Income Tax Presents

[Drek]

Well when I get my gold back from my income tax return, I am going to be buying some new hardware. Nothing incredibly extravagant, but much better than what I have now, and hopefully will be able to run anything that comes out for the next few years. However, I know from past experience that hardware changes with the weather, and a good brand doesn't necessarily mean a good product.

I'm having a hell of a time finding reviews for what I want to buy, probably because it isn't high end and for some reason the products that get reviewed the most are the high end products. I was just wondering if anyone could look at what I want to buy and tell me whether they think the components are solid or maybe recommend some similarly priced alternatives. I am less concerned about blazing speed than I am about rock solid dependability and combatability, and knowing the components won't melt down in a year or two...

I also want to know if my psu is good for the hardware I am running, and whether all the components match well or not. I am also at this point going with the stock AMD cpu cooling. I will be trying to do some over-clocking at some point, probably nothing extreme, will the cooling be sufficient? I was looking at a Gigabyte fan, but I'd rather not spend the extra $70 if I don't have to, and I am on a pretty tight budget.

Case: Antec SLK3000B
PSU: Thermaltake TR2 500W (W0093RU)
Mobo: ASRock AM2NF6G Socket AM2 nVidia nForce 6100-405
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+(65W)
RAM: Corsair XMS 2 TWIN2X Xtreme Memory DDR2 667Mhz PC5400
VPU: Sapphire ATI Radeon X1600 Pro 512MB PCI Express
HDD: Western Digital (WD3200KS) Caviar 320GB SATAII 7200RPM
DVD: LG GSA-H22L 18X/18X DVD-RW

Beyond that it is just a couple of cables and an extra Vantec 120mm case fan. All this weighs in under $1000 Canadian before shipping and taxes.

Any opinions or additional information would be much appreciated. Also can anyone recommend a good dependable, reasonably priced colour laser printer?

[Hell Phoenix]

E6600 processor. Couldnt recommend it enough. I have mine OC'd to 3.4 and if I had better memory I could go even higher. Its one of the best performing procs out right now for the money.

[Drek]

Appreciate the recommendation, but that is well out of my price range. :)

[Drek]

Well discovered my first mistake. The ASRock AM2NF6G has a X8 PCI-E graphics slot, while my video card is a X16 PCI-E card. While you can fit a X8 PCI-E card in a X16 slot, you cannot do the reverse. I assumed it was like the old days of X2, X4 and X8 AGP where you could use any AGP card in an AGP slot, however, it ain't...

[=|[76AD]|= TatsuSaisei]

lol, what I plan to spend my tax money on.... is a matching 4000 Series Taketoshi Wakisashi for my 4000 Series Taketoshi Katana....

http://www.lastlegend.com/05kat/taketoshi/taketoshi.html

KIAI !!

I also want a 1 GB GPU .... I will build the rest of the PC around that... lol

[Drek]

@ TatsuSaisei - Very pretty! Funny, I just did a bunch of research on Japanese and Viking swords. :)

Changed the case and the mobo around, and discovered I needed to order a DVI cable. So all in all about $60 more but still within budget.

Case: Thermaltake Matrix VD2000BNS
Mobo: Asus M2N
Monitor: LG L1952TX Black 19" LCD

All very budget I know, but it should run all the latest games, and hopefully will continue to do so for another year or two. My present computer lasted a good three or four years before games started coming out that it couldn't handle, so hopefully the new one will come close to that. I think probably sometime this year I'll upgrade to a really nice sound card. I've always had a weakness for good sound and still fantasize about putting together my own demo... Wonder when they'll start coming out with PCI-E sound cards?

edit: Didn't include the monitor before. I chose a 4:3 monitor instead of wide-screen because I still play a lot of old games that don't support wide screen. Me and DOSBox are pretty good friends...

[Drek]

After doing more research that I should have done before I ordered my computer, I've discovered that the Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 would have been a better choice for processor, but even it would have been more expensive and when everything was factored in I spent my entire budget as it was. If I had had another $200 to spend I could have gotten the Core 2 with a decent mobo, but that's ok. No matter what I bought, within a month something far better would be the same price or cheaper, so I think I'll try to be happy with what I'm getting... :)