the space. For me, I would like to eventually do a raid. 320 gigs would be more than I need. (I like using an external.)

I haven’t decided on the 4870 brand, and I cant find it either. I will just wait until newegg gets it or go with a 4850 for the time being. There is a nice sale on the 4850 there. I think it is like 165 shipped. I could go for that and discard it when I get a 4870x2 if they do decide to make one.

Random_2: The XIGMATEK is a CPU cooler. Is this what you think I need? You said PCU cooler. I assume that is a typo?

Thanks to all of you for the comments and ideas!

So far I have ordered the case and PSU from Buy.com. That place seems kind of scandalous, so wish me luck with those baseheads! lol

- Hypnotico

You should get 4 SATA cables with the GA-X48-DS4:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Show [...] d+-+Retail

+1 for the HDT-S1283, if you intend