Building myself a rig

InProgress

Ok, so in the last year I have gathered as much money as I can (being a student sucks) and i got like 600$ and I wants to build me a solid computer which i can later upgrade. I was thinking of something in the lines of:

Mobo: ASRocK - A770DE http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=A770DE
CPU: Athlon 64 X2 7850 2,800GHz
HD: Samsung - HD322HJ - 320GB SATA2
Vid card: SAPPHIRE 100270SR Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102809
RAM: at least 2 gb
Power supply: 600W Delux, dual 12V, 20pin+4pin, 3xS-ATA
Case: the cheapest I can find

First time building my own PC, so I'm guessing it's really not best bang for my buck. What do you think and how could I improve it whilke keeping it in the same budget?

Mark Dygert

I'm a big fan of ASUS, Nvidia and Intel I've built ATI/AMD system in the past and not had too many problems. But I've had an easier time and better preformance with the other three.

I've never heard of ASRocK, hopefully they're good, looks like a budget board. Not a fan of their integraded audio chip. VIA caused TONS of problems with a lot of games when I worked tech support for Atari. Most of the problems where not easily releated to sound... which was all kinds of fun.

2gb ram, to start but with it as cheap as it is, stuff that puppy as full as you can.

320gb might seem high but it fills up over time.

Make sure your cheap case has proper air flow or you're parts are going to be toast in no time. That doesn't mean popping the side pannel off whenever you smell burning... =P

Sage

Get a decent motherboard man, don't be cheap with that or the psu.

EarthQuake

ASrock is an "ok" manufacturer afiak, they're about midground between something like asus, and totally generic. I wouldn't be afraid to put an ASrock board in a budget system, but i think i would opt for an Asus, Abit, DFi, MSI or Gigabyte board in a workstation. You can find pretty cheap versions of quality mobos from these companies if you dont need 42 sata connectors, 16 ram slots, 4 PCI-E slots etc etc. Most of the higher end mobos i find offer a lot of stuff you really will never need, unless you're hardcore into adding stuff.

If you can work it out price wise, i would try to get an intel i7 920, the cheapest non-generic motherboard that has all the features you need, and 6 gigs of ram. This may put you over budget, but i think it would be a wise investment, and you'de see quite a large difference in performance over that AMD cpu.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/common_cpus.html

If you believe that chart, you'll see an i7 920 is something like 4x faster than the cpu you have picked out(well a X2 7750, i couldnt find 7850 on the list).

i7 920 $244 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115202
MSI mobo $185 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130221
6GB DDR3 1333mhz $90 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231223

Comes out to about $550 with that stuff alone, which tottaly blows your budget. I think it would be a perfect base for a $800 system tho.

IF you're on such a low budget, and want to do 3d work i would get a lesser 3d card (9800 GT can be had for about $100) and put that extra $150 into more ram, a quadcore, etc. Video cards these days arent really as important for 3d work, atleast not nearly as important as a good CPU and lots and lots and lots of ram. Plus ram is dirt cheeaaaaaaap. I mean you need a good video card, but a good one can be had for $100. With a good amount of ram(atleast 4 gigs) and a nice cpu, you can have a 9800 GT and run Crysis at max settings no problem. Maybe not at 1920x1200 with full antialiasing and all that, but in a respectable manor. When you're baking normals/AO maps etc you'll curse the fact that you cheaped out on the CPU to get a fancy video card. =P

As an alternative to the i7, you could go with a lesser GPU, and get something like the AMD Phenom II X4 940 quad core at $190, keep that same motherboard and still be under budget. I think that CPU will still blow your cheap-o cpu above out of the water. Generally, the most expensive thing in any PC build should be the CPU, if you're even thinking about doing any rendering atleast.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103471
Also dear god do yourself a big favor and do not cheap out on the case, if you buy even a decent case you'll have something that will last another 1 or 2 PC builds if you take care of your stuff(ie dont kick your tower down the stairs =P). A good thing to look for when buying a case, is what has FREE SHIPPING on newegg, you can list the cases with free shiping specifically, same with PSU. Otherwise you'll pay an extra $50-60 to ship your case+PSU. And you can generally find decent stuff with free shipping, any time you look.

I put this coolermaster into my workstation, it has toolless drive bays(mega win) and enough space for installation to be a breeze

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119137

And this into a budget build for my GF. Toolless again, and great value at $45

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119068

And just make sure to get a PSU that has really good ratings, thermaltake makes some good, decent priced PSUs. If you get a decent PSU, you dont need to buy one that is 1000w or anything crazy, 550 or 600w should be able to handle most anything aside from SLI geforce 280s

550w $70 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182030

kite212

i would not get the 4850x2 i have heard nothing but bad things about that card, 4770's in crossfire would be a better bet, or even 4850's in xfire. That's if you want ati. I have 4850's in xfire and they are rock solid, beat the snot out of my old 8800gts. The Nvidia 260 core 216 is also a rock solid card in single or sli configs. I'm with EQ asrock is'nt the best. Don't skimp on the mobo i would get either an Asus, Gigabyte, or Msi. Those are always solid boards for the price, and Asus customer service has been good to me when my lappy mobo fried. And for DFI they used to make really solid boards. My last board was a DFI and the northbridge died in under 6 months, sent it back got a replacement. Now that board after maybe less than 2 months would not post, read some threads and it happened to alot of people, board is fucked. Then i wemt out and picked up a brand new Asus, and man it is faster cooler and more stabel than my DFI. You could do a rock solid am2+ build for you budget, but if you go quad you might need to only get a single gpu and a micro or mini atx mobo, and if you get a ddr2 board get a gskill 4 gig kit it should only be like 50 and youll have room for 8, and if you install win 7 x64 that 4 gigs will be good to you for a while.

