Help required.

pablo21

How do Folks, I've been given a free Intel Northwood 3.2 ghz chip to build a PC with here at work (Nice that!) and I want to build a serious piece of Kit around it and I'm looking for a few suggestions from some of the more experienced of you. Now within reason, money is not really an object because its gonna be for personal use only as opposed to customer spec. So heres my question, if you were building a wish list PC, would you pick this chip to start on or something different or seeing as I'm getting this chip for free what kind of wish list would you build around it?? I want something very fast and a bit special. All help and info greatly appreciated! I'm gonna go down the snazzy case road aswell and probably use a DVD burner and a pretty good spec sound and graphics. Looking forward to hearing your suggestions!!!

D

YOu might have better luck in the hardware forum.

tman

9800 pro/xt and an audigy 2 platinum along with a decent set of 5.1/7.1 speakers are are at the top of my wish list at the mo...
seeing as you've got a p4, a decent mainboard that supports dual channel ram is a must. throw 1024mb of matched ram in there & you're sweet...
a couple of western digital raptor sata hard drives would be nice:)

subway_ie

1024mb of RAM is damn expensive right now

Woden

you must have some idea of a budget though we have to have limitations

i like most of tman's suggestions though i'd wait a little while for the graphics cards as there is new ones just around the corner which should have substantial performance increases.

with regards to a wish list processor there is better processors on the market but either the difference is not substantial or to make it substantial you'd have to spend ridculous amounts of money so you're off to a good start with that processor imo

decent motherboards for intel systems include the highend asus offering P4C800-E i think or abits ic7 max 3. do you plan on overclocking it? if so i recommend a thermal right heats sink sp94 is the high end p4 offering here and you can put you choice of fan on it.

corsair, ocz, mushkin all make good ram as tman suggest put 1024 in it. your choice of ram will depend again on whether you are planning on overclocking it. if you not overclocking it pc3200 will be sufficient

the WD raptors are nice drives and would be sweet to have in a system and you might consider one large seperate drive just for storage

also nice tft is is must and a good 17inch one will set you back about 500-600 euro start off.

liteon make good cd-rw drives get there 52x offering and antec make good psu's

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pablo21

I've had a few suggestions for this motherboard so I think it' appears to be the way to go. Thanks for the suggestions, they're all great! As for budget, I havent really set a limit, Once its not crazy money (i.e. grand or more for graphics etc) I dont mind spending a bit!

MOBO:
Abit IC7-MAX3 Mainboard S478/800mhz,SATA I875P, ATX,GbLAN,Dual-DDR,Firewire,Raid

RAM:
At least a gb of ?

Woden

the intel heads can argue the merits between the abit and asus boards,

with regards to ram again it depends whether you plan on overclocking, if your just gonna run it at stock some good pc3200 ram will do like corsair xms3200LL, mushkin pc3200 special 2-2-2, or ocz pc 3200 platinium limited edition

however you plan on overclocking you may want some memory that can run with your cpu's fsb on a 1:1 say some ram that can handle 250mhz fsb, but again check out the stuff form these manufacturers.

www.shop4memory.com do ocz and mushkin memory shipping free
www.overclockers.co.uk do ocz and corsair memory
www.komplett.ie do corsair memory

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