If you had $3K to build a new computer, what would you buy?

[Jumpem]

I'm going to be building a new box next month, now that school is over. If I go the AMD route should I get a current Tbird/PC-133 or wait (hopefully not long) for DDR? Maybe keep the total to around $2500, but I can go to $3K if it's needed.
What would you guys choose for:

Motherboard
CPU
Memory
Hard Drive
Video Card
Sound Card
DVD
CDR/W
UPS
Printer
Keyboard
Power Supply
Case
Case Cooling
CPU HS/F

 

[Imaginer]

Personally. I have my list.

1 Ghz Athlon T-bird
128-256mb of pc133 cas2 corsair ram
MSI KT7 Pro2A motherboard
ATi Radeon All in Wonder 32mb DDR board.
Sound Blaster live Value.
Plextor 12x10x32 CD burner
Pioneer 16x DVD with 40x CD drive
Probably a maxtor 30gb of ATA100 hard drive
(building my own case so scratch that out)
A 10/100 pci network card
(scratch out modem because of ADSL and T1)
and a floppy drive
17-19in monitor (maybe Princeton)
(already have a logitech cordless keyboard and mouse)
Oh and 400W AMD approved power supply.

And some money for the case fans and wood.

But that is just me. This configuration gives me power and speed as well as multimedia features. Might want to look into a different sound card if you are not doing basic gaming or music listening. Speaker wise, I am unsure myself but would get a 2 speaker and subwoofer set.

Good luck! 3k of money is alot of money.

 

[Noriaki]

I wouldn't wait for DDR. Games at high res are Video limited, and office applications are human input limited. Some games benefit some from the higher speed memory but not that much and it will be pretty pricey at first and I think that it would be good to wait a while for the DDR bugs to get worked out Let someone else be the Guinea pig.

[*]MSi K7TPro 2A
[*]Athlon/TBird whatever speed you want to pay for
[*]256+ MB PC133 2-2-2 RAM (I'd personally go Micron 7E becuase I can get it really cheap where I live, but any PC133 2-2-2 will do fine)
[*]IBM 75GXP whatever size you want
[*]Elsa GeForce 2 GTS probably spring for a 64MB (the Radeon is nice to, but I had one and the drivers were horrid...:frown
[*]SBLive! X-Gamer/MP3+/DE 5.1 (Games, MP3 software or both?) the TB Santa Cruz looks nice to...but I like my SBLive because it works in all the games I want and have no complaints...
[*]Toshiba 12x I think....my Pioneer is getting on my nerves, it reads CDRs and CDRWs quite poorly at times.
[*]Yamaha 8x8x24 if you just want to occasionally burn or Plextor 12x10x32 if you will burn alot.
[*]Don't much about UPSs sorry
[*]Lexmark Z51 (my roommate has one and I love it, might be a bit pricey but we got it pretty cheap)
[*]Logitech Cordless freedom pro. I love this keyboard...kinda hate the mouse though. USB or PS/2 and cordless The volume up/down buttons are kinda handy to. So are the winamp play/next/prev/stop if you are in a game.
[*]I like my 450Watt powerwin but the 300Watt powerman that comes with below is good to.
[*]InWin Q500N 11 drive bays and solid construction lots of room and no sharp edges. excellent motherboard tray. And it can be a desk extension
[*]3 80mm standard case fans 2 input, 1 exhaust + 1 exhaust in power supply.
[*]I'd go for an FOP32, the YSTech 26CFM fans are pretty good and not obscenely loud but those 38CFM deltas (FOP38) are absurd....or maybe an Alpha PAL6035, but I kinda like the FOP32 becuase it's cheaper and they perform about the same.

Oh yeah you didn't ask about a mouse, get an optical one I favour the Logitech basic Wheel mouse optical but they are all pretty much the same just find one whose shape you like.


I dunno how close this is to $3000...probably a bit short but I wouldn't try to fill it up just to make $3000, save some and buy an NV20 in 6 months when they are (hopefully) cheaper. Unless of course you can't save the extra for some reason.

