On Mon, 21 Jun 2004 12:13:31 -0700, Mystic while doing time wrote:

I'm planning to purchase a new computer later this week (at last!), but
first I would very much like some 2nd opinions from some of the many
knowledgeable folk in this group to hopefully spot any egregious errors
I may have made before I begin plunking my money down. I'll be getting
the core of the system as a barebone from mwave.com, and then adding the
hard drive and videocard myself. (I'm not quite confident enough of my
hardware abilities to do CPU and MB installation just yet.)

Here is the system spec I'm planning on as of today:

CPU: AMD Athlon64 3000+ (socket 754)
MB: MSI K8N Neo Platinum (socket 754, NForce 3-250Gb chipset) Case:
Antec Sonata (w/TruePower 380 PSU, if I understand correctly) Video: ATI
Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB DDR 8X AGP HD: Samsung SP1614C 160GB, SATA, 8MB
buffer, 7200rpm DVD burner: Pioneer DVR-107BK 8x8 DVD-RW RAM: Kingston
512MB DDR400 PC3200 KVR400X75C3A/512 (one stick for now) FDD: Mitsumi
1.44MB
OS: MS Windows XP Pro w/SP1 (DSP/OEM)

All told, the entire system above looks like it will run me around
$1175-1200, which is just about the upper limit of my budget.

Here are the things I plan to use this machine for (sorted roughly in
the order of their importance to me):

- Software Development (for Direct3D, Windows, and web) - Games (flight
sims being the most power hungry examples) - 3D graphics rendering (in
Bryce, trueSpace, etc) - 2D graphics editing (in Paint Shop Pro) -
Multitrack digital audio recording and editing (Sonar, Wavelab) - DVD
viewing (using PowerDVD, probably) - Video editing (only infrequently,
performance is not a major concern)



The onboard audio is 7.1 Realtek alc850 which will perform a lot better
than an M-Audio and only slightly slower than an Audigy 2 ZS. It should
be more than adequate for your needs.

The same is true of the Pioneer 107 top 5 performance. If you're lucky
when the DVD/RW burns out there will be 12x dual layer multi-format
burners under $80. LG, LiteOn, Pioneer are all solid choices but I think
the LG-4082 can read DVD-RAM.
http://www.videohelp.com/dvdwriters.php

I've got burnt with a Kingston PC133-256 but after several returns I got a
stick that worked. When I add up the memory cost, not getting the
rebate (not Kingston's fault) and the (2) RMA shipping costs that
is some expensive memory. Mushkin would be better.