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Building a New Computer....No Idea Where to Start

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Whats up everybody....I just got home from my wondrous experiences at bootcamp and AIT and I realized that my computer is a POS and i need something more modern and new. I used to research computers all the time and I built mine way back in 2002....now i dont know the first thing about all this new stuff. I just need to be pointed in the right direction research wise and I used to want an AMD since my last was intel but i guess their quad cores are the way to go. Same with ATI, back when i built my computer they had the image quality so i would like to stay with them but I hear nVidia's pretty good now. Price range is around 2000.....without monitor. Unless there's a huge awesome widescreen thats cheap. Water cooling is a must, I want it to be quiet and I had so many fans in my case last time that i had to replace like 3 of them. Not to mention you could hear it anywhere in the house.

Thanks in advance.

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MODERN HOMEBREW RULES:

1) Every kit is worse than the one you build a week later
2) Every power-supply is too big - until you get a new XXXXX
3) Every cooler is noisy ... every improved new cooler is bigger
4) AMD will NOT do-it-right the 1st time ... ever.

Carry on without fear.

nss
*****

OK i will help you with what i can i normaly don't make list of parts for people but i will help you out.

First you will need a case the way your talking about your build you should go with a full tower case

Thermaltake Armor Series VA8000BWS Black Aluminum / Steel ATX Full Tower Computer Case
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Next you will need a motherboard if you are going for crossfire go with a X48 board but if you go single card go P45 (theses are intel chipsets i don't do AMD when it comes to processors)

X48 board
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

P45 bohttp://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

GPU go with ATI in this department they are the leaders

go with a 4870 for you
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

CPU (duo core for gaming)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

PSU
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

CPU cooler
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Memory 4gb the brands are corsair, Mushkin, G.Skill

I think that is everything

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thx for the help so far and lol sorry its gonna be used for gaming mostly and to get me through the rest of school. Thanks for the help. How much of a benefit is water cooling gonna get me? And are quad cores and crossfire worth the price?

SNeaKyTiKi said:
I hear nVidia's pretty good now.
Not any more. ATI is the king right now. All Nvidia G84, G86, G92, G96 and most of their mobile laptop chips have a defect in them. This basically covers there whole line up of cards for the past year plus what they are currently selling right now. Geforce 8400, 8600, 8800, 9600, 9800

The soder material between Nvidia's chips and their cards are substandard and as a result becomes brittle and breaks when heated and cooled repeatedly. It is more prone in laptops because the peak temps are higher but now reports of failures are coming in from their desktop cards.

Nvidia lost over $200 million dollars last quarter just to pay for repairs for their laptop chips alone.

Here is the latest story. I would not touch Nvidia at all right now.

Nvidia G92s and G94 reportedly failing
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/08/12/...
Quote:
It seems that four board partners are seeing G92 and G94 chips going bad in the field at high rates. If you know what failures look like statistically, they follow a Poisson distribution, aka a bell curve. The failures start out small, and ramp up quickly - very quickly. If you know what you are looking for, you can catch the signs early on. From the sound of the backchannel grumblings, the failures have been flagged already, and NV isn't playing nice with their partners.
The best bang for your buck these days with outstanding performance is the ATI Radeon HD4850. Most ATI 4850 cards sell around $170.

I can bull**** on the G92 chips, most gamers have them and haven't had a problem. My G94 has held up to high heat and load pretty good, too. The G84 and G86 are official. The other reports comes from the Inquirer *snort*. But yeah, ATI is slightly ahead right now, for the last couple months. And definitely go Intel.

themyrmidon said:
I can bull**** on the G92 chips, most gamers have them and haven't had a problem. My G94 has held up to high heat and load pretty good, too. The G84 and G86 are official. The other reports comes from the Inquirer *snort*. But yeah, ATI is slightly ahead right now, for the last couple months. And definitely go Intel.
Most G92 gamers probably are fine. This defect does not mean that 100% of them will die. It is just a higher than average fail rate over time.

However I still would not buy Nvidia. This issue was suppose to be isoloated just to Nvidia notebook chips as of 2 months ago. A month ago it is revealed that the G84 and 86 desktop chips have the same defect. And just this month there are reports that the G92s and G94s are bad.

If I was in the market for a video card I would not want to risk getting a G92 or G94 chip to find out a month later that they got "Officially" added to the list of bad chips too.

SNeaKyTiKi said:
thx for the help so far and lol sorry its gonna be used for gaming mostly and to get me through the rest of school. Thanks for the help. How much of a benefit is water cooling gonna get me? And are quad cores and crossfire worth the price?


*WARNING: Wall of text ahead*

There are two schools of thought for both the quad vs dual core issue and the single or dual GPU issue.

As far and the quad vs dual core issue, if you want the best performance in games for the immediate future (RTS seems to be the exception) then you want to go with a fast dual core processor. But it's only a matter of time before more games start taking advantage of quad core architecture, so if you'd rather sacrifice some performance now for future benefits you'll want to go with a quad core setup. If you do heavy multitasking, like video editing, quad core is the only way to go.

As for a crossfire or a single GPU setup, the only way crossfire is obviously worth it (assuming you're looking for pure performance, not price/performance) is if you're buying two top-of-the-line cards. In almost all circumstances, a single great card is better than two very good cards (crossfire doesn't scale 1:1 and sli scales even worse). So unless the dual-card setup can reach performance levels not attainable by a single card, your money is more well spent on a single card setup. Pretty much everyone will agree on that.

The other thing to consider is your future upgrade path, and this is where the disagreement happens. Some people believe that getting a single great card now with a crossfire/sli capable MoBo will give them a cheap upgrade path in the not so distant future when they can throw a second card in after the price has dropped. The other side believes that by the time you're ready for that second card it will be economically feasible to just buy a single new card that will outperform the two older cards. Personally I'm in the single-card camp, but neither side really know what the real answer is.
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