Just spent quite a while working out a new system and would appreciate peoples thoughts about the hardware I have chosen. Its mainly a gaming machine CPU: AMD Athlon 64 4000+ San Diego 90nm (Socket 939) MOBO: Sapphire PURE Innovation Gruper Radeon Xpress 200P (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard G CARD: PowerColor ATI Radeon X1800 XT 512MB GDDR3 PSU: Antec TruePower 2.0 550W PSU The Ram, HDD and Optical drive will be taken from my old comp and these are: RAM: x2 512mb CRUCIAL PC3200 DDR HDD: 120GB Maxtor diamondmax plus 9 8mb cache DVD RW: Plextor PX-712A
I've seen very little in regards to the Sapphire PURE RX480P, but I don't remember there being anything that was screaming as a major issue. The main detrement I remember is that it uses the ATi SB480 with the Radeon Xpress200P, and that's known to have some major USB2.0 performance issues. It's also kinda pricey from what I hear. A cheaper alternative is the Asus A8R-MVP, which seems to be the best Radeon Xpress board out there. I've yet to see any review of it knock it. In general, I'm not sure I'd really go with the Radeon Xpress at all. It's still got some issues, and I'm not sure if it's with the silicon itself or just a driver issue. Right now, the nForce 4 line is a proven chipset family, and unless you'll just die without going with an ATi chipset, I'd recommend steering clear of it altogether at this point in time.
Depends on what you're looking for. The Gigabyte K8AF-9 is pretty cheap, and if you just want a board that runs, and nothing else, that'd be your best bet. On the other side, if you want something with lots of tweaking, the DFI LanParty/LanPartyUT NF4 series are great. A happy medium would be the Asus A8N (-E or SLI, depending on what you'd want to go for in the future). The price range here is between about $80 to $130, depending on the board. If you want SLI, you can extend that range to about $170, depending on the motherboard.
