Building my first computer.
 

Was hoping for a little help in building my first PC. I have installed many
individual components (Disk Drives, video cards, chip upgrades, CDs) but
never an entire unit and never a power supply or mobo. Anyone know a good
web page or book I should look at, or is it all pretty straight forward,
just intall the components as directed?

Looking at the following:

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Chip
ASUS K8T800 mobo
ATI Radeon 9600 XT 128mb video
Thermaltake XaserIII V1420DU case w/480 power
Plextor 708A-BPS 8x dvd burner
Crucial 184 pin 512 mb ECC DDR PC-3200 memory (x2)
Turtle Beach 6 channel sound card
Thermalright SLK-947-U Copper heatsink for Intel and AMD

Guess my main questions are:

Will the Athlon 64 be a better choice than Athlon Barton chips? (Worth the
extra money?)
Do I have any obvious mistakes in my choices (in terms of compatability or
quality, I will be using existing hard drives and floppies and such)
I am a little vague on cooling. Will the Thermalright heatsink work with
this set up and what other cooling conciderations should I be looking into.
(the case comes with 7 cooling fans)

This is about a $1350 setup, is there a better bang for the buck out there?

I will be running mainly things like photoshop with very large photo files
(up to 350MB) and of course a few games tossed in. Running windows XP Pro
as well.

Thanks for any help.
Matt

Re: Building my first computer.
 

"auralian" <mjcarson@comcast.net> wrote in
news:0DgMb.24337$Rc4.91641@attbi_s54:

> Will the Athlon 64 be a better choice than Athlon Barton chips? (Worth
> the extra money?)

For things like Photoshop, the better memory speeds provided by the onboard
memory controller will be great.

> Do I have any obvious mistakes in my choices (in terms of
> compatability or quality, I will be using existing hard drives and
> floppies and such) I am a little vague on cooling. Will the
> Thermalright heatsink work with this set up and what other cooling
> conciderations should I be looking into. (the case comes with 7
> cooling fans)

Provided that the Thermalright heatsink is rated for an A64 3400+, it
should work fine.

> This is about a $1350 setup, is there a better bang for the buck out
> there?

Yes. Don't get the 3400+. Get the 3000+, it is the same clock speed as
the 3200+ but with only 512k of L2 cache. The price drop is more dramatic
than the extra performance.

> I will be running mainly things like photoshop with very large photo
> files (up to 350MB) and of course a few games tossed in. Running
> windows XP Pro as well.

XP Pro is good for now, if you have the ability (unknown how MS is
distributing Windows 64-bit at this time), when Win64 is released upgrade
to take advantage of the 64-bit features of the chip, which (provided Adobe
releases a 64-bit upgrade to photoshop) will greatly enhance the speed of
your processing.

Re: Building my first computer.
 

Just install the components as directed..it is pretty easy
"auralian" <mjcarson@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:0DgMb.24337$Rc4.91641@attbi_s54...
> Was hoping for a little help in building my first PC. I have installed
many
> individual components (Disk Drives, video cards, chip upgrades, CDs) but
> never an entire unit and never a power supply or mobo. Anyone know a good
> web page or book I should look at, or is it all pretty straight forward,
> just intall the components as directed?
>
> Looking at the following:
>
> AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Chip
> ASUS K8T800 mobo
> ATI Radeon 9600 XT 128mb video
> Thermaltake XaserIII V1420DU case w/480 power
> Plextor 708A-BPS 8x dvd burner
> Crucial 184 pin 512 mb ECC DDR PC-3200 memory (x2)
> Turtle Beach 6 channel sound card
> Thermalright SLK-947-U Copper heatsink for Intel and AMD
>
> Guess my main questions are:
>
> Will the Athlon 64 be a better choice than Athlon Barton chips? (Worth the
> extra money?)
> Do I have any obvious mistakes in my choices (in terms of compatability or
> quality, I will be using existing hard drives and floppies and such)
> I am a little vague on cooling. Will the Thermalright heatsink work with
> this set up and what other cooling conciderations should I be looking
into.
> (the case comes with 7 cooling fans)
>
> This is about a $1350 setup, is there a better bang for the buck out
there?
>
> I will be running mainly things like photoshop with very large photo files
> (up to 350MB) and of course a few games tossed in. Running windows XP Pro
> as well.
>
> Thanks for any help.
> Matt
>
>