New PC Build.

So, here is the final specs for the PC I am building next week. I\'ll be ordering all the parts Friday morning.

NXTZ BlackLine Lexa


AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000


 MSI K9A Platinum Socket AM2 ATI CrossFire Radeon Xpress 3200 ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail

 SAPPHIRE 100186L Radeon X1950XT 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 VIVO HDCP Video Card - Retail

 OCZ GameXStream OCZ600GXSSLI ATX12V 600W Power Supply - Retail

Will be reusing some older parts from previous build..

250 gig Seagata SATA
100 Gig WD Sata
Hi-Tec Floppy
LightScribe DVD-DL burner

Total cost of the new system will come in exactly at $800 dollars. The bright side is, with some nifty NewEgg deals, almost $200 bucks will come back in rebates, bringing the price down to $600.


Then in the next few weeks, I\'ll be adding another videocard for CrossFire, another burner for dual burner and 500 gig SATA drive. After that, my old tower / PSU will be put to use, as I will be putting together another system, this time a MicroATX in that case (it\'s a Thermaltake Tenor, in fact, heat is what killed the previous system).  This PC will be used mostly as a back up server, it\'ll have two 500 SATA drives and  not much else. Will be using onboard audio / video on that one. The main purpose of this system is backup and media streaming to my Buffalo LinkTheater media center.  I will also have a KVM switch, for ease of switching bewteen the two systems.

Any suggestions? Ideas? This isn\'t going to be some super-duper gaming rig, but a nice update from my previous build, which is going on four years old.

[Evi]

How is that case? I was considering getting that case a while back.

Will let you know when I get everything. Reviews say it\'s a great case and sexy to boot.

that\'s gonna be a nice rig when you\'re done... it\'s about damn time this part of forums sees some life.

I\'d love to rebuild my rig.. but with a new baby coming any minute and a lot of money being spent on fixing up a 90+ year old house, it\'s low on the list.  It\'s holding up pretty decent anyway (X2 4800+, 2 gig, 7900gt)

Congrats

How much/type RAM... 2 gigs I hope?

I\'d possibly be interested in selling my 7900gt.. I don\'t game hardly at ALL anymore.  I don\'t know how it holds up to a x1950xt.. but it plays company of heroes pretty much maxed out @ 1280x1024.  But you probably don\'t want  old parts for a new rig anyway.. at least I know I wouldn\'t.

what made you choose the AMD over the Intel?

I thought of asking the same thing, but I like to see people still throwing their support behind AMD.  Although if it were me I\'d make it a quad

but I understand having a budget and getting the most bang for your buck.. and they are still very capable chips

Quad is to expensive at this point and as for the AMD thing, I\'ve always bought AMD and will continue to do so. As much as I make fun of people for brand loyalty, I have it when it comes to AMD. I was burned once with an Intel chip, went AMD and never went back...Just a personal preference. Well, that and the fact that AMD is cheaper .


And yes, 2 gigs of ram , though I may bump that up to 4 gigs sometime in the next month.

double post.....

I hope AMD can improve yields with the Barcelona, cause clearly the native quad core AMD chip is a much better engineered CPu than anything Intel has, but unfortunately AMD\'s new architecture is very difficult to produce in the fab, and if they cannot get the clock speeds up they might be in trouble. Barcelona is more efficient and can do more work clock for clock than intel, like always.

The new Core2\'s are very good at speed with desktop applications so people naturally assume the intel chip is better(which it is compared to AMD\'s old K8) but in the server market you can be assured the Barcelona with be the chip to own, since the applications used in those environments take batter advantage of the AMD cpus. People need to understand AMD designs have always favoured the server maket, and while they did excellent for desktop use they slaugted intel when it came to server use, the netbust(INTEL) was a usless chip. Let\'s not forget even intel\'s new Core2 while better than K8 the domonice you see in the desktop numbers does transfer over the the performance in the server market.

Overall AMD engineeres better cpus, but intel has money and resources that AMD can only dream off, and intel money and fab process has saved there ass more times than i can count. It\'s incredible the achievements that AMD has made considering all.

AS much as I love AMD, if i had to buy right now it would be a E6600.

not bad!

Raz what DVD burner to you plan to buy?

Maybe i can suggest one as a hardcore media enthusiast and long time member of cdfreaks.

Pioneer 112D( requires maual bitset)
LiteOn LH-20AS1  (is known to be noisy)

Also avoid lightscribe like the plague, most people never even use it for 3 reasons.
#1. the media costs more
#2. Takes 30 min to burn a proper image(taking 4 times longer than the actual dvd burn process)
#3. The image looks ugly and fades

Lightscribe = marketing gimmick

I already own one Lightscribe Burner  - the media is actually about the same price. But yeah, it isn\'t all that great. I picked it up for $30 bucks (OEM), so it\'s no big deal.

I will most likely pick up the LiteOn you mentioned for my second burner.

I\'d also like to spring for a 512 Meg videocard, but to be honest, I see no reason to. The only game I really play on the PC is WoW, so it\'ll be a waste (well, with that mentality, so will the dual videocards to be honest).

for $70-80 you can get a inkjet printer that prints on dvd and cd\'s, takes about 1 minute to print, looks 100 times better than lightscribe.

Also make sure you use either Verbatim or Taiyo Yuden media, the rest is rebranded junk from either ritek or CMC.

Yea, LS isn\'t all that and a bag of chips. I\'ve made maybe twenty or so LS discs , and with a few passes , it doesn\'t look all that bad. Still, I wouldn\'t go out of my way to buy another LS drive.

I almost wish I could afford the ThermalTake Armor case, but that ain\'t going to happen. Hate building a new PC, there is always thing you want or think you could do better.  

I\'ll just be glad to get this one finished, so I can go ahead and start on the next, which will be using my HTPC style case (ThermalTake Tenor). My main system was in it, but in all honesty, even when I put it together I knew the components would overheat with time, due to the lack of airflow and size of the components.. Still, I gave it a shot and paid the price. It lasted almost a year in that case and then I noticed it started to overheat and shut off, so like a brave soul, I went into the Bios and turned off the autoshut down feature..Heh..Lasted about another month.  No big deal though, gave me a reason to justify building another PC (to the wifey that is).

/ edit
After reading that story, I guess you could classify it as PC homicide, as I simply put it through a slow and painful death.

Bad news, looks as though I won\'t be getting the Lexa. I double checked and the case will not support long videocards or videocards that take up more than one slot , due to some weird design issue. Gorgeous case, but I guess I\'ll do some last minute shopping and find another one.

as far as dual-slot cards, I am afraid there may indeed be trouble. The Lexa\'s design with the removeable expansion card plates is indeed strange. I mean, inbetween each removeable plate is more metal that cannot be removed.

That is from their website.

Damnit to hell, I loved that case.