by KoHC on Wed Jul 03, 2002 7:36 am
It's better to wait another month before you start building your machine. Nev video card from ATI (R300) will hit the market soon. Even if you don't like ATI cards the overall price for video card should drop.
Few video cards I would recommand: nVidia GeForce 4 lines (no MX, they suck), GeForce 3 if you can find those very cheap. ATI R300 or RV250 (when it come out). Or Radeon 8500 when R300 comes out. If you don't like overclocking, make sure you pick retail package of ATI cards made by ATI. OEM and third-party cards normally run slower. TV-Out will be great if you're thinking of playing on your TV. Most video cards now offers TV-Out, so it shouldn't be a problem.
Big hard drive will be good. Especially the price differences between large hard drive and smaller ones isn't much. 120GB seems to have best price/size ratio now. Stick with major brand (IBM, Western Digital, SeaGate, Maxtor) and 7200RPM or faster.
256MB of RAM should give you enough memory, 512MB will be good too. Make sure you get CL2 instead of CL2.5 (DDR). I recommand you get Crucial's Micron memory or Samsung. Both 2700DDR has very nice performance.
Another thing, dual channel DDR motherboard should be out soon as well. Which will benifit greatly for P4 CPUs. But I wouldn't expect those boards hit the market before October.
AMD XP CPUs are nice, for $85 you can pick up XP 1800+, not a bad deeal. Keep in mind tho, XP1800+ is only 1.53GHz. It is faster for today's application, but not too sure how it will perform with tomorrow's programs.
P4 1.6a is great for overclockers. Almost guarentee 2.1GHz if you're willing to overclock a bit. However, if you want P4 1.6a you better act quick because Intel is discontinue this CPU soon.
Keep in mind that no computer is "future proof", so just buy whatever you can affore. Both Intel and AMD CPU are nice choice for now, so choose whichever you like.