My future P4c system, opinions and suggestions?

[RodanX]

First off I'd like to say hi everyone. I've been lurking for quite a while but this is my first post. I'm doing a full system upgrade and thought I might solicit some opinions from those more hardware knowledgeable than myself. The specs so far:

High quality aluminum case (haven't decided yet)
450-500 PS
875P mobo (again I'm not dedcided)
P4c 2.8 or 3.0ghz (waiting until 3.2 comes out and drives prices down some)
1gb Crucial 3200
Radeon 9800 Pro or GeForce FX 5900
2 WD SE 120gb HDD
Audigy 2
Lite-on 52/48/whatever CD-RW
16x DVD

Is there anything I'm overlooking? I'm looking for a fast, stable system that I don't have to overclock, hence the P4c 2.8 or 3.0 instead of the 2.4 or 2.6. I will probably overclock a little but I'm not looking to push things. I don't intend to pay $500 for the FX 5900 but this is going to be my Doom/HL2/Quake4 machine and it seems that at least for the D3 engine games the 5900 is a good step up from the 9800 pro (unless ATI has some optimized drivers that make a real difference, I guess we'll know soon). I'm hoping that the 5900 price drops some to become competitive with the 9800 before I buy.

I also have a few questions about compatability with future upgrades:

1) The 875p will be compitable with the early Preston CPU that run on the 800mhz FSB, right? I want to make sure I can upgrade next year. Hopefully I'll be able to grab a 3.8 or so for fairly cheap in a little over a year.
2) Along those same lines, does anyone know how long AGP will be supported before that new PCI standard totally takes over? I'm just hoping that they continue supporting AGP through the spring refresh of the R400 and/or NV40.

Thanks in advance.

 

[OverVolt]

Nice Rig!

I would go with faster memory, like PC3500+

In my system my Samsung orig is the main bottleneck, i wish i had bought faster ram. As for PSU's, always go name brand Quality PSU's I have an Antec TruBlue480w it's snice stuff. Enermax, and sparkle are also good PSU's.

I haven't heard much about a new PCI based graphics port standard, u have a linky?

I think Intel will make 800FSB versions of Preston (I think it's Precott, maybe thats the chipset?). Not sure if there sticking with sock478, or changing. I haven't heard any details about it.

 

[DaveSimmons]

PCI-X won't be better than AGP 8x (for a given chipset) for several years and there are hundreds of millions of AGP slots out there so high-end AGP cards will also be offered for several more years.

500watt is a waste of money for just 2 drives and one power-sucking graphics card. 380 - 450 of a good brand will work just fine.

Stay away from MSI for the 875 mobo until they clean up their act (see Toms and [ H } for their benchmark cheating and poor overclocking).

 

[Oxonium]

wow, that is a nice system. As far as the graphics card, I'm assuming that you are referring to PCI Express 16x. From everything I've read, that will be implemented early next year with the Grantsdale chipset for the Prescott P4. This chipset is supposed to be the first use of PCI express and DDRII SDRAM in mainstream motherboards (Grantsdale is supposed to replace Springdale). I've also read that (don't remember where) Intel is FINALLY going to remove some legacy devices from this chipset such as floppy, serial, parallel, and PS/2 support. I haven't used any of those hookups in 4 years, so good riddance. Anyways to answer your question, I believe that there will probably be AGP support through at least 2004 , if not part or all of 2005. This should include R400/NV40. There are still some GeForce FX boards being made today that support the PCI bus, 5 years after AGP was first implemented to replace it.