Imput on what to build for my main household system.

[Spongebob]

I've been hanging around this board alot lately becuase I'm getting close to building a powerfull system for my household again. After recovering from summer vacation expences, I'm ready to BUILD! The system will be used for a little of everything and alot for video games, so with that in mind it might give you an idea what type of hardware I'm going to be eyeing. I already have a nice big LCD monitor stored away for the system and plenty of different harddrives laying around to chose from, so I can eliminate those 2 things for expences but I think I'll buy everything else new and my spending limit is flexible but I'm leaning toward the $800 to $1000 (US) range.

Questions.....

Whats the best mainboard on the market?

Should I go with a Nvidia or an ATI based graphics card?

I have 2 sticks of Corsair CMX512-3200C2PRO 400MHZ ram laying around, should I use it in this system or buy some better stuff? I really don't want to be skimpy here.

Microsofts new operating system is coming soon so eventually that WILL end up on this system. Is there something I should keep in mind when buying hardware and running that O.S.? I haven't been doing any research on (Longhorn).

Should I buy now or wait a few more months before building? could it be that some better hardware is coming out very soon thats worth a short wait?

[amd_man2005]

Re: Imput on what to build for my main household system.

Keep your RAM. I would go with an nVidia based right now.

[Yawgm0th]

Re: Imput on what to build for my main household system.

Agreed. That's good RAM, and nVidia's cards well have better image quality than ATI's in most games and perform equally or better than ATI's in most games.


Build now, as well, because it'll be quite some time before anything new that's important is out. The next big thing will be socket type changes again, and it's probably not happening for either company until H2 2007.

As for Vista (the next version of Windows), it'll run fine on a system with 1GB of RAM and an Athlon 64, preferably dual-core.

The best mainboard, hands down, is the DFI nForce 4 Ultra and SLI boards, Ultra being preferable since it's cheaper and SLI doesn't have much use with anything but a 7800GT or GTX. Unless you don't want to ever overclock and really need to save moeny, DFI is the way to go.

[amd_man2005]

Re: Imput on what to build for my main household system.

Thanks for covering the mainboard, I don't know much about new ones. :)

[Spongebob]

Re: Imput on what to build for my main household system.

I was looking at an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200 CPU but its runs around $480. What advantages do you gain over its predicessor? And can that M-board handle it?

[Yawgm0th]

Re: Imput on what to build for my main household system.

The dual core CPUs gain huge advantages in multi-threaded applications, such as video encoding, as well as in regular multitasking. Unless you run a well-tweaked system without many background programs, a dual-core CPU will provide huge performance gains in just about everything you do.

They'll work fine with that motherboard and any socket 939 motherboard, as long as it doesn't have a really old BIOS. At this point in time, buying a new board should pretty much guarantee it has an updated BIOS that will take a dual-core processor.