So:
- prices don’t include tax,
- prices don’t include Vista,
- prices don’t include keyboard, mouse and screen.

All this and no photo?

mwave is ok but I like http://www.gamegiants.net the prices are better on most items in your list.

Ooops you did it again !!
NiCE try man ..
Looks cool for Windows Vista..
Sure it will give a good result

How hard is actually process of putting together these components? Does it require specialist skills and tools?

Very interesting! Thanks for posting.

vista seems to be rather popular with people from this part of the world. over here in asia, vista has been overly critiqued for its unstability.

regards,
The Pandora Effect.

Maybe if you went more into detail of why you chose each individual part and/or the actual process of building the machine, as your post title says “How to build…” not just ‘What parts to use…’…..

Just my $0.02

Thanks for the part tip off though :).

Why the hell would I want a PC with Vista?

I agree with all your choices with the possible exception of the WD drives. I had 4 of them in a NAS, and found them to run very hot, So hot in fact that I ended up replacing them with 4 seagate 320 gb 300 mb/sec drives. These are running at last 15 to 20 degrees cooler in the same environment.

Nice try!
personally, I prefer Athlon X2 for maybe a bit more $$, but performs much better than P4 8XXs.

With Vista you need double the amount of money spent for ram while you only get the same performance as you would have on win XP. With win XP, you could get a pc to perform smoothly on normal tasks with 1G ram and an INTEGRATED graphics card (no high end encoding, 3D and games and stuff, of course!). Think of the $$$ you save with keeping XP for the time being!

Vienna would be out by 2009 and Vista (reminds me of Windows ME…). I would just use XP for another two years. By then prices of 2G ram would have lowered and should (hopefully) be equally as good for Vienna.

PS. may have gone a bit off topic about Vista, but just my 2 percent

I just really want to build a great gaming computer with all the speed, graphics, and sound as those 6000-8000 models out there(alienware/the new dell and gateways) I have replaced boards and added memory before but never build a computer from the ground up (os, drivers etc) there has to be a way to get me surfing and playing for less than these corporate giants anyone who can help please email me at sillycracker6288@yahoo.com

@GrayBags101

it says the drive is 250GB, on the blue hyperlinked text. the 16MB refers to the cache size.

hmmm, did you checked all the price’s in deal ram?

btw, will it run supreme commander and the next farcry?

Thanks for writing the article. Well done. I’m also sorry for all the ID 10 T s out there. Learn to read people. Don’t just skim.

Where can you get a motherboard/AMD 3200+ AM2 PCI-16X combo for $89?

You did not provide a link.

I went to http://frys.com/ and i did not see any great motherboard/CPU deal.

you did not leave ur email address.

how is your performance on your office pc with the FX5200? are you using the stock drivers, or forceware version 96.85? that seems to be latest version which supports this card..

im also running a ~4 year old system. athlon xp 1800+, 1GB ram, fx5200, raptor HD, nforce2 mobo (the 7nnxp).

i have to say, yea sure aero glass works for me, but dear God the performance hurts me deep. for one, nvidia’s driver support is DISMAL! they dont support my nforce2 period, and support ends at 96.85 for my fx5200. i had to disable the nforce NIC, because i was getting dropped packets left and right. using the onboard intel gbit nic now with the latest drivers from intel. seems to be working better, but for whatever reason… aol im 5.9 and earlier still just refuses to stay connected for longer than 10 minutes.. whats up with this!

the amount of memory aero consumes is scary. to do anything meaningful such as watch video, i have to disable it.. i like aero though, so i resort to turning it on and off now. even with it on though, i must disable transparency to keep ram usage somewhat sane. with it off, i really wish i could just use my old 3rd party xp themes again… (deviantart.com rocks!)

the stock fx5200 drivers were awful for me, but the forceware drivers arent actually much better. i run a dual monitor setup and have now started noticing that if i leave the computer for a while and come back, every so often i wont get any display.. i have to vnc in from another machine, change resolutions or disable/enable the secondary display to get anything on screen. this is so incredibly annoying!

its rather pathetic in my opinion that a company who’s entire reputation is grounded on their driver support has dropped the ball so miserably with this. here’s to hoping this sad situation will change soon.

i also had to disable many services and features on vista to get somewhat manageble performance. the sidebar was first to go, thinking about disabling windows search now too. quite unfortunate.. there are others like these too.

performance was wonderful under xp, im thinking about switching back but more so hoping things can be improved. whats your advice, and can you offer any tips to improve performance for users with older systems like us?

Sorry to disappoint you, but I did not plagiarize your article as you’ve accused me in the comments on my post. By coincidence we both wrote very similar posts a week apart, but the difference is I had the post on my todo list for 3 months before I got around to writing it. And if you look into the details: 1) all my parts are from NewEgg and different than yours, and 2) The system I configured cost almost $50 less.