Upgrading a 4 year old box

[mparthas]

1. What YOUR PC will be used for. That means what types of tasks you'll be performing.

75% general task - browsing, reading pdfs, watching movie etc. Half in Windows half in Linux.
25% Gaming

2. What YOUR budget is. A price range is acceptable as long as it's not more than a 20% spread

Will spend around 300? for CPU, Mobo, RAM and PSU

3. What country YOU will be buying YOUR parts from.

Germany

4. IF YOU have a brand preference. That means, are you an Intel-Fanboy, AMD-Fanboy, ATI-Fanboy, nVidia-Fanboy, Seagate-Fanboy, WD-Fanboy, etc, etc, etc, you get the picture.

Somewhat of an AMD fanboi. But I am only willing to pay up to 10% performance penalty / higher price for my preferred brand.

5. If YOU intend on using any of YOUR current parts, and if so, what those parts are.

Yes, see below.

6. IF YOU have searched and/or read similar threads.

Yup. This component selection is the result of many helpful advice in two different forums. But I dont know f the final build is even compatible or has some kind of performance bottleneck.

7. IF YOU plan on overclocking or run the system at default speeds.

Will OC if it's not too hot or once winter comes around.

8. WHEN do you plan to build it?

ASAP. I am staring at the "Bestätigung" i.e. CONFIRM button at mindfactory.de. But I will put it off for about 12 hours to see if if there's any input from you guys.

=================

The build is as follow:

Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 2.53GHz 1066MHz S775 3MB Box
94?

Gigabyte GA-P35-S3G iP35 S775 FSB 1333MHz PCIe ATX
56?

Power Supply ATX OCZ StealthXStream 500W ATX 2.2
40?

Kit 2x2048MB OCZ DDR2 800MHz CL5 Vista Performance Platinum
67?

==================

I will eventually buy a 4850 or a card at similar price range.

Old parts that I already have:
CRT 17 inch monitor
1 SATA hard drive, 1 IDE
DVD and casing.

 

[oynaz]

A couple of points:

The PSU is overkill. You can get by with 350 watt.
The price for that RAM kit seems rather high.
Are you sure that the motherboard supports your IDE HDD?

 

[mparthas]

350W ? That sounds rather extreme. 400W is the lowest I would go. Besides the thing is on sale right now, only 40? and has good reviews.
Also, a new harddrives might be added. And, though its unlikely, I might just Crossfire two 4850's if this mobo supports it.

The RAM -is- high over here. I actually had expected a 2GB to cost me 50? because that was the price a couple of months ago.

EDIT:
Dang, it has IDE controller but it does not support Crossfire :-(

 

[Bateluer]

Originally posted by: mparthas


EDIT:
Dang, it has IDE controller but it does not support Crossfire :-(

What does IDE have to do with Crossfire? Are you mixing up Crossfire (Multi GPU) with RAID (Multi Hard drive)?

Also, I'd never skimp on a power supply. Always get the highest wattage/quality that you can reasonably afford. If you cut corners on the power supply, it will cost you later as it dies and takes everything else with it.

You can cut corners on a CPU, video card, RAM, etc, and you'll just suffer slower performance, nothing more. Cut corners on a power supply and you suffer instability, various components randomly burning out, catastrophic PSU failure, etc. Go with a good brand with respectable stats, like Seasonic or Fortran.

 

[mancunian]

Originally posted by: mparthas
Old parts that I already have:
CRT 17 inch monitor

Are you going to leave this as it is? Because from where I'm standing, a 4850 card is a complete and utter waste if you aren't going to upgrade this at some point.

Build looks good otherwise, I run an E7200 very nicely at 3.6Ghz on a Gigabyte P35 board (along with a 4850), no reason why you shouldn't be able to do the same.


But if you aren't planning to upgrade the monitor, you may get by with a lesser graphics card.

 

[Denithor]

Keep the powersupply, you cannot go wrong with too much available wattage (but you can seriously screw up a build with too small a unit).

That didn't sound very good, did it?

Ditch either the 17" CRT or the 4850. These are basically totally opposite ends of the spectrum (4850 is really only needed if you plan to run resolution of at least 1600x1200), if keeping the CRT just get a cheap 3870 or 9600GT and save some bucks.