With these I plan on building a new computer for myself and give my present computer to my sister which is a Compaq with a Sempron Proccessor I bought for just under $400.00 a year and a half ago.
I have done a lot of upgrades to my present computer, however this will be my first build from scratch. I dont think it will pose too much of a challenge but Im sure it will be a little difficult all the same. Im hoping to learn a lot as a go along and hopefully continue to build computers for myself at lower costs to my requirements rather than buying generic computers.
Anyways, here is a list of hardware I will need to complete this computer:
Athlon 64 X2 Proccessor
Cool Computer Case and power Supply
CD Burner + DVD-ROM Combo
Audio Card
DDR Memory (not sure how much yet)
120 GB Hardrive (or equivalent)
LCD Monitor
Mouse and Keyoard
Speakers will be aqcuired from my older sister (probably for a small fee)
This computer will run OS Windows Vista.
Other than that I can’t think of anything I am missing, please feel free to correct me on anything I have missed or added by mistake. Im estimating to complete this project under $300-400 dollars.
Im sure I’ll have many more questions when I actually start Assembling this computer.
Would you like my old case,its pretty nice,i could give it o you for free,since i realy don’t need it anymore. If you want i could also take some pictures of it.
one 60mm fan and one 80mm fan (mounting holes already in the case, thats why Im getting them) and this 80mm fan with copper core heatsink to cool the Athlon 64 2X proccessor.
Still deciding on the RAM, hardrive and audio card at the moment, but if I can have confirmation from sombody to make sure these will work good together, Id appreciate it as I would like to get this stuff bought tonight.
Abit UL8 boards have 2x SATA and 2xATA. They’ll take either SATA or PATA HDD drives and they also support RAID 1 (mirroring), which is a nice thing to have if you can stretch to a second drive.
Brands of HDD are largely up to you. I’ve had every brand of drive fail at some point, and I tend to buy a good brand name on $/Gb ratio. IBM/Segate/Maxtor/Hitachi/Samung/WD are all solid brands. Again, how many GB really depends on how you use the PC. If you’ve got a decent music collection (or a lot of games), definitely over 250gb.
Sound cards… I haven’t had any complaint with Sound Blasters since the SB2. They just work.
You seem to have covered all the bases with the list of parts. If you’re going to be gaming on it, you definitely want a sound card rather than on-board sound. I found it incredible the difference it made to Flight Sim. Frame rates jumped up, and stuttering air traffic controllers became a thing of the past.
I find Vista runs quite happily with 2gb of ram.
You might find you want a bigger PSU if you’re planning to upgrade the video card later.
For PC hardware, both NewEgg and TigerDirect are quite good - and they both have some excellent specials. Definitely worth poking about there, you can save quite a bit if something you want is in their clearance sections.
Thanks a lot, that info is going to help me a lot! And WOWY7, 320 GB is waaay to much, I have 130GB on this PC and have only used 19 after a year and a half (I like to moderate my GB usage). I think 120 or equivalent is good enough. Also, 2GB of memory is expensive, but I do think it is well worth it! My Mainboard can support up to 4GB of RAM so I am going to go ahead and fill up about half of that.
Everything is going to be ordered tonight, very soon, so Im going to keep poking around for the deals
EDIT: I want to get this Hardrive, but it requires a few cables, can anyone tell me which cables I need?
My mom has it on her computer. It is the slowest most glitch prone operating system. Even OS X is better, and that’s mac.
