Advice on gaming PC build

Reflection

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Jan 7, 2007
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I am buying two systems for my husband and I for gaming, hopefully with options for upgrading graphics cards in the future. I currently cannot afford the DX10 cards, but I would hope for the systems to be ready to take one when later in the year when the ATi cards are released and they are more reasonably priced. I would love to wait for the new cards to release and prices to drop, but we need them ASAP since we don't have PCs right now (just moved back to the US and our old ones were, well, old and not worth bringing over). SLi/Crossfire is not something I'm interested in either (I already need one card for each machine it would just get silly buying four), and I don't need wireless/firewire/etc since we pretty much just use them for gaming and browsing the web.

Enermax 535W EG565P-VE FMA 2.0 SLI ATX12V V2.0 Power Supply
Cooler Master Centurion 5 BLACK/SILVER w/ no PS (10 bays),1394
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 Dual-Core
Asus P5B Pentium 4 ATX Mbrd (1.86GHz-3.8GHz+), P965
Corsair 2GB (2 x 1GB) XMS2 PC2-6400 DDR2 800MHz
Sapphire Radeon. X1950XT, 256MB GDDR3, PCIe x16, 2x DVI, VIVO
Western Digital 250GB WD Caviar SE16, SATA II 300MB/s, 7200 RPM, 16MB cache
Sony AW-Q170A Black Dual 18x DVD+RW/-RW/CD-RW (48x/24x/48x),18x DVD
MS Windows XP Media Center 2005 CD (full version)

(Already have two Soundblaster Audigy 4s to use for now)

Does this look like a solid build?
 

apt403

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Oct 14, 2006
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Which version of the P5B are you getting? The regular P5B sucks for oc'ing, the P5B-E is decent, and the P5B Deluxe is awesome for oc'ing. I would get this psu instead, the 1950xt is a power hungry card. Where are you buying all this stuff?
 

Reflection

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Jan 7, 2007
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I'm buying through a recommended local retailer who will be building the system for me, competitively priced compared to online retailers. Back in the UK where I had all my techie friends I would have put it together myself, but I don't quite feel up to the job without backup. I guess the plus side is even with a bit of a markup compared to buying direct, it's still cheaper in the US than the UK!

I'm trying to keep in a budget here, and am currently around the limit - pushing for more graphics power now since we have TFTs with 1600x1200 native resolution and cheapy case/reasonable PSU. I figured the Enermax would be decent enough for a single graphics card, since it has two 18A 12v rails (all a bit new to me) with a total of 34A.

I've never really tried overclocking, and not sure if I would with this system, so OCability is not too important to me. The motherboard is the regular P5B as I figured I did not need any of the firewire/SLi/stuff on the more expensive versions.