Blumpkinstein

I purchased Quake 4 and it ran so poorly that it made my system show its age. So I am upgrading and order the following parts from Newegg.com.
I included the part numbers so if you wanna check out the more detailed specs feel free.

I need opinions.

I prolly should have gotten opinions before I purchased but I only had 1000.00to spend and after all this stuff and the shipping it came to 1008.00.

I wasn't a complete doof, I am fairly experienced in building my own machines and did look for parts that met my budget AND had good reviews by more than just a handful of people.

If I have to return something important like the PSU (if it is too weak) I can do so.


Antec SmartPower 2.0 SP-500 ATX12V 500W Power Supply - Retail
Item #: N82E16817103937


ASUS A8N-SLI Premium Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
Item #: N82E16813131540


AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego 2000MHz HT Socket 939 Processor Model ADA3700BNBOX - Retail
Item #: N82E16819103539



G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model F1-3200PHU2-2GBNS - Retail
Item #: N82E16820231047


TWO:
eVGA 256-P2-N541-TX Geforce 7600GS 256MB GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Video Card - Retail
Item #: N82E16814130020


I am also running these drives. I don't have the stats or links to their stats, I got them years ago, the only thing that is new is the 250 Gb drive and I just got that a month ago.

TWO WD SATA 7200 RPM 80 Gb HD's

Two WD IDE 7200 HD's
One is 120 Gb and the other is newer its 250 Gb.

Memorex CDburner
Sony Dvdburner

forcifer

i think you would be ok to take off the 250 gig hd and spend more on proc. aslo the psu is a good brand, but im not sure about watts. id get probably 600 for SLI

sinclair_tm

looks great, alot better than mine. but i wouldn't bother with the ide drives, just put the 2 sata's in and raid them.

Blumpkinstein

I took you advice and was able to cancel my order in newegg and place a new one that replaced the PSU with one that was suggest here by another user.

OCZ GameXStream OCZ600GXSSLI ATX12V 600W Power Supply 100 - 240V - Retail
* Model #: OCZ600GXSSLI
* Item #: N82E16817341001

I also ordered another case. I got to thinking about what was said about dumping the two IDE drives. Well, that I thought was if I got another case I could halve my work load but not having to disassemble one machine to build another. This way I can just remove the SATA drives and DVD burner from my current system and incoporate those into my new one. This way I will have three systems (I built my wife a nearly identical machine as my current setup), the one I have now can be used for all my media: home movies/pics/music etc etc.

The thought also occured to me that I can hook my current system up to my 42" Plasma in the living room. All I would need is a few USB extension cables and a powered hub to extend the range for the wireless mouse and keyboard I have and lastly the DVI cable to hook the vid card to the tv.

There is just one thing that concerns me. The two IDE drives are slaves in my current system, one is 120 Gb and the other is 250 Gb; the 250 is mostly empty since it is so new, so I figured I would simply copy all the data from the 120 onto the 250 and format the 120 as the primary drive in the new config of my current system. Of course I would slave the 250 again BUT I have read here that I may have trouble with that, seeing as I used Windows Disk Management to partition and format the 250 gig when I slaved it in.

What I read was a sticky that said that since I did that if I try to slave it back into a new set up because partition info will be on the my current SATA RAID'ed drives and (not to make it a run-on sentence) that I may end up buying Partion Magic to fix this issue. That will be another 40 bucks but I guess it wouldn't be bad investment, not a complete waste of cash. I could use it to help friends recover their data too (I do small time pc repair work on the side).

Lastly I kinda sorta forgot how I set up my RAID last time. I think this board has RAID controllers on it and it should make the job easy. I wonder if the new copy of XP Pro I bought (which includes SP2) will already have the drivers for SATA drives. My old copy gives a few quick "Hit F6 to install SATA drivers" message. If you are not paying close attention you can miss it and it requires I get the SATA drivers on a floppy ahead of time and finding those on the driver disk can sometimes be a pain. I am sure you will see a post from me asking if anyone knows where to find them on my new MoBo driver disk.
I am reading up on it now and am having a helluva time getting a copy of the users manual from Asus.

Trust me I will do my homework and look around online before I post a cry for help needlessly.

Thanks to anyone who reads this long-winded post.