Choosing the right hardware IV, Conclusion

As you can read in the last installments of this series (I II & III) I was looking for some new hardware for my desktop. Since the last installment I have chosen and bought the hardware but I had not updated the blog to reflect this yet.

Choosing the right chipset for the job at hand

For first, I have very good experience with Asus as a manufacturor. At work we prefer Asus and at home I have a lot of Asus boards so the choice for a boardmanufacturor is easy. For the chipset it goed between Nvidia and Amd/Ati at the moment since they deliver the best bang for the buck featurewise. Nvidea as well as Ati would give me the features I need but the AMD boards are a little cheaper. The AMD 690G will be it, a very modern chipset, fully featured and the ability to hook it up to my tv in the future (when I buy a new tv with DVI-in). For memory I chose a pair of 1Gb Dimms which were on sale from a respectable manufacturor, Kingston. So the partlist for now comes to:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 2.0GHz HT 1MB AM2 65W Boxed
Asus M2A-VM
2x 1Gb Kingston Valueram

Other hardware

This would give me everything required to build my new desktop but I decided to also order a harddisk and a videocard since they were cheap and I had the money for it after my mum also kindly donated cash to the cause! So after looking into harddisks I chose the cheapest 250 Gb harddisk available in the shop, a Maxtor DiamondMax 21 250Gb Sata300 8Mb cache (STM3250820AS) was added along with a Asus PCI-e Radeon X550 TC 512MB to be able to use 2 screens (and if surroundview works: 3, in combination with the buildin VGA). And when the gear got delivered I noticed that the PSU I wanted to use from my old desktop did not have enough power to power the motherboard so I got a new PSU too, an Enermax 350 Watt which they had locally on sale for 30 euro.

Putting it all together

Building it all into my old case went like a dream, no problems whatsoever so now I have a new desktop to play with. Installing an operating system is the next task and will be described in a next post. All in all I am very happy with my new pc!

//Z