Buying vs Building PC Computers

[Passacaglia]

Originally Posted by Thomkal

Pass,

What research have you done on the Radeon 5450? In my continual search to get a new computer, I was looking at the Radeon 5450 until I researched it at places like Tom's Hardware. Apparantly that card is good for things like home video and graphic editting, but not very good at all for gaming. So might not be a good card if your primary use will be gaming.

Not a whole lot -- I just looked at the Micro Center web site, and it seemed like the best thing for the money there. I don't do very intense gaming, so I didn't need any kind of amazing graphics card -- I don't do anything really arcade-y, so I'm just looking for something to make Civilization look nice and to conserve memory. I'll see how it goes.

I got the stuff last night, and put everything together to the best of my ability today, but nothing happens when I turn it on. I tested the power supply, and that works fine, but when I hook it up to the motherboard, I can't get it to work. If I can't think of anything by tomorrow, I'll give Gigabyte a call.

As for what I ended up with:

Antec Three Hundred ATX Case -- $50
Intel i7 930 -- $200
Ocztech 6GB kit DDR3 1600 DIMM -- $110
Thermaltake 600W TR2 ATX power supply - $70
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R ATX 1366 -- $220
Gigabyte HD 5450 1GB D3 PCIE2.1 -- $70
Samsung 22X DVDRW Sata -- $20
Sansoem SAM 500GB 7200RPM Sata -- 2 at $30 each

[cartman]

Originally Posted by cartman

I'd go for Windows 7, if at all possible.

I'm not building a new computer, but doing a bit of a tech refresh/upgrade. I'm putting in a 64GB SSD as my boot drive, going from 2GB to 8GB of RAM, and installing Windows 7 64-bit.

Finished this over the weekend, and I'm happy with the results. Took some finagling to move my User profiles and ProgramData directories off of the boot drive, as well as some tweaking to my BIOS settings to have the motherboard be stable with 4 sticks of RAM installed, but the effort was worth it. The machine is running much better now.