*edit*

EQ, Abit is sadly out of the game they stopped making mobos a while ago a buddy of mine had his heart broken the day that happened.

InProgress

Thanks for the comments guys. So I changed the almsot the whole system to fit in my budget, as well as be more balanced.

CPU: AMD - Phenom X4 9850 Quad-core 2.50GHz
Mobo: ASUS - M3N78-VM
RAM: 2 Gbs. I'll shove more in it with the first opportunity
HD: it's the same. I'm not really worried about not having enough space as I write a lot of DVDs
Vid card: Sapphire - ATI Radeon HD4870 PCI-EX2.0 1024MB
Power supply: the same for the moment
Case: the same, but I always intended to keep the side panel open

Hope this is better than the first setup

Snader

you might want to reconsider the 320 gig HD.. or at least keep the option in the back of your mind to get a second one.. right now im in the process of switching pc's and i had a lot of throwing away to do to get all my files onto a 250 gig drive (granted thats 70 gigs less, but your HD would have the OS and software installs as well)

besides.. with enough HD space you wouldn't need to buy those CDs/DVDs

also.. you aiming for a midi or a bigtower? the midi would save you some money but the bigtower would offer a lot more space and better airflow (and thus durability of the parts because less heat)

InProgress

I'm not really that fussed about the HD's capacity, as at the moment I'm using under 250 Gbs (sharing a pc with someone). And a HD is pretty cheap. If I'll need some more space in the future, I'll buy one

As for the case, I'm going for a regular ATX (I'm guessing it's midi, not big tower).

InProgress

Did a little more research, and have a re-rehashed PC setup for you to judge:

Mobo: I'm having a hard time deciding between: GIGABYTE GA-P31-ES3G LGA 775 Intel P31 and ASUS - P5N73-AM/C/SI
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad, Q8200, 2.330 GHz, FSB 1333, 4MB L2, Socket 775
Ram: A-Data - 2GB - DDR2 800 Dual - DDR2 800MHz | 2GB | SPD 5-5-5-15
Vid: Sapphire - ATI Radeon HD4870 PCI-EX2.0 1024MB GDDR5 256bit, 750/3600MHz
HD: Samsung - HD322HJ - 320GB SATA2, 7200rpm, 16MB PMR Spinpoint F1 Series
PSU: DELUX - Sursa ATX 600W Delux, dual 12V, 20pin+4pin, 3xS-ATA, PCI-E
Case: I haven't decided on it yet, as I scrapped my original plan on buying the cheapest I can see. If someone could reccomend an intermediate case between the coolermaster which EQ mentioned, and the cheapest no-name you know, I'd be grateful.

P.S: ATI vid cards don't have big issues with Intel CPUs, do they?

muppo

i wouldn't go for a 775 system nowdays, amd phenom 2 are a bit cheaper and generally faster than any core 2 duo/quad on the market nowday's, not to mention 775 have all the nail well planted on the coffin (intel core i5 coming around september or so, called i5 because they are stripped version of the more expensive corei7 and also new socket for this so not compatible with corei7) whilst amd will support am2+ and am3 socket till 2011, so if you would upgrade your cpu in the future you can do it without touch the rest of your cfg.
my suggestion is go for phenom 2 (2! not older phenom 1) or go with intel core7.
my suggestion:
asrock or gigabyte motherboards (be sure it have 790 chipset (asrock is just cheaper version of asus) 75 to 100€ depend on the models
cpu amd phenom 2 940 BE or CPU 955 BE (140€ for the 940, 200 for the top 955 black edition)
8 gb ddr2 800 mhz cash latency 7 120/130€
video card nvidia 275 (~200) or stay with 4870 1 GB (~190), imho for just a bunch of € more better pick the nvidia.
rest of your list should be ok , pay attention to get a decent PSU (suggest you a corsair 520 W about 70€), had
various expirience in the past with cheap/generic psu and they actually decrease the performance of a pc by a lot especially under heavy task as you are supposed to do with zbrush or mudbox/maya/photoshop w/e you use.
all the price are tooken from the web dunno your country pricetag's should be around the same here in europe

and last thing check the hardware reviews around the net so you get a grasp of what you're going to buy, the core 2 8200/8400 quads are probably the worst choice atm.

so to have a resume, with ~ 600€ you have the amd 940 BE with 8GB ram and the nvidia gtx 275 , the PSU 520 and the mobo you want to pick it doesnt really matter, just be sure it is 1 with 790 chipset. (~ 650 with phenom 2 955 BE) that outperform in every task any 8200/8400 system , and by a lot.

or just go for an i7 but only cpu+mobo+ram you are already over 500 € already, up to you.
ciao

sir-knight

I swore I'd never use MSI ever again after the p3 intel board I got... the thing had like 400 million capacitors on in and half of them were swelling within a year.

I had a few slight issues with ASUS amd boards, nothing major, mainly to do with being picky about the brands of RAM it ran. Always use high end ram, never cheap out on RAM, mobo or psu.

I'm a big fan of EVGA right now, can't beat lifetime warranty, but I think they're all high end intel boards. But this evga system is the first system I've built (I've built about 20 for myself and friends) that booted up properly first shot and not had a single issue no matter how minor... ever... And it was switched on in november.

I haven't followed AMD development in a long time, as my last system was an athlon xp 2500+... I went to a core2quad 9300 in my current system.

i7 is probably a good buy now, you could probably buy the low end i7 cpu for the same price I got my core2quad back in november by now, but it'd be interesting to see what intel has up their sleeve, is i7 just an intermediate step (because i5 is coming) and will they introduce another socket format in a year or two or will they die shrink the current i7 on the sockets they use now?


I also went cheap on the case, but I picked out something that had lots of room for fan expansion. a coolermaster centurion 590,it's very cheap in terms of price, and the case is decent enough.