Ok, here's the deal. My one PC at home is starting to show its age. It's a five year old Dell 4600 that has gone through several upgrades - more memory, disk swap, new optical drive and new graphics card. The PC is used mainly for email/web surfing/Word but we do play some games like World of Warcraft and my son has started to do some video processing (simple MovieMaker stuff). I'd like to replace it with a faster, mid-range system - one that would run most games well and would be suitable for more video work (nothing too serious) - and one that I can expand/improve later on.
I looked at various sites like Dell and it looks like I would need to spend about $1500 to get what I want. So I'm thinking about assembling my own system, partly to get more for my money and partly because I'll know what is in it and how expandable it will be (and I think it would be fun to do). This is what I'm thinking of:
- Intel E8400
- 8600 GTS or 8800 GTS graphics card
- 3-4Gb RAM
- dual 320-500 Gb hard drives (I like to mirror my data having suffered thru one disk crash)
- WindowXP prof
- optical drive(s)
- no idea about motherboard and case yet
- no idea about power supply and cooling (except quiet is good)
What kind of motherboard should I consider, especially if I want to expand the system down the road to a quad core? How much power/cooling do I need for a system like this? Most importantly, have I forgotten anything? Any recommendations or advice would be appreciated. Thanks.
I looked at various sites like Dell and it looks like I would need to spend about $1500 to get what I want. So I'm thinking about assembling my own system, partly to get more for my money and partly because I'll know what is in it and how expandable it will be (and I think it would be fun to do). This is what I'm thinking of:
- Intel E8400
- 8600 GTS or 8800 GTS graphics card
- 3-4Gb RAM
- dual 320-500 Gb hard drives (I like to mirror my data having suffered thru one disk crash)
- WindowXP prof
- optical drive(s)
- no idea about motherboard and case yet
- no idea about power supply and cooling (except quiet is good)
What kind of motherboard should I consider, especially if I want to expand the system down the road to a quad core? How much power/cooling do I need for a system like this? Most importantly, have I forgotten anything? Any recommendations or advice would be appreciated. Thanks.