 

[fkloster]

1) Case: FongKai 630 / 250watt athlon approved
2) Mobo: Asus A7V266 retail mobo
3) CPU: AMD 1.2Ghz retail w/60mm Hedgehog!
4) Mem: Crucial 256mb PC2100 DDR (maybe I should call my memory PC3800 )
5) HDD: IBM 75GXP
6) Floppy: Teac 1.44
7) Monitor: 19" Viewsonic
8) Video: CLAP NV 20
9) Sound: SBlive value
10) CDR: Plextor 12/10/32a
11) CDRom: Aopen 52x
12) MS periphs

Am I over 3K yet?

 

[Electric Amish]

Motherboard: Abit KT7
CPU: T-Bird 1.2GHz
HS/F: Alpha
Memory: 256mb PC133 Mushkin SDRAM
Video: Matrox G400
Sound: SBLive! (since Aureal's out )
Floppy: Teac
HD: Maxtor Diamondmax+ 45gb
Case: Not sure, 300Watt PS, tho.
CDROM: AOpen 52x
CDR: Plextor 12/10/32 EIDE Plexwriter
Keyboard: MS Natural, USB
Mouse: Razer Boomslang 2000
Modem: Lucent Winmodem
Printer: Lexmark Z52 Inkjet
Monitor: Iiyama 19" VisionMaster Pro

amish

 

[marlboroman]

That is crazy I think my system was about 1600.00 for
ABIT KA7-100
Athlon
3X128 Mb PC133 Micron
GeForce2 GTS DDR 32Mb
Sound Baster Xgamer
IBM 75 GXP 7200 ATA100
CDwriter
LS120
Monster 2 300watt
FPS2000
17" mon
USBCam
Umax Scan
Lexmark Printer And some more things

 

[Grminalac]

Well I suppose it depends on if you are trying to go for most bang for the buck or money is not an issue.

I have been drooling over building a system like this.

Abit VP6 dual Pentium III motherboard
Dual PIII 700's 100FSb (you can buy them pretested to 1Ghz)
or Dual PIII 933's
256 Megs of good quality Srdram; Mushkin rev 2 took a hit in price.
2 Maxtor 40gig hard drives used in a raid setup provided by the highpoint controller on the Abit board, giving you a very fast 80 gig drive.
Might as well throw in a geforce ultra. downgrade if the little bit of performace boost isn't towrth the money.
You might even look into a voodoo 5, they are cheap and I like mine simply because they do reliably play older games.
I suppose the rest si up to your own personal preference. 3dcool.com offers cool cases you might want to look at a few of them.

 

[Noriaki]

I'm not sure how much that stuff I listed cost...but if you really want to spend that $3000 you could consider a Tekram 390U3W and some Atlas 10ks or IBM Ultrastars, 10k RPM SCSI is pretty sweet

And don't use IDE RAID...espeically not with the highpoint controllers on ABit boards.

 

[Jumpem]

Here's what I've come up with guys let me know what you would change? It's in the same order as how I laid it out at the top:

Tbird 1.2Ghz($300) or P3 1Ghz($500)
Asus A7V($145) or Asus A7M-266($?) or Asus CUSL2($160)
256MB Mushkin Rev3($266) or 256MB PC2100($?)
IBM Deskstar 45GB($185)
Radeon 64MB($269) or Creative Labs GTS-Ultra($425)
SB Live MP3+($85)
Pioneer 105s 16x DVD($110)
Plextor 12/10/32($230)
APC Back-Ups Pro 500($160)
HP 935c($190)
Microsoft Internet Keyboard Pro($45)
Enermax 330Watt($60)
ColdForge AA-15($300)
7 120mm Panaflo's with filters and grills($175)
Super Orb and Arctic Silver($40)

As for a mouse I already have a Razer Boomslang 2000, but I'm open to suggestions?

