The biggest tip - Don't go overboard. You dont' have to buy the Best of Everything or take on a design that is too ambitious . The beauty of computers is that you can upgrade and rebuild them over time - and the parts only get cheaper and better!


yes, for power supply, I would recommend a brand name you've heard of. Get one that is SLI rated. YOu may never do SLI, but the extra power will futur proof it to some extent.

Personally, PC Power and Cooling is my preferred brand. I've been building Personal and professional Rigs and consulting for about 10 years now, and they are the best in terms of stability and reliability.

I've only had one instance where it failed and that was when my powerlines got hit by lightning (my house is wired from the 20's and 50's - thus no grounding). And even then, the PSU took the brunt of it. I lost the mother board and CPU, but everythign else survived and was salvaged.

Also with that much RAM, you'll have to run a 64-bit OS to make use of it. 32-bit essentially tops out at 2 gb's for all practical purposes. I've not tried Vista 64-bit, but from everything I've read, it still has some serious bugs and stability issues, not to mentian an overall lack of drivers. It might be better getting XP64 and waiting for Vista to get up to speed, or for the next OS, which is due (according to MS) around 2009-2010

COOLING--
The Case - Most cases will come w/some generic fans. There are 2 types of Case fan out there: Ones that plug into the motherboard and ones that plug into the power supply. Make sure your mother board can handle the # of fans you have or use fans the use molex connectors (power supply). Air enters the case at the bottom front and leaves out the top rear. Make sure the fans are aimed in the right direction.

If you buy the RETAIL CPU, it will come with the proper fans, paste, and instructions on how to attach them. If you buy OEM (cheaper), is sometimes will not. You can buy your own fan and attach it (I've been using thermaltake for 4 years now and have been fairly satified). Just make sure, when selecting a fan, that you look up its specs to make sure it will fit on your motherboard. You'll also need to buy thermal paste (Artic silver. <-period)

You really don't need to replace the generic fans and cooling devices unless you are planning on overclocking or are going for a unique design (silent PC, for example)

sorry for spelling - Its past my bedtime and I ought to hit the sack

Speaking of Blu-ray...
I noticed you didn't mention optical drives in your OP. I personally feel Blu-ray is just too expensive at the moment to justify buying one for your new rig. I know it isn't as cool, but it might be better buying a good DVD burner and buying a Bluray drive later - once the price has come down and there's a little more selection.

Of course that a very personal decision - If you own or plan to watch a lot of Bluray movies via your computer it might be worth it.

I've personally owned Several Lite-on CD and DVD burners. They are very rugged (No rubber bands to snap- Uses gears instead)and versitile (great error correction - very good speeds!) My Lite-on DVD burner is 5 years old (doesn't even do double layer - that came out right after i bought it, lol), and I've never had a problem with it.

On a side note. I've found, that I don't do a lot of burning of DVD's or CD's. With consumer electronics becoming more advanced, I've found that I can plug everything straight into my computer or stream it through my network, or use a jump drive to move data. Other than the occasional CD for my car and some Physical Backup dics (both of which can be replaced with an IPod - or something similar), I rarely use them.

I'm glad to see Blu-Ray winning the market. I had a feeling it would as soon as I saw Disney promoting it.

I have a Lite-on combo drive and I'm very happy with it, good product.

I find I'm using my writer less and less. Now I've got eSATA and use a regular hard drive for all my external storage. File sharing is done over my LAN. With flash drives becoming standard, external storage will only get more convenient. Right now, an external hard drive is rather bulky, but backing up data at full hard drive speed is wonderful. A more compact flash drive would be even better. Heck, I may find I don't need a writer at all.

Intel boxed processors come with a heatsink/fan (HSF). It's possible to buy the OEM unit which is just the processor by itself, but the boxed product is the retail version and is more common.

I recently bought a retail E6750 and didn't like the factory HSF mounting system at all. It uses plastic push pins that require quite a bit of force to engange. You really feel like you're going to damage the motherboard installing it. If the design has not changed, I would reccomend getting a good after-market HSF, one that uses a better mounting system. I found one that uses screw down springs and a backplate. It's very easy to install and works as good if not better.

