my first DIY - advice needed for newbie

[leepark]

What is involved in getting a PCI-E system? What components, from the list above, do I have to change? Will it cost more overall?

 

[1stimer]

Originally posted by: leepark
What is involved in getting a PCI-E system? What components, from the list above, do I have to change? Will it cost more overall?

You will need to make sure your motherboard has a pci-e slot. Most of the newer boards (939) have this. The pci-e slot is where a pci-e video card goes. The prices should be comparable.

 

[leepark]

Do you recommend that I go with the PCI-E over the AGP? Do I change anything else other than the motherboard (eg., from A8V-Deluxe to A8N-SLI Deluxe)? Can I use the ATI 9600Pro or 9800Pro all-in-wonder with PCI-E? I just looked on ATI site and I gather you have to use one of the x--- model cards, correct?

 

[acorcoran]

Personally, I feel that if you are not going to be gaming, I wouldn't spend the extra on a PCI-e. You could build a really nice budget machine when you don't have to worry too much about gaming. Your set up looked nice. I'd go ahead and get 1gig of ram as it can never hurt if you use things like photoshop, etc.

Lian-Li is a great case, no doubt about that, but it is a pricey one. There is no problem in this, but this would be an area if you needed to cut cost, you could. The sonata also comes with a nice Power Supply that you could use.

Main thing you would need to change would be the motherboard, video card for the pci-e set up.

 

[KayKay]

Originally posted by: leepark
Do you recommend that I go with the PCI-E over the AGP? Do I change anything else other than the motherboard (eg., from A8V-Deluxe to A8N-SLI Deluxe)? Can I use the ATI 9600Pro or 9800Pro all-in-wonder with PCI-E? I just looked on ATI site and I gather you have to use one of the x--- model cards, correct?

you probably don't need pci-e, but if you want your computer to last ever so slightly longer, it would make upgrading things in the future easier. I saw the gigabyte k8nf-9 motherboard, it's about 145 at atic.ca, it has pci-e and it isn't too gamer crazy. It received a very good review from neoseeker.com, and it has lots of excellent features. in the review, it benchmarked better than the a8n-sli board in a number of tests. I was very surprised at that since the board uses the nforce4-4x chipset.
review
http://www.neoseeker.com/resourcelink.html?rid=87254

atic
http://atic.ca/index.php?page=LongDesc&sku=11850

as for the vid card, the x600 series is equivalent to 9600
the x700 series is roughly the same as 9800 series

again, pci-e is not necessary, but it won't cost you too much more