New Build slightly overwhelmed, please advise on parts list.

[dewey2641]

Hi,

The last home built I put together a few systems 3-4 years ago and while they worked, compatability was an issue. My last system was a lower end hp that I slapped some extra ram and a video card in and it worked but is pretty much maxed out.

For the work I do I'm running several instances of a program and need lots of ram and video texture.

In general what I want is a new box that has E6300 mildly OC'ed. 4 gigs of ram and middle of the road 512 meg video card, such as the Nvidia 7600 GS.

I'd like to keep the price around $1000 maybe sightly more if a significant proformance / stability issue can be addressed.

Heres the list so far: (all with shipping added)

case : XION II XON-103 Black SECC Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 450W Power Supply $76
Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600JS 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM $64
Memory: CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 675 (PC2 5400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory - Retail ~ $400 for 4gig
MB: GIGABYTE GA-965P-S3 Socket T (LGA 775) Intel P965 Express $122
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 Conroe 1.86GHz 2M sharing L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor $180
video: eVGA 512-P2-N548-TX GeForce 7600GS 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Video Card $136

Thanks for any insights you care to share, I'm planning day after thanksgiving.

ps. If I got an extra hard drive could I do software raid0 in WinXP like under linux or do I need raid chip on motherboard?

 

[CompRookie]

If your work does not require high video resolution, I would suggest you look into the 7600GT graphic card instead of the GS since the GT version will feature GDDR3 memory with much higher speed and offers better performance. You can buy an eVGA 7600GT at Newegg for $119.99 after the rebate. More video memory is only useful when you are playing game at resolution such as 1600X1200 otherwise [/quote]it doesn’t have much impact on the performance.

 

[dewey2641]

CompRookie, The suggestion to run with a GT is a good one, however, the amount of texture memory used > 256 Meg, which is causing the card to swap memory, so I have to have 512 ram on the video card, which would be the eVga Geforce 7950GT for $250. For the extra $100 I'd be more tempted to try getting an extra hard drive and load up raid 0 for faster disk access.

Same problem with ram. Most of the time I'm running between 0-100 meg free on a 2 gig system.

 

[chuckshissle]

At 1280x1024 rez and quality setting, you should have a decent performance. 2Gb of ram is plenty enough for any current games at high settings.