Building new budget PC

[anyweather]

so far I got down to this:

Intel E5200
Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2H G41
Radeon 4670

This PC will be mainly use for video playback (H.264 encoded .mkv and of the sort), internet, email and general use. Rarely it'll be used for gaming.

I've decided on RAM and PSU, but what's holding me back is the G41 chipset.
1. Will the onboard GMA X4500 be enough?
2. If I add the 4670, from what I've read, the G41 does not support PCI-E 2.0, will this be a huge performance hit?
3. How's the SATA I/O performance? (thinking of a WD Black 1TB)

appreciate for any advise


EDIT: should go under Computer Help

 

[o1die]

The gigabyte g41 board is a good choice. Any onboard video will work fine for general usage. And the 4670 is a good choice for low end power supplies, but try the onboard video first if $$ are tight.

 

[Zap]

Actually, Motherboards is a perfect place for this due to your choice in it.

1. Onboard GMA x4500 is probably not enough because wasn't there an x4500HD that specifically addressed video decoding? That requires the G45 chipset, which seems pretty rare right now. Thus, likely the best choice would be the cheaper board with a low end card.

2. G41 does not support PCIe 2.0 but that shouldn't matter unless you are going really high end.

3. SATA I/O should be pretty good because it is an Intel chipset.

Regarding the G41 chipset boards, they are limited to 8GB RAM using only two RAM slots.

Regarding your actual motherboard choice... DON'T GET IT. The GA-G41M-ES2H board has only a PCIe x4 slot, not x16. It sacrifices PCIe lanes to get onboard DVI/HDMI. Here are the three available Gigabyte G41 chipset boards:

GA-G41M-ES2L - PCIe x16, VGA-out and DDR2
GA-G41MT-ES2L - PCIe x16, VGA-out and DDR3
GA-G41M-ES2H - DVI/HDMI-out, DDR2, PCIe x4

If you are going to be using a graphics card at all, then avoid the ES2H board. If you don't already have the RAM, I would highly suggest the GA-G41MT-ES2L because it had the PCIe x16 slot and uses DDR3. Right now DDR2 and DDR3 are near the same price, so you may as well go with the newer/faster stuff.

The E5200 CPU would be a decent, budget choice.

For the graphics card, pay close attention to the RAM that comes with it. IIRC the 4670 GPU can use DDR2, DDR3 and GDDR3. DDR3 and GDDR3 are pretty close in performance but cards that use DDR2 are terrible values, moreso because they are often priced really close to the faster cards.