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Advice, salvaging old parts - rebuild on the CHEAP

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Ok, so my 5 year old Dell XPS600 finally died on me, PSU and MB.

I am very cash strapped and need to get back up and running, but don't feel like it would be a sound investment to dump money into replacing the fried parts on a proprietary maxed board system.

For now, because of my cash issues, I plan on using the CPU, Video card, and all Drives and Memory from the dead Dell (maybe a few of the fans, depending on the case.

Drives being really unimportant (2 sata HD, 2 IDE optical), here is the "meat" of what I have to work with -

Pentium D 840 Extreme Edition w/HyperThread (the Extreme Edition seems to be an issue with finding a new MB that is compatible)

2GB DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHZ (1x1)

Dual 256MB NVidia GeForce 7800 GTXs, running SLI

What I need is:
A Case
A Motherboard
A PSU

Budget - $300. I know, that is not a lot, but it is all I have to work with at the moment

I need a socket 775 board that will support the Pent. D 840 Extreme processor, and the SLI setup, and a firewire port.

Obviously, I am also looking for a board that will allow me to upgrade the CPU and RAM a bit (of course within the 775 family) when I have a few more $$s in the bank.

The case needs to have great airflow, and easy to work with, preferably with a bottom mount for the PSU.

For the PSU, I'd like to get 600W - 650W or better.

I'm looking for suggestions, I am pretty sure this is doable for $300, but I want some pro-opinions, it has been a long time since I have built my own.

So far I am thinking

ASUS 95N-D Motherboard (or not????)
Antec 900 Case (or not????)
and I have NO IDEA on a PSU

That board/case combo leaves me with about $100 bills left over for PSU, and whatever else I may want to push in there extra

Any suggestions, please help?

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Homebuilt system Master

Even a 320mb 8800GTS > 7800GTX SLI so perhaps you could off load the latter in the used hardware market? In fact sell those DDR2/Pentium D and start afresh on an entry level DDR3 platform as an option?

I don't know, I mean if I sell my current processor, ram and video cards, the most I could possibly squeeze out of them is maybe $200, and that is being VERY optimistic, it would probably closer to $100. So instead of $300, I have maybe 500 (again/optimistic), and will need not only a case, MB, and PSU, but also a CPU/heatsink/fan, video card, and RAM. I just don't know if what I could get with that would be much better than what I could build out with my current parts and a slow upgrade plan. Like say newer 775 processor in a few months (like a 9500) then a few months later, new video card setup...finally some more ram. I could end up with a fairly power little box over the next year - I'm not a cutting edge gamer or anything.

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Homebuilt system Master

The good news is: to reach new heights of gaming performance (w.r.t your current performance) u dun need anywhere near $500 for your project :p  $345AR and by GPU hierarchy we have
7800GTX SLI < 8800GTS < 9800GTX < GTS 250 hehe

This is *before* recovery from sale of old hardware ^^
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Well....now we are back at the drawing board. I did not even consider AMD when first researching, and there looks to be some significant savings there. I know my old GPU setup was killing me, even with my old CPU it was a slight bottleneck. I may need to reconsider my plan. :)  Great advice.

grit2112 said:
Well....now we are back at the drawing board. I did not even consider AMD when first researching, and there looks to be some significant savings there. I know my old GPU setup was killing me, even with my old CPU it was a slight bottleneck. I may need to reconsider my plan. :)  Great advice.

Hi G - My Dell XPS600 motherboard died on Cinco de Mayo. I'm currently off of a borrowed computer. I know not nearly as much as you do and was wondering if you could tell me how what you did, went, and maybe tell me instructions to take to a smart computer person who could fix me. What you said about your system sounds just like mine. I went to turn it on may 5 2011 and it would only stay on for a second, no beeps. Dell tech support had me open the case, take out each memory stick one at a time, clean them, put in one at a time, close the case, try to power up...then unplug the hard drives from the motherboard and plug them back in - result was always the same - computer came on for a couple seconds and turned off. Had early warning on May 2 when computer fans were all that would turn on; turned off computer, turned it back on, it rebooted so I did as complete of a backup as I could - 35 CD's. Thanks for any help, Meredith at sandanie at aol dot com (not sure if I can even find my way back here ) thanks again
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