I'm still not sure if I want to go all out with a WTX aluminum case or just add some more cooling to my current PC Power&Cooling mid-tower? I could save roughly $500 if I just stay with the case that I have, just have to get the thoughts of a really cool modded case out of my head!

That all comes out between $2500 and $3000 depending on what CPU/Video you choose. Or between $2000 and $2500 if I do not get the WTX aluminum case.

I left the monitor out of the price because that will come later. Right now I have a 17" Sony. I'm going to choose between the 21" Sony G500 or F500R.

 

[Noriaki]

Looks good. I didn't know you had a Razor 2000 I didn't like the shape of the Razor mice but if you have one and are comfortable with it it's more accurate than the opticals are.

P3-1Ghz for $500 or TBird-1.2Ghz for $300 that should be a tough choice

 

[Jumpem]

Noriaki, I've always had Intel systems. I know that AMD's products are good, but I'm paranoid about stability and system issues!?

 

[Sugadaddy]

<< 7 120mm Panaflo's with filters and grills($175) >>


Better get some rope to tie that thing down, cauz that case is gonna be flying away.

Go with the T-Bird over the p3 and get a geforce2 ultra with the money instead. Don't worry about AMD stability, if you set it up properly, it'll be just as stable as an intel system could ever be.

 

[R0b0tN1k]

Dual P3 1GHz+, some motherboard with a Serverworks chipset...those things rock. Add a Gig of ram, and you'll be rockin.

 

[XeonTux]

Definately would include:

-=- SMP

-=- Adaptec 29160

-=- Ultra/160 SCSI 10K HD

-=- SCSI CDRW

-=- 512MB ECC RAM

$3000 is a nice budget to do these things with, maybe even a color laser postscript printer too

 

[TheOverlord]

if your gonna wait till next year hold out for dual t-birds!!
amd is supposed to release the chipset supporting this in Q1 of 2001 i believe, and i think VIA has gone head on their own to develop a SMP chipset for t-birds...
so with the dirt cheap price of t-birds you have outstanding performance with money saved so you can get an NV20 later or U160 or 1 gb of RAM (hehe) whatever you want...

 

[Jumpem]

I have a P2-450 with a TNt-1 in it right now, so i'm looking to rebuild fairly soon. I may just get a 1.2Ghz Thunderbird and PC-133, instead of waiting for the DDR stuff to arrive.

 

[Lord Evermore]

I'd buy at least two computers worth of parts. At a certain point, even with that much money that I knew I could just blow on the stuff, I wouldn't be able to justify the extra expense of some of the parts for the ever so slight performance increase. Instead I'd build two computers which would perform extremely well, just not the absolute best possible. I can always use another computer for something (or at least pretend to) but I won't notice if I get an extra 2 frames per second when I'm already at 100+, or that a graphics program takes 2 seconds less to render an image (if you're doing so much of that stuff that 2 seconds seems like a lot, then you should be spending a lot more for a much better computer).

Definitely SCSI CDRW and DVD, perhaps a SCSI hard drive, but ATA100 works pretty well (maybe one small SCSI for speedy boots and stuff, and a huge IDE for storage; all IDE if it came down to making the difference between having enough to make one or two computers). One GHz Athlons, or less if I knew by that time that I could reliably handle the overclocking of an TBird. 19 inch monitors for each computer (even though you didn't include it), perhaps 21 inch if there's some spare change for it (or a 17 inch secondary monitor for each, with a decent PCI card to drive it). 256MB minimum for each computer, 512 if the money is available (which is pretty easy when RAM is so cheap).

As far as particular brands, I couldn't say without actually having the money and the time to research it. And yes, I could definitely build a pretty nice computer, with monitor, for 1500 dollars, I just can't think off the top of my head what parts would go in it. I certainly couldn't allow myself to spend 2500 on a single computer all at one time (I'm not even sure I could force myself to spend that much, except by buying stuff that I absolutely would not need like huge SCSI hard drives).