My NEW build, rate please. (made changes)

[Abyssalx]

ARK 6099-CA Black Steel ATX Mid-Tower Case
Western Digital Caviar 250gb
8GB DDR2 800MHz Memory
AMD Athlon 64 X2 7750 Kuma @2.7GHz
Crossfire Sapphire 4830
Antec earthwatts EA500 500w
ASRock A780GXE

did a lot more research than my last build.

 

[xthekidx]

Why crossfire on two lower end cards? Just get a good one for the price you pay for those two mediocre ones for the same performance, and then you have your second PCIEx16 slot open for xfire later, instead of having it already occupied right off the bat. I would also get a better processor and a differnet Mobo, ASRock isn't a very good brand, I like to stick with asus or gigabyte. For gaming you don't need 8gb, 4gb is plenty. Get a 320gb HDD instead, it will be faster.

 

[hotroderx]

The processor is a awesome budget processor I highly recommended it (currently running one my self at 3.1ghz).

Cross fire I don't recommend I have personal used crossfire and its pretty much useless. Unless your going to be gaming on a decent size TV I had 2x's HD4870's in crossfire on a 19inch monitor and thought something was wrong because I couldn't tell a difference between a single card vs 2 cards. So I did a little research and found out that crossfire really doesn't help tell the higher resolutions and on top of that not all games support it. So I would ditch the video cards and go with a single HD4870 very good card for less then 2 of them.

The memory is utter over kill and could harm system performance (yea I know OEM's are offering over 4 gigs of memory in desktops). The more memory you have in a system the longer it takes to address it all. Not to mention unless you plan to run Vista 64bit (not recommended by me) your not going to be able to use all that memory. OS wise I still recommend XP Sp3 It runs more stable and is faster then vista hands down.

If nothing else please ditch the motherboard its garbage. ASRock is a cheap version of asus and given back in the day asus was a awesome company. But for the past few years there quality has slipped dramatically. Out of the 6 asus motherboards I have used in the past 4 years ever single one has died in a 1 to 2 years. Which is horrible they where all different models built at different times (only reason I used asus was I was building a PC for someone and they insisted on asus ever time). My personal choice is gonna be Gigabyte ever time I have owned and built at least a dozen computers with Gigabyte boards over the past 6 years and never had a issue with one unless it was because of something I did or lighting damage (neither is the boards fault).


Case wise the case you picked isn't a bad case but unless your just set on a case I would recommend taking a look at COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UW its a nice solid looking case that to me looks extremely upscale and elegant.

Hard drive wise I cant really see a issue other then you might want to look at different brand Western Digital lately hasn't been know for there reliability.


Power supply should be plenty to run the above items I cant really see why it wouldn't its a name brand power supply you might want to double think brand thought personal I would recommend Thermaltake.


I hope this helps out and makes decisions a little easier

 

[theAnimal]

Power supply should be plenty to run the above items I cant really see why it wouldn't its a name brand power supply you might want to double think brand thought personal I would recommend Thermaltake.

Thermaltake Toughpower PSUs are good, the rest are mediocre.

 

[xthekidx]

Antec is a better brand than thermaltake, stick with the antec psu.

 

[roadrunner197069]

3 on a 10 scale.

 

[Abyssalx]

crossfiring 4830's is better fps benchmarks than 1 4870 and im buying them seperately. one now and one in the summer.

 

[Abyssalx]

Nevermind.
I swapped out the memory for 4gb kingston 800mhz
swapped video card to HIS HD4870
swapped out motherboard for a gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3
only 1 pci-e slot but it's better quality and if I get a 4870 it will be fine with only 1.

 

[xthekidx]

Go with the UD4 so you have xfire as an option.