[Omega]

My desktop's motherboard recently died on me, and I'm quickly tiring of using my laptop at home. It has been a while since I built my last machine, and I'm not current on trends/reviews...can anyone who's up on this stuff give me some recommendations?

I'm not looking for someone to "do my homework for me" but I know computer systems are a hobby for many here, in addition to head-fi, and am just looking for some holistic system recommendations, please!

I'll need new: CPU, motherboard, RAM, video card, power supply and case, and will not spend more than $850 total on these components. Primary tasks are: moderate to heavy 3D modeling, Photoshop, occasional FPS gaming, some video compositing and general browsing/email/document writing. I'm impressed with Intel's Core 2 Duo chips and am heavily biased towards nVidia video chipsets (due to driver support). I'll retain all my PATA drives (4 of 'em), so I can't go SATA-only.

My primary constraint is performance per dollar. My secondary constraint is low-noise. I have no illusions about building a budget-minded "silent" system, but I'd like it to be reasonably quiet. Audio output quality is not a concern, as I'll use a Squeezebox for that.

SLI would be cool--can I fit that into the budget? Why does memory look so expensive recently? Thanks!

 

[JahJahBinks]

For that price you probably have to go with the cheapest or second cheapest core 2 duo and SLI is out of question too

 

[nysulli]

http://anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=2861

very recent and a good guild to building a sub $1000 pc

 

[roastpuff]

SLI is also relatively pointless considering your budget - the only things worth SLIing is the 7900GT-class or above.

I agree with JahJah... that budget will get you a low-end Core 2 Duo set... not much beyond that.

It's also quite rare to find a recent motherboard that supports anything beyond 4 PATA devices... I'm assuming at least one of the four PATA drives mentioned is an optical?

 

[regal]

It was hard to find a PATA capable MB 2 years ago let alone now. You need to google a PATA to SATA converter/adapter. I remember seeing one.

For your budget you may have to go for a D-series cpu. I picked up a D 820 for $75 it can overclock to 3.5 ghz with the stock fan.

 

[Omega]

Yeah, 4 ATA devices includes 2 opticals, so only sporadic power consumption. Thanks for the article nysulli...I perused Anandtech a few days ago, but missed this recent gem.

Looks like a PATA-to-SATA adapter card is not even necessary...there are miniature pass-thru converters that plug directly to the back of a PATA drive to enable a SATA connection.

 

[alex_cs]

very hard to find a mobo with more than one IDE socket at the moment. my advice would be to spec out a new system with 2-3 PCI slots (not PCI-x16,x4) and find a card that converts to sata, or a pci card that has 2-4 ide-100/ide133 slots on it (2 is the norm though)

 

[Iron_Dreamer]

Here is what I came up with from newegg.com. You should be able to really OC this setup quite well. If you only need 1GB RAM instead of 2GB, you could get a better video card (or course at the expense of quietness), or just be further under your budget. The built-in suspension system should keep your existing HDD's quiet. The limitation on quietness will be the stock Intel heatsink, and there are any number of different parts you could replace it with.


Antec Performance One P150 Silver Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 430-Watt ATX12V v2.2 Power Supply - Retail
$159.99 -$15.00 Instant $144.99

ASUS P5B Socket T (LGA 775) Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail
$139.99

GIGABYTE GV-NX76T256D-RH GeForce 7600GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Silent Pipe II, Lead Free Video Card - Retail
Mail-in Rebate $30
$159.99

Rosewill PCI IDE Silicon Image Host Controller Model RC-208 (un-RAID) - Retail
$12.99

Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 Conroe 1.86GHz LGA 775 Processor Model BX80557E6300 - Retail
$181.99

G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Standard System Memory Model F2-6400CL5D-2GBNQ - Retail
$259.99 -$50.00 Instant $209.99

Subtotal: $849.94

 

[J-Pak]

The E6300 is a really good deal right now. Hopefully we'll see another price drop after the new year.