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What do you think of this setup?


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Technically speaking, it will run Vista, but......

You wanna go with a x64 setup, and you're buying a cheap motherboard with only 2 DIMM slots, and filling them with 1GB sticks (not a whole lot really, I use that much for XP). Also, the board only has 2 SATA ports, etc.

And like anonymous_user said, you're ending up with a no-name PSU, and it doesn't seem to be a great case either...

It's cheap, but you get what you pay for here.

It wouldn't cost you much extra to get a decent basic motherboard/case/PSU instead of those.

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The thing is, you're hardly going to be able to upgrade that. More RAM (for Vista x64) will eventually mean a new motherboard (4GB max), or at least throwing away your existing RAM (all banks full). A newer CPU worth upgrading to in the future will be AM2+ too, so again a new board. The newer vid cards will likely soon use PCI-E 2.0, and this only has a 8x slot even (16x, but in 8x mode). You want more than 1 HD + 1 optical drive? Too bad, only 2 SATA ports. The PSU will likely die on you, so that you'll be forced to upgrade anyways, and you just might tire of the cheap flimsy case with poor airflow too. Just saying, a worthwhile update will basically mean getting rid of almost all these parts (a waste of money)

When you count other things like a hard drive and a DVD writer, you're spending close to $400, where spending ~$100 more would make a HUGE difference in the quality/longevity/usable life of parts you're getting.

$40 would get you a PSU that's FAR better (there's tons of them, perhaps a 380W Antec Earthwatts...)

There's lots of nice boards around $80, like the GIGABYTE GA-MA770-S3 (I pretty much picked the first board I saw, no in-depth research there). It supports AM2+/AM2 CPUs (no need to throw it out with the next CPU upgrade), has a PCI-E 2.0 x16 slot (will work with new vid cards), newer chipset, 4 DIMM slots (16GB max), 4 SATA ports, Gigabit ethernet, very good sound (24bit/192KHz audio & 7.1 channels, supports BluRay codecs, etc), 6 USB2 ports at the back, 2 firewire, toslink & spdif digital audio outputs, solid caps (will last a long time), etc. There's plenty of other boards around that price, some of which have pretty good onboard video (with DVI or HDMI outputs too), and some that even do MPEG4 decoding in hardware if you want to play BluRay discs one day (look at boards based on the 780G chipset).

Case wise, perhaps an Antec 300, but again there's so much choice there...

Those few extra $s will make a HUGE difference.

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