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Building a new machine - Need some advice

Z

zafzo

n00b
Joined
Jan 20, 2005
Messages
15
Well I've got $3500 coming back on my tax return so I've decided to blow it on a new top of the line machine. God forbid I actually save money. It's about time anyway, my current set up is almost four years old. ewww... I know I'm looking for an Athlon 64 939 system with PCI-E. This is obviously a gaming rig for Doom 3, Everquest 2, and of course Civilization the original (it needs the power lol). Anyway, here is what I've come up with so far.

MB: Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
CPU: Athlon 64 FX53
MEM: 2GB Corsair XMS PC3200 TwinX
HD: 2 x WD Raptor 74GB SATA
DVD: Sony DVD burner
CASE: Thermaltake Tsunami
PS: Antec True Control 550
VID: Asus ATI Radeon X800 XT
SC: Audigy 2 ZS Platinum

My main questions are:

Is the FX-55 worth the extra $200 over the FX-53?

I'm not too up to date on DVD burners. Any other recommendations?

With the SLI board, should I go with an nvidia 6800 since ATI doesn't support SLI? I didn't plan on using the SLI, it just seems that it it the only 939 board out there with PCI-E.

I've always been a big fan of Antec power supplies and had good experiences with them but I've heard of some others that are pretty good as well. Zippy, Enermax, etc. Any other recs over the Antec 550?

ECC or non ECC memory? I've never really understood the difference.

Lastly, water cooling. I've been OCing for quite a few years now but have never dabbled in the water cooling arena. Can anyone recommend a good water cooling setup for the above configuration?

Basically if I'm going to blow over 3 grand I want the best. So feel free to throw some new ideas my way. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. :)
 
If you've got the cash, blow it on the FX-55. But if you'd go overbudget, it's not worth the extra money, no. Yes there is a performance increase, but it's not THAT significant.

The other thing I'd like to mention is that the NEC 3520A DVD burner is, as far as i know right now, the only 16X dvd burner on the market to be able to support DVD-DL (the minus DL's that will be coming out soon), and has excellent amounts of hacked firmware to make it perform better, and burn at higher speeds on cheaper media.

As for the video, I would take the Geforce... Sure you may not want SLI right now... but since you sound like me (keep your systems for a long time until they almost become unusable), you'll definately want that upgrade option. Why? Well, 2 years down the line, when games become taxing on your video card, you'll be able to throw in another Geforce at a fraction of the cost of today, and almost double your GPU power. So yes, I would definately swap that ATI for a GeForce 6800 GT or Ultra. Everything else looks good to me.

0.02 - Steve
 
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