£350 pc for american friend, what do you think of my choices?

[locutus12]

heres the spec,

1 Western Digital Caviar SE WD1200JBRTL 120GB 7200 RPM IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive - Retail

$64.00

1 ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 Socket 939 ULi M1695 ATX AMD Motherboard -
$66.99 $66.99


1 GIGABYTE GV-NX76T256DB-RH Geforce 7600GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card - Retail

$199.99 $199.99

1 MASSCOOL 5T568S1H3 70mm Sleeve CPU Cooling Fan/Heatsink - Retail

$7.99 $7.99

2 Rosewill RFA80-K 80mm Sleeve Case Cooling Fan - Retail
$1.99 $3.98

1 GeIL Value 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)
$67.99 $67.99

1 AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice 1GHz HT Socket 939 Processor Model ADA3000BPBOX - Retail

$625 inc shipping and taxes (£351.12p)

i know squat about the 7600GT, was just going with the general trend, what do you guys think?

p.s. to convert any prices to the £ just divide the dollar ammount by 1.78

 

[semi-pro waster]

It should be fine but can I ask why go with an IDE hard drive and why bother with the ASRock motherboard when you are buying a new PCI-E graphics card? Is that because you have the ASRock so know it to be ok or is it just that you don't know of another suitable?

How about getting a slightly cheaper graphics card like an X800GTO but upping the CPU power to say a 3700 to give a more balanced overall machine?

 

[locutus12]

i chose the asrock because its a damn good board for the money and has support for M2. the IDE hard drive was chosen because this is the first ever pc he has built and ive got to tell him how to do it via a webcam and teamspeak so i was going for the easiest option, bare in mind hes going from a 60 gig ata 66 with no cache and even if he had SATA, he wouldnt notice

the graphics card is something for him to grow into as time goes on and the venice 3000 clocks to stock opty 150 speed and performance (well, mine does at least )

its all abou the budget and selecting the easiest parts for him to put together.

 

[semi-pro waster]

Fair enough, your reasoning is solid enough although I'm not sure that if someone can't install a SATA drive(which wouldn't need drivers on an Nforce4 motherboard, don't know aboutthe Uli chipset) would be happy overclocking but you know your mate better than I do You are right though that most people won't notice that much of a difference between SATA and IDE in performance terms especially when he is coming from a pretty slow PC.

 

[locutus12]

hes not the one that will be overclocking it... thats what systool and VNC are for