Pc Suggestions

[[SS]CJ]

My laptop took another crap on me. I told Fujitsu about it. The customer rep said that the engineers are looking into it. I guess a lot of laptops (same model as mine) are coming back to them. Their lab coat guys are stumped. What does this mean? Fujitsu is refunding my money. With that said, i've decided to build my own pc. I've never built one before, but everyone that I've talked to about it has said its pretty basic.

Here's the problem; I have not idea what to get. What kind of motherboard, CPU, case, etc. Chenzo was telling me about RAID O, 1, 2, etc. He said it really increases speed and performance. Does anybody else have RAID set up on their pc? If so, was it hard to intall? BTW, my budget is $1600.

I've just been browsing around and have come up with this so far, case, motherboard, and CPU. Here's the links:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=494296&Sku=C455-6072%20CAW&CatId=712

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-Details.asp?EdpNo=637331&sku=MBM-K8NPRO-3200

Any suggestions about hard drive, vid cards, sound cards, monitors? Anything I'm leaving out?

Am I going in the right direction? Any input would be appreciated.

[[SS]Steve-O]

Get a GREAT motherboard. This is important becuase eveything pretty much runs off that, plus if you want, you can easily upgrade to better processors later. Then build around that. Asus is a great company for motherboards, I think. Jammer what kind of things will you be doing with your comp? Games? Graphic Design? Surf the web? Digital Video editing?
I think $1600 is more then enough to get you a sweet comp thou.

[[SS]Snakebite]

$1600 ??..... Go buy a Sony VAIO laptop, mine rocks!! Problem solved. :D

[[SS]Rator]

yeah it rocks if you dont hook it up to your router! LOL! jk.

Jammer, best way to get the best PC for your money, is to tell Chenzo what you want to use it for, and ask him to recommend all the parts you need.

[<WH>sMoKeOuT]

Nice new badges you guys got going...Looks good..

[[SS]CJ]

After checking out the available desktops, I discovered that none of them had the kind of motherboard I was looking for. It would have been nice to avoid the trials and tribulations of building my own pc, but in the end, thats what I am doing.

I ended up getting a Gigabyte K8N Pro AGP8X/DDR400 Motherboard. It has RAID 0, 1, and 0+1 capabilities. While I still have to do some reading on RAID, the option is still there. It has built in 6 channel audio and will support up to 3GB of RAM. The CPU that I got is a AMD Athlon64 3200+. I could only afford 2 512 sticks of RAM. Regardless of RAID or not, I decided on 2 80GB hard drives with 8MB cache and they run at 7200rpm. I didn't go all out on the video card. I ended up with an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro with 128 DDR Memory. The case I got for it is pretty basic, its a mid-size tower with a 350W power supply and its brushed aluminum. I think it has a light that goes inside of it as well. I opted not to get a dvd r/rw + - or whatever. Too much money. Didn't think I'd get much use out of it either. I did get a cd r/rw/dvd rom though and a 3.5" floppy drive. That's about it. Now I just have to put it all together without destroying anything, then get it set up correctly.