Building A Computer For School

do you need/want video in? If so radeon 9800 all in wonder would be a good choice, almost every card now adays has dual monitor, if you want it buy it. CRT will always have true colors more than lcd and they are less expensive and better quality, but if space is an issue get lcd.

[QUOTE=redeye]do you need/want video in? If so radeon 9800 all in wonder would be a good choice, almost every card now adays has dual monitor, if you want it buy it. CRT will always have true colors more than lcd and they are less expensive and better quality, but if space is an issue get lcd.[/QUOTE]

Nah, go Plasma or DHTV :P

DVDRW
CDRW
XP Professional

A DVDRW will also do CD... so you don't need both..

As for XP pro... it cost a LOT more than the home edition... I work in design with the home edditon and I never had any problems...

If you don't plan on running iis on your XP OS, then Home and Pro don't have too many differences that would affect you as a user, they are mostly on the company level where these differences show up. If you were to adminstrate a bunch of XP Home machines you would shoot your boss for not buying XP Pro.

But if you do plan to experiment with web development and can afford the extra I would go with Pro. I am not sure how well Apache installs on home? anyone? But Home was not meant to have web server services running on it.

Well in time i would like to learn MySQL and PHP but that probably won't be for a bit and I do plan on buying web space, but to practise and learn on my own system would be nice. As for video in it is something that I really do want to have as I will be working with premier and I own an older video cam and would like to play around with the vids in premier.

a cheap firewire card (if you're shooting on dv) is all you'd need to take video into premiere. if you're not on dv you may need an all-in-wonder card as was mentioned. for editing check out vegas too if you can, stronger app than premiere on the pc according to, well, everything i've ever seen

as far as cpu i'd go athlon 64 personally, if for no other reason than because its simply a newer architecture. i've heard fantastic things from people running athlon 64's with 3d apps. and a gig of RAM will do you for a while, and most RAM is DDR now (unless you're buying for an older machine).

on sound card you can get an audigy 2 zs for under $100, closer to $65 as i skim ads on pricewatch. for that price i can't see not getting one, if nothing else the additional panel looks cool on the front of your box ;)

chris

does it matter who makes the RAM should I buy only certain brands?

Stick with known companies, like Kingston or Corsair. You can go with cheaper no name brand RAM, but your chances of it going bad are higher. Detecting if you have bad ram is a pain as you usually don't know that is what is causing your PC to perform horribly.

Which type of motherboard would be best? By this I mean what manufacturer of a AMD 64bit motherboard?

I say go for this combination as your core components. Search the net for "64bit motherboard review" if your looking for the best 64 bit board though. Do that with everything, reviews, reviews, reviews.....


Motherboard Asus P4C800-E Deluxe
Cpu Pentium 4 800fsb
Memory Corsair TWINX1024RE-3200LL (1gig)
Main HDD SCSI Ultrastar Piranha 36Z15 18 gig
SCSI Card AHA-2940U2W
Power Supply TRUE550 EPS12V <- ANTEC