I am building my first PC. Always bought before, either HP or Gateway. Never had any problems with either, but this time I wanted to build it exactly the way I want it. Here's what I am putting together.

Intel D955XBK MB
Intel Pentium D 3.2ghz
Kingston DDR2 667mhz - 4 512kb cards
Western Digital 250mb SATA 300 HD 1
Western Digital 80mb Sata 150 HD 2
Floppy
PNY Geforce 6600 Video card
Cooler Master Centurion RC532 case
Antec NeoPower 480 power supply
Front and rear 120mm fans
Sony DRU800A DVD burner
Will also add a media card reader sometime.

Have most of the parts, just waiting on the MB and CPU to arrive and the time to put it together.

Any suggestions out there other than RTFOM.

 

While your waiting go in and get all the updates for each componet both firmware and drivers. Also search, search, and search some more for any known conflicts between any of the componets and look for patches. Put all updates for firmware, drivers and patches on a cd or floppies to have them handy. You may need them on that first boot.

I'm doing just the opposite, I have always built my own, but I am currently at a point where I am going to have to pretty much start from scratch becasue I did not upgrade as I should have. So now thinking about buying a shelf model Alienware or Dell.

 

Alienware...............

First congratulations and secondly...I now hate you

 

I use to build my own...too lazy now...just click and ship them...

I'm sure you already ordered teh chip and MB but AMD is definitely worth considering.

 

You shouldn't have too many conflicts with that setup. It's when you get into high performance memory and cutting edge vid cards that stuff starts going awry. Kingston is a good solid memory. It looks like you're gonna try a RAID-0 setup with the 2 80 gigs? If so read up on how to do it with that motherboard. You'll have to load some drivers from a disk when you install that OS for that. You may need drivers anyway for the SATA drives to work during install. Depends on how old your winXP is. If it's win2k you'll need a driver disk for sure, unless your MB has some way of getting the OS to recognize the drives. If your MB doesn't support SATA 300 that drive will operate at 150 speeds.

If you're doing RAID-0 don't expect huge perfomance gains. Onboard SATA controllers generally aren't that great with RAID setups. Depends on the MB.

Make sure the heatsink is on correctly (you can potentially burn it up if not on right) and use some arctic silver 5 for the thermal compound between the heatsink and CPU if you plan to overclock it at all. If not, the OEM stuff on the heatsink will work.

Edit: oh and BTW, I hope that MB supports DDR2 memory

 

Outside their gaming models they aren't that much more expensive than Dell or anyone else if you compare apples to apples. Just suppose to be much better support and built. Thier warranty also still covers if you have added software even if you dont buy it from them. Dell nor any of the others will not.

I'm in a bit of a situation at the moment. I have an out dated desktop that I am using and need more HD storage but would also like something faster all around. So far I havent ran into any software where the speed is an obstacle... yet! But it wont be long.
The MB is starting to get some bad connections that if the case gets bumped I have to go in and push everything to hope that it sets it and makes connection again so it will boot.
My laptop took a nose dive well atlest the monitor, so it is hooked up to an external monitor which makes it a lot less portable. LOL as in it's now just a slim line desktop! I dont know anything about LCD and dont feel like learning so it works well for my wifes computer.

So thinking about the Alienware, Area 51, series laptop and then just getting a larger HD for my desktop for now. After Christmas of course.

 

That laptop is just about the same as a desktop machine without as much upgrade ability. Get youself a laptop cooler

 

Shoot most the low end laptops out now are better and faster than my desktop.

 

I don't plan on setting it up as RAID, just have 2 hard drives like I do now. One for programs and one for data I don't want to lose. I looked at setting up for RAID, but don't want to do that right now. Maybe later, although that will mean rebuilding the operating system from scratch as you have to have the RAID files on the drive before you install the operating system. I went with the 250mb drive for the main for doing stuff like burning DVD's and such. That eats up hard drive space quick. If I could have found a 40gb second hard drive with the performance of the 80gb, I probably would have went with that. Really don't need that much space, but smaller than 80gb drives are getting few and far between.
The MB does supprt SATA 300 and DDR2.

Operating system is WinXP home with SP2 just bought. My old system, I will hopefully sell to someone that isn't looking for top end, although performance wise it's not bad.

 

Yep, already ordered and shipped. Hope to get the MB and CPU tomorrow. Thought about AMD, but have seen some conflicts with some software and have had good luck with Intel setups.