New PC advice

Moosehead · 7 Feb 2006 at 21:23

Well it's new PC time again and I have a couple of grand stashed away in the ol' hardware budget. I've picked out a few parts (I already have an XP Pro license and a mitsumi floppy/card reader for the new PC) and wondered if any of you ninja PC hexperts had any comments or suggestions on the spec. I plan to use everything at stock speeds, repeat - I do not intend to O/C anything, a hard concept for some of you I know

and it'll be used for both dev work and gaming. What I've picked out so far follows...

£69 Aspire X-Qpack Cube Case
£10 Vantec SF12025L Stealth 120mm fan to replace case fan
£77 Antec TruePower 2.0 550W PSU
£65 Asus A8N-VM CSM Micro ATX Motherboard
£459 AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Dual Core CPU
£23 Zalman CNPS7000B-CU CPU Cooler
£159 G.Skill 2GB DDR ZX PC3200 (2x1GB) 2-3-2-5 Dual Channel Kit
£359 Connect3D ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB
£152 Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS Edition
£164 2x Samsung SpinPoint P SP2504C 250GB SATA-II Hard Drives
£34 NEC ND4551 Dual Layer DVD±RW Drive
£247 Samsung SM930BF 19" LCD Monitor
£22 Microsoft Digital Media Pro Keyboard
£45 Logitech G5 Gaming-Grade Laser Mouse
£21 Belkin 54Mbps Wireless USB 2.0 Network Adapter

KizZ · 7 Feb 2006 at 21:54

Looks good m8. If I was you I would get the 4400+ and clock it and save some cash. But I see you dont want to do that

nikebee · 7 Feb 2006 at 22:07

any reason you've got for the Cube mobo and micro ATX?

other than that, only thing worth noting is perhaps change the Vantec Stealth fan to an Akasa Ultra Quiet fan, much quieter and pretty much the same price

try and squeeze a Raptor HDD into the budget if you can

although you might just want something nice, small, quick and quiet... (going by the replacement fan/spinpoint HDDs) in which case a raptor isn't for you.

i'd also go for a PCI based network adapter rather than USB... usb ones have given me no ends of trouble in the past... they just seem to be poorly built :-/

Moosehead · 7 Feb 2006 at 22:15

nikebee said:
any reason you've got for the Cube mobo and micro ATX?

Yah, I'm fed up of putting my back out lugging my current tower PC to the monthly LAN party.

nikebee said:
try and squeeze a Raptor HDD into the budget if you can
although you might just want something nice, small, quick and quiet... (going by the replacement fan/spinpoint HDDs) in which case a raptor isn't for you.

You noticed! Yay!