Is this a decent graphic card?

[Xest]

Any boards that support 1066 RAM?

[Ovi]

Power supply looks a bit overkill though, 400w should be plenty. Core 2 Duo's require around 60 - 75 watts compared to AMD 64 X2's 100 - 110 watts. You're looking at around 150 watts for the graphics card also as nVidia cards generally are a little less power hungry than ATIs.

65Watts for the Athlon 64 X2 I recently bought.

I picked this CPU because it was the cheapest Dual Core CPU I could buy. Still the most I have ever spent on a CPU, but Dual Core was a "must have" when buying a CPU now.

Not much experience of Asus, I usually stick with Abit, they used to be much better than the competition now I would just say better.

I went for "DDR2-667 (PC2-5300)" RAM, it was only a little more than PC2-4200, but a lot less than the PC2-6400. The make I went for was Corsair, as they are a well known name but for the "Value Select" type as I didn't feel I would gain much from spending more. Like Xest said no point going for Georgio Armani here! Just remember with DDR to add memory in pairs. I went for 2x512, which was plenty good enough for me.

I went for a "cheap" graphics card GF7300GT because I was close to the budget, it got really good reviews and I would need to spend at least twice as much to get much better. (Apparently the fact it uses DDR3 makes it much better than it's price suggests... I have had my pinch of salt though, but so far it is plenty good enough for me )

The other components I carried over from my existing PC, although a new ATAII hard disk will be in the next round of upgrades

[OohhoO]

Can't find an available MB which supports 1066 ram, altho the ram itself is available

I wouldn't save much by getting a cheaper power supply tbh.

Going to restrict myself to 2gb ram on cost grounds



Maus, KB, Floppy, DvD, etc, from old system

Case: NZXT Midi-Tower Apollo Silver,5x5,25" 1x3,5" 4x3,5, NO PS! 149.90
Power: Thermaltake Toughpower 600W,ATX 2.2, SLI, A.PFC, 140mm Fan 139.90
Board: ASUS P5B, PCX, P965,FSB1066,Audio,SATAII,RAID,GLAN 199.90
CPU: Intel CORE2DUO E6300,Box775P,1066MHz,2MB,65nm,Fan 279.90
RAM: 2x Apacer DDR2 1024MB, PC-5300Major,240Pin,667MHz,CL5 339.80
Graphic: GigaByte NX7950GT, 512MB,1400/550MHz,TV-Out, 2xDVI,DDR3 399.90
HD: 2x 160 GB,SATAII,Samsung HD160JJ,SATA-II-300, 7200/ 8.9ms/ 8MB 179.80
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CHF 1689.10
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That looks reasonable & is only 10% over budget
But does it fit together?

[Xest]

Dunno how much of a problem having your system clock down to lower speed RAM is nowadays if I'm honest, that would be my only concern.

Regards to the power supply, a 600w power supply may not cost too much more but it will dissipate a lot more heat and they often tend to be a little noisier due to requiring bigger fans also. If heat isn't too big an issue wherever you have your computer it's not anything to worry about, I have tons of machine in my study but even with just 2 on it gets uncomfortably hot unless I open the window.

[OohhoO]

Thermaltake power supplies are pretty quiet. I have a friend with exactly this model. I could go for a Raptoxx instead, but their cheaper line is noisier (<24db) & their quieter line (0db ) is more expensive, but they would at least have a sexeh blue glow!

16 db is acceptable for me.
No wait... blue-glo >>> all!

I could get 800mhz RAM at little extra cost so that might be worth considering.

I must say I'm not up-to-date on the relationships between FSB-speed, RAM-speed & CPU-Speed.

[Xest]

Could always just grab 1gb RAM for now and upgrade to 2gb 1066 in 6months or smth.

[OohhoO]

hmmm tomshardware has been testing core2 setups with ddr2-800 ram modules, a 700w power supply , & a radeon x1900xtx

[Ovi]

Could always just grab 1gb RAM for now and upgrade to 2gb 1066 in 6months or smth.

That was my logic when I opted to only go for 1GB. To be honest for what I do (2x Eve-online clients + browser + Office Apps) 1Gb is coping fine at the moment anyway.

[Xest]

Well you don't need a 700w supply it's just overkill Honestly the only time you need over 400w to 450w is if you're running 2 cards in SLi or running a massive array of hard drives.

That was my logic when I opted to only go for 1GB. To be honest for what I do (2x Eve-online clients + browser + Office Apps) 1Gb is coping fine at the moment anyway.

I think people overestimate the amount of RAM a machine needs, I've been fine on 1gb for years now and I do play high end games such as GRAW. Many people base their understanding of how much RAM they need from task manager but this is misleading as explained here. Games are designed for the lowest common denominator, no games company in their right mind would design a game to cache for 2gb of memory as it would kill the userbase and it's too easy to produce a method of streaming data to and from the drive anyhow. If you're doing extremely high poly rendering in 3D Studio Max or Maya or if you're dealing with operations in Photoshop on large raw images then the RAM comes in useful, likewise if you're running server applications involving large databases or a web server that needs to cache large amounts of data in memory to provide fast responses to clients then it makes a massive difference having the extra RAM. Just to demonstrate my point, the XBox 360 and PS3 are currently showing off the most power intensive games on the market yet only have 512mb and 256mb of RAM respectively. Both console also just use a standard SATA bus for the harddrive also so it's not as if they benefit faster streaming too and from memory than the PC, the game focussed optimizations on modern consoles are in the buses joining memory, processor and graphics card for the most part.

[OohhoO]

Aye that is pretty true.
My daughters PC came with 2x512mb RAM (the only PC in the house I didn't build myself) & when 1 module broke the diference wasn't hugely noticeable.
Tomshardware says adding RAM up to 2GB is likely to improve gaming performance.
RAM is pretty cheap again ATM tho.
Altho... reducing to 1mb RAM would get me within budget!