Newegg Wishlist
After months and months of agonizing and waffling I have to go with Intel over AMD. The main reason being price/performance/upgradeability. I got into the AMD game nearly 4 years ago (Ziggo 2) with an Athlon XP+ 1800 and an Asus A7V333+Raid. My thinking at the time was buy what I could afford across all the parts and upgrade as prices came down. AMD decided to change their socket on me though... not once but twice. Kinda screwed my update path as getting a new board wasn't part of it. I wasn't going to hold a grudge against AMD for that but I still didn't like it.
So here I am again trying to envision the upgrade path. Upgrading is fun to me and not just a necessary evil. So I'm setting a limit of under $1000 for the core components but I'm going to skimp on the processor this time. Also the first time I did this in 2003 I picked a motherboard with on-board video but this time it's not an attractive option. That was my very first build so I could afford to do it piece by piece... and now I have standards that won't let me do that :)
Processor: Intel Pentium D 805
I had originally planned on getting the E6300 but by going with an OEM D 805 I was able to cut over $100 from the cost. I think my upgrade path feels pretty solid going this route too. Since the exact chip I'm getting is an OEM I had to throw in a cooler: ZEROtherm CF800 92mm CPU Cooler - Retail - I did a little research on this and it shouldn't be any worse than the stock Intel cooler.
Motherboard: ASUS P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP
Originally I was looking at motherboards with the P975 chipset but the $200+ price of these boards left me holding off on the purchase. Roughly $150 per component just feels right in my mind so I started to look at the P965 boards. I also found benchmarks where the ICH8 southbridge was alot better than the nvidia chipsets when it came to USB performance and some other things. The WiFi version of the board is priced about $20 more than the one without and even though I don't need WiFi I figure it won't be bad to have the option in the future. The same with dual PCI-E slots... I'm not sure that I'll ever need that but might as well.
RAM: CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
No point in sacrificing on the RAM. I struggle along with 1.5GB in Ziggo2 with XP + Photoshop, virtual machines and other apps as it is.
Video Card: ATI X1950 XT
Originally I was thinking about going with an ATI X850 variant because that's what I currently have in Ziggo2 running in a 4x AGP slot. The comparison would have been cool but I can't find any X850 cards lately. I want to have VIVO regardless so that meant the X1650 was the card to set my sights on... until I compared the X850 and X1650 using Tomshardware.com's graphics card comparison utility. The X850 consistently scored better than the X1650... oooookay. That's how I ended up with the X1950 as my card of choice and this was what ultimately lead me to choose the Pentium D 805 as well, spending more on the video than the original plan. It's an open box card but I have the adapters I need already. I also didn't want a card that was double height with the cooler.
Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer
On-board sound doesn't cut it. Never has for me.
Hard Drive: WD Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s
Seems like an obvious choice to me.
The total comes to $935.18 with shipping. I'm also trying to get a Lian-Li PC-65 variant case. This is turning out to be just as complicated as putting the core system together. I went to microcenter and they had one on display, so I bought one. When I got home with the box it's not the same case they had on display. In the box = 2 80mm fans up front, on display = 1 120mm fan up front. There are other differences as well and I'm taking the damned thing back to see if I can get what I want. This adds another $150+ to the total but this is total splurging :) I don't NEED a case, I have a few I can use but none of them are aluminum with a removable motherboard tray! :D