I seem to remember reading something about SLI license issues between Intel and nVidia. In any case, it's not something to be concerned about for single card configurations. It's only an issue when running multiple cards. You won't have any problem running a single 8800GT on an Intel motherboard. Personally, I'm running one on an Intel based motherboard myself.

Make sure you buy an oem copy of vista, if you do in fact go with it. They cost about 300 dollars less. Also, 4 gigs of g-skill ram (which I found better than any kind of SLI ram) costs about 100 dollars. Have fun!

yes, that's the problem w/ using more than 2gb with standard XP. It really doesn't make good use of the extra RAM. In some cases, it will see it, but It won't (can
't) use it.

Aye, not to mention stability problems with that much RAM. I would suppose that XP would recognize more DDR2 due to the nature of the memory controller (new and imporved over DDR!).

Now, I know windows will see the extra RAM, but will it make use of it? By that I mean when running an app, can you actually fill more than 2.25GB or does it top out at 2.25 and leave the rest sitting there?


Oh yeah, g00berhead - buy a floppy drive. If for whatever reason, you use sepcial drivers for your hard drive (RAID, SATA, STATA RAID - Boards w/ an Nforce chipset were a huge problem -are they still? Anyone know?), you'll need a floppy to intsall windows XP. Windows won't let you add new drivers during the install process via CD.

Alternatively, you can use Nlite and create your own XP install disc with the drivers integrated (Saves a lot of headaches - hell you can even preinstall some basic apps, like a firewall, antivirus and all the servics packs and hotfixes.)

I don't think your motherboard would have that problem, as far as I know, it only really existed with Nforce boards but, a simple floppy isn't a terrible investment to have.

By floppy drive you mean the 3.5" floppies?

I have a copy of XP pro I got for like 5 dollars from my college, I think I will stick with that. XP has not given me very much grief over the years, although sometimes has a hard time shutting down frozen programs.

Just wating on money to start buying some of my hardware >.<

Yeah I meant the 3.5 floppy

I have an original OEM xp Pro disk. When I installed it on my Motherboard (w/ an nforce 570 chipset), I needed to use a floppy drive to install the SATA/RAID drivers. This was because the generic Drivers that XP shipped with didn't work with the newer hardware, hence I needed the floppy. Otherwise, XP couldn't see my harddrive, lol.

As Far as I know this was limited to Nforce boards and its more of a one-time installing XP problem, as the XP install process only looked at the floppy drive for extra drivers.

Dystopic has a good point about grabbing an enthusiast type board. Even if your not thinking of overclocking or doing anything funky, the enthusiast boards have some features that can be really useful (Q connector, built in wifi, etc). In addition, some of them support fairly advanced integrated sound, saving you some space and $$. Especially considering Realtek and Creative have been having issues with thier products.

They also have better warranties, lol.


Good to see you too guys! I hope all is well in your lives adn that you all haven't been as busy as I have been recently, lol.

Yeah, Nlite is my hero when I do my "clean out an' reinstall the OS fest" every year or so. I wish I had known about it earlier when I first put together the computer, sigh.

[link="http://www.nliteos.com/"nLite Site"[/link]

Hey that rhymes.


nLite is a utility that can take an original XP install disk, and allows you to us it to make a new custom XP install disk.

You can add the Service Packs, Drivers, Programs, etc. You can also remove Items, services, etc from it to reduce the amount of crap added to your computer.

The process is called Slipstreaming.

It takes a little while, logistically speaking, as you need to go out, find and download what ever you want to add to your XP install (Service packs, Hotfixes, drivers).

The forum even has a list of links to addons, freeware programs that people have repackaged so that they can be slipstreamed into the XP install disk. It includes most of the mainstream freewre out there.

It nice to load up a fresh install and already have your firewall, anti-virus, and spyware in place. Not to mention they even have instruction (haven't tried it yet) to packaging DIY, so you could add in some of the lesser known programs out there.

Laslty it even will allow you to enter the critical info for the install (serial Number, name, region, etc) meaning that it can be totally automated.

For Vista Users, there is a Vista Version, called vLite.

Ps - thr program is fairly straight forward - But it does expect you to have a decent undestanding of what's going on