Re: Time for a new PC, which motherboard?

On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 11:22:00 +0200, coolsti <cool@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi,

its been more than 3 years since I built my PC, and now its time to
upgrade my wife's. But I can see much has happened since, and I am quite
confused about which hardware to choose.

I am quite content with what I have now on my last home-built. It has an
Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU, an ASUS P4PE motherboard with onboard sound
and netcard and 533 bus speed and AGP 4x video card slot.

I would like to build something that is like this, but of course using
today's technology, but within a reasonable price.

I intend to stay with the Pentium 4 CPU (not the extreme, too expensive
for me) and probably with ASUS for the motherboard (unless there is
something as good or better). But I am confused about the following points:

1) what type of RAM is best for today?
2) what chipset to use for the motherboard?
3) what bus speed to look for (again, within reasonable expense)
4) PCI-express or AGP (I think the answer is PCI-express)

I should mention that this is to be an ordinary gaming computer, with only
1 CPU and not 64bit.

Can anyone give me some tips on the motherboard? Netcard and sound can be
onboard, but not the video card. Links to places which give good overviews
would also be much appreciated.

Thanks for any help!
Steve, Denmark

This is another post to add to my collection of evidence that Moore's
Law is delivering spec improvements with no benefits.

Go to www.motherboards.org and do some searches. If you are satisfied
with what you've got and just want to upgrade your wife, I would go
for 1 or 2 gb of Corsair Value RAM, an ASUS board with 800mhz fsb,
another 2.4ghz p4, an ATI PCIE video card with 256mb of ram, an Antec
PSU. In US$ that would be about $75 per gb of RAM, $50 for the board,
$100 for CPU, $150-200 for video card, $65 for PSU.

The reason I suggest ATI is because nvidia cards seem to have lots of
problems these days, although I know there are some good ones and
satisfied users.

I think you can get a little more oomph per dollar (kronar) with an
AMD setup, but intel is good too. Here is one I built a few months
ago that I'm very happy with:

www.geocities.com/wilkes_charlie/new_system.htm

Charlie




.

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