have questions about building a new computer.....

There is an Intel Core 2 Quad out now but we're talking big money (upwards of a thousand for just the processor) I have seen some charts where the Core 2 Duo has out performed many chips rated at a higher speed and done it more efficitenly too....if you're an Intel-preferred customer then the Core 2 Duo would be the way to go. and invest in MEMORY...there's never too much...1 gig is probably the minimum now-a-days

Planetonline.com has great computer peripherals you can add to your computer. Buy from there. I have bought some from there when i made my own computer.

what kind of gaming are you into?

xoxide.com has some great stuff you might want to add to your computer check it out i go there when i build all mine.

in my opinion, the 480 Gb hard drive; you'd probably better off getting several smaller HD's and RAID'ing them if you are concerned about performance, because looking at benchmark speeds and whatnot alot of those super huge hard drives have less then desirable seek times. Not to say they don't have good buffers, but in my opinion 6 80's in RAID 3 would be a better solution... and if you really wanted to go for extreme overkill performance, 24 20 Gb SATA's in either RAID 5 or RAID 100 (if read speed and data surviveability are more important then write speed) for the board, get either SATA or Serial SCSI for the drive interface. probably SATA, but if you want to have alot of devices Serial SCSI (note, you can use the much cheaper SATA drives with a Serial SCSI board and cables, but being Serial SCSI you have a device cap of some ungodly high number, rather then... 4 (plus floppy)). as for processors, I'd recommened that you reconsider dual processor boards; and get two dual core 64 bit AMD processors. AMD makes a better chose for any multi-processor board cause it allows for a higher connection speed between the two (or more) processors. And further, I'd recommend that you get two dual cores instead of 1 quad core the reason is that the cores of a multi-core do not have the same level of independence of each other as multiple processors do.

Iv'e been doing some studying, I read that the Intel core 2 extreme quad prosessor config. is the most powerful on the market. but the only bad thing is that motherboards that have more than one core 2 extreme socket are extremly rare & pricy, & often custom made.

the core2 conroe x6800 runs at 2.93GHz benchmarks faster than any of the AMD dual cores in every program tested, and runs cooler than any intel CPU has run since celeron 333's, the advantage with AMD dual core CPU's is the price and the way they handle memory,

but since price is no object why not go all out get the new intel quad core, all 4 cores run at 2.66GHz you can use the ASUS P5W DH with either of the intel chips and while it is not the most expensive MB I have used it several times and found it to be stable and easy to work with while still having all the bells and whistles one would want on a MB

then you have to make the choice of video card/cards, RAM, and since price isn't an option blu ray or DVD burner (OK now I am dreaming) oh and hard drives whether to drop the money on raptors or just fill it to overflow with nice SATA 3.0 500's, RAID mirror or stripe or mirror and stripe so many variables and so many opinions and they just get more confusing

 

 

I prefer AMD processors. The AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Windsor 2.6GHz is a good choice. Also what helped me when I first tried to build a computer was newegg.com . Just read the reviews and you can see what is best for you.