Graphics and Gaming PC project

[ideas]

Hi, everyone, am planning on building a Power PC for a fren but he asked me wats the best parts for him to buy?

1. so first of all am thinking that he should hav RAID

.... but which raid settings is the best for performance & which SATA HDD should we get?

2. then am thinking he should hav at least 1-2GB of memory

.... but what brand would u recommend plus Tight Timings vs High Clock Frequencies?

3. then here comes the motherboard

... am thinking Asus, Gigabyte, DFI or Foxconn?

( supportin DDR2 667 up to 800 or better yet a DDR3 )

4. Yes, here comes the juice "CPU" and are these Sever boards & cpu compatible with all these games?

.... should i use

Dual-Core Intel® Xeon Woodcrest OR Intel Conroe 2.67 up

OR

Opteron with L3 cache OR AM2

5. Yeh then he said he wanted a All in one Card to watch CATV and play Games

... so wats a Good All-in-one Capture & Gaming Card?

6. then a LCD monitor 19"-20" under $380

... reccomend one

7. woa... the the Power Supply 500Watt up -$150 max

..... so wat PSU would u recommend

8. Well about the DVD burner i would go for a Plexter

... wat do u think?

[ripken204]

1.raid doesnt rly help much at all unless ur in a server development. so unless he know the risks of it and the pain in the butt of it, then he can do it. does he want a raptor? or a large hdd?

2.2gigs or ram is a for sure. if you go amd then get high frequencies, if you go intel then get tight timings

3.for amd get am2 and the dfi board, but its not out yet...

4.for amd, wait until the opterons come to am2 or until 65nm processors come for am2. but if u want intel then a conroe would be a good choice. the conroe is expensive but is worth it, beating every amd processor out there.

5.you do not want an all in one card. get a good video card such as a 7900gt or an x1800/x1900. and then you would want to get a tv tuner such as one by hauppauge.

6.http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Order=REVIEWS&Page=1&N=2010190020+1309821317+1109909237&Submit=ENE&Nty=1&Subcategory=20

viewsonic seems to be a great brand. i personally have the samsung 940b and its great, no ghosting.

7.ocz GameXStream 600w

8.plextor is just way overpriced. go for a nec 3550a.

so how much are u planning to spend on this and where are u buying it from? is this in USD?

[SupaFly-TNT]

All good suggestions, but on the Video Card thing, you can get a X1900 AIW from ATI so if you want the combo card that should do well for your friend.

Only thing that may trip you up is if you want HD TV support, then you should get a regular GFX card and then add on the HD TV tuner, still a bit pricey, but your friend appears to have a high budget.

[Aegis]

How much does he want to spend? By graphics do you mean Photoshop and 3D work? If he plans on going the Woodcrest route, make sure to get two Woodcrests (quad-core) as that's the only real benefit of a Woodcrest verses Conroe. They also have a higher bus speed (Woodcrest has 1333MHz compared to 1066 for Conroe). If he does a lot of professional work, then I would really recommend getting two Woodcrests as opposed to getting a Conroe. Reason for this is because most professional apps already do support 4 threads, and the upcoming Adobe CS3 suite will add multithread support for Adobe programs. Games are also moving beyond dual-threads, so he'd be future-proof for a while.