Suggestions for PC build

[sandman_1]

Eventually going to build a PC for my Dad and going to reuse some old parts of mine for it to save some money.

What I have:

4GB RAM DDR2 1GB sticks
Nvidia 7900GT
Antec Truepower Trio 550watt
ATX Case

I guess what I need:

Motherboard (With on board sound preferably)
HDD
CPU
DVD Burner

He doesn't need anything fancy as he won't be gaming or anything intensive like that. Need a motherboard, a good one, with 4 mem slots and Intel CPU. Like to keep everything around the $200 range.

[Artemis]

Eventually going to build a PC for my Dad and going to reuse some old parts of mine for it to save some money.

What I have:

4GB RAM DDR2 1GB sticks
Nvidia 7900GT
Antec Truepower Trio 550watt
ATX Case

I guess what I need:

Motherboard (With on board sound preferably)
HDD
CPU
DVD Burner

He doesn't need anything fancy as he won't be gaming or anything intensive like that. Need a motherboard, a good one, with 4 mem slots and Intel CPU. Like to keep everything around the $200 range.

By reusing the RAM you are severely limiting your choices, I don't believe you will get what you want for that price unless you look on the secondhand market, maybe craigslist perhaps ?

[sandman_1]

That sucks, I got those sticks for free.


Without the RAM, what would you suggest?

[Artemis]

A bigger budget.

[Skiz]

That sucks, I got those sticks for free.

Without the RAM, what would you suggest?

The RAM is the cheapest part of the build; it's one of the last items of hardware you should should consider.

Alternatively, for cheap builds/parts, Craigslist is a great place to start.

[mjmacky]

Out of curiosity why are you limiting yourself to Intel CPUs? Are you saying you already have an Intel CPU, or you want a new one with the board?

[clocker]

I would chose Intel over AMD without hesitation.
If you ignore the CPUs themselves, going Intel gives you access to better motherboard options...the ICH series storage controllers are worth it by themselves.

As I see it Sandman, you have two choices, one of which fits your budget but is labor intensive, the other costs more upfront but has less after-care.

The cheap option requires a supply of used machines that you Frankenstein into a serviceable PC and then upgrade/repair as desired/necessary.
The folks I know who do this are currently sitting in the Q6600 range of chips with a couple gigs of DDR2. This level of OEM usually accepts SATA although many times only for the HDDs, the opticals will still be PATA (so there are a limited number of SATA ports).
If you can cram enough RAM into one of these, they will run Win7 just fine, I no longer consider XP a viable option.

Because the machine is used there is the inevitable risk of component failure and the canny advocate of this approach is always looking for better castoffs to incorporate, so it takes some work to keep going.

The second option would be increasing the budget, buy all new and turn the user out on their own like the OEMs do.
Reliability is better and your postbuild support will probably amount to little more than the misplaced icon or unopenable attachment.

I would figure $500-700 as a reasonable range to build a new PC (not including software).

[mjmacky]

I could price out a solid system for you for under $400, everything brand new, quality, and sure to be performing beyond what it's really needed for (doesn't include monitor). Even cheaper if you want to reuse your case and power supply (I already assumed you would reuse graphics).

[sandman_1]

@macky

I am always had Intel CPU's. I guess it is just a preference.


@clocker

Yea I don't mind building from a used machine. He doesn't need anything fancy and he is currently retired so that is why I need to keep it somewhat cheap. He gave me 2 old PC's of his, pretty old ones. None of them even have DVD burners and one had a DVD ROM drive and both probably have AGP slots and stereo sound cards. I can reuse the cases even if they are retro. He won't care about that though. My old 7900GT is more than enough for his needs as would be the 550w power supply.

@Skiz

Didn't think about Craigslist. I will check that out, thanks.

[Artemis]

@macky

I am always had Intel CPU's. I guess it is just a preference.


@clocker

Yea I don't mind building from a used machine. He doesn't need anything fancy and he is currently retired so that is why I need to keep it somewhat cheap. He gave me 2 old PC's of his, pretty old ones. None of them even have DVD burners and one had a DVD ROM drive and both probably have AGP slots and stereo sound cards. I can reuse the cases even if they are retro. He won't care about that though. My old 7900GT is more than enough for his needs as would be the 550w power supply.

@Skiz

Didn't think about Craigslist. I will check that out, thanks.

Your 7900GT is a DirectX 9 card, if you are going to use Win7 as the OS for this build this is the minimum, and in my experience using an older DirectX 9 card results in a 'blocky' desktop with reduced performance compared to even a relatively cheap DirectX 10 card.

I don't mean to rain on your parade this is just my experience, also remember that earlier than 8xxx series NVidia cards don't support PureVideoHD so the newer video codecs are not decoded by the graphics card, which once again will result in reduced performance with video files.

[sandman_1]

Blocky? Not even close. I had the 7900GT running Windows 7 for the longest before I got my GTX260. It ran Windows 7 on my 24" monitor at 1920x1200x32 without even sweating and with all the bells and whistles on. Besides this isn't a gaming build. My dad will be browsing the Internet, checking email, word processing, and ect., hardly even pushing the 7900GT. It did do DXVA so it did decode through the graphics card in mpc-hc. Easily did 1080p Bluray just fine.

[Artemis]

Blocky? Not even close. I had the 7900GT running Windows 7 for the longest before I got my GTX260. It ran Windows 7 on my 24" monitor at 1920x1200x32 without even sweating and with all the bells and whistles on. Besides this isn't a gaming build. My dad will be browsing the Internet, checking email, word processing, and ect., hardly even pushing the 7900GT. It did do DXVA so it did decode through the graphics card in mpc-hc. Easily did 1080p Bluray just fine.

I had a 7950GT which I used to run that I sold to a friend ( I never ran the card myself under Windows 7). He later used it in an HTPC build, under Windows 7 running on a Samsung LCD 40" TV the output was blocky even compared to an 8500GT and performed lower with .mkv files. Under Linux the card ran extremely well though (using XBMC as the frontend in both instances).
If it is just for a standard internet browsing PC it will be more than adequate though, with the caveat that those addictive little flash games require DirectX 10 for hardware acceleration.

[mjmacky]

The "blockiness" you see is when you use DXVA hardware acceleration on non compatible files. If you were to use pure software decoding (like CoreAVC or ffmpeg) then you wouldn't see those blocks, regardless of your video card.