Acceptable build? Looking for improvements.

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Limp Gawd
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Jun 6, 2003
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I'm building an computer system for my family, and this is what I've came up with. A few thing I want to notice is that I'm not going to overclock it, we live in an fairly hot area thus the big heatsink for cpu, and I already have the speakers, screen, keyboard, and mouse for the system.

So is this following build acceptable, or is there any possiable improvement or spot where i can cut a bit on price.


Revised spec below
 
I'd get a S 939, Venice core CPU and an NForce 4 Ultra motherboard, and I'm assuming that case includes a PSU so I'd get a better one because for $43 you can't even get a good PSU by itself. Stock heatsinks are usually ok and would save you some money if you get a retail pack CPU. The motherboard comes with PLENTY of cables as do HDD's. Don't bother buying any.
 
Ditch the crappy aspire psu

You can get Antec for good prices, and they're good psu's. Enermax also has some pretty cheap and good ones.

If you want, you can probably find a refurb'd dfi nf4 motherboard for around 80-90$, and then you can spend about 10$ more and get Twinsmos SP ram. That way you'll have a motherboard that will be much more reliable in your overclocks, and you'll have ram that will complement it nicely. Also, leadtek 6600gt's are very good. I'm also happy with my msi 6600gt. But the price on the chaintech you have looks pretty good, so that might outweigh the benefits of a better stock cooler for you.

[Edit:] I'm tired, and it's around 5am here, so please forgive me. I was thinking s939. Anyway, MSI's s754 boards are generally pretty good. You might want to check the motherboard/amd cpu forums for more specific info. I believe Epox is good for overclocking as well when it comes to s754. Anyway, gigabyte boards aren't generally thought well of, and usually for a pretty good reason, so that's why I'm trying to offer you alternatives.
 
Guys read his post. He is building this for hims *family* and he specifically states that he will NOT be overclocking. It sounds like he's after a budget build with good performance. I doubt he needs 939, nf4, and the costs associated with it.
 
How about the futureproofing and upgradability of going dual core in a while? 6600GT's aren't exactly budget GPU's either. They're generally as expensive or more than a 6800nu for less performance.
 
The top few items that i'm looking for at here is.

1) maxminium performance for as low of price as possiable prefers in 600-700 dollars range
2) odds of upgrades is very low, consdering my family has been using this 1ghz pentium 3 sience it has been built several years ago. So i would recokin unless the motherboards and stuff would be useable say 4-6 years into the furture the odds of them being upgradeable is low.
3) I'm not sure on the aspire PSU because its starting to rise to 800ish dollars and i'm looking for some reasonable spot to drive down the prices.
4) to repeat myself from my first post, this is not an overclocking computer.
 
The spot to go cheap on is NOT the PSU. If it dies and takes half of your components with it, where will you be then? I say you just get a Dell if you don't care much what's in it and want a good computer for 700 dollars. Get the extended warranty and if it breaks you're covered since you plan to keep it for a long time.You won't save any money building a bargain computer anyway.
 
Family don't want a dell, they say its ugly. *shungs*

So is there any spot on the spec that i can hammer down a bit price wise?
 
Revised spec

Case: AMS CF-2029 White Computer Case - Retail
$37
PSU: Antec SmartPower 2.0 SP-350 350W Power Supply - Retail
$46
Cpu: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Integrated into Chip FSB Socket 754 Processor
$146
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-K8NS ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
$66
Ram: CORSAIR ValueSelect 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM
$80
Harddrive: (2x) Western Digital Caviar SE 160GB 3.5" IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive
$83 x 2 = $166
Combo Drive: Toshiba SD-R1612 52x32x52x16 Combo Drive
$30
Video Card: CHAINTECH SA6600G Geforce 6600GT 128Mb
$156
Misc (Cable, etc): round cable, floppy disk, Arctic silver
$34

Total: $761

Dropped the zalhman heatsink and went with an retail cpu with cpu heatsink on it.

And about cpu, i'm not sure how much i can drop it, i would like it to remain in the performance range of 2800-3000+ aproximatly
 
Coolermaster Cavalier is a really nice case and comes with an ACBel PSU for 70 dollars. Very high quality. I've used several of them and they're excellent.
 
BossNoodleKaboodle said:
Coolermaster Cavalier is a really nice case and comes with an ACBel PSU for 70 dollars. Very high quality. I've used several of them and they're excellent.
Click to expand...

I looked on newegg and didn't see any cavalier that came with a PSU
 
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