recommendations for a new PC?

I'm looking at getting a new desktop from the Goat

I need something quick, with plenty of ram and storage.
I haven't kept up on tech lately so I'm open to suggestions. Here's what I've considered thus far:

Motherboard: ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+
Memory: 2ea : Corsair XMS 2GB DDR 400 (TWINXP2048-3200C2) (total of 4GB)
Video: not too picky here, I'm not going to be playing any games on it yet.
Case: Coolermaster Stacker 810, Black
PSU: PC Power and Cooling 510 SLI-PFC 510W
Audio: I saw the Fatal1ty units with the drive-bay remote unit, anyone heard any good/bad on those?
Optical: 2x Plextor 16X DVD-RW
Hard Drives:
2x WD Raptor 150GB SATA
2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB SATA


Thoughts/Comments/Suggestions?

thats

i wouldnt go all out on the video card until they start releasing hdcp cards

yeah the vid card is probably the least of my worries right now.

my requirements for a vid card are pretty light right now
1920x1280x32bpp resolution support
DVI output
PCI-E

that's pretty much it.

when's AM2 supposed to hit the streets? that might effect when I buy this

what will you be doing with the machine? if gaming isn't the #1 priority, might i suggest going the route of intel? get the intel d975xbx mobo (which will be ready for intel's next gen cpu conroe later in the year) and a pentium d 920 or 930. i've got this combination now and it fucking flies.
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i'll be doing lots of multitasking....writing estimates using my estimating software, loading tons of photos into a catalog, and printing them to a PDF writer. the PDF writing is what's killing me right now, it takes 1GB of memory (i'm printing 300+ photos to the PDF writer) to print one catalog to PDF, and i'm not even using full quality photos (my camera is set to 1.8mp, as low as it will go)

as it stands right now, i hit print, then go watch TV for 30 minutes.

but i hadn't considered intel as an option, i see a Pentium D 950 is about $350, i can deal with that. the DDR2 isn't that much more, either.

holy shit!! prices have dropped on those! when i bought about a month and a half ago, the 950 was about $700, which is why i only got the 930 for $350. i'd definitely snag one of those 950's.
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If you can hold out till mid june which is only a month and a half away, two things will occure. You will have the conroe chip from intel which will spank anything out today, and second, anything out today will be much cheaper.

Just keep that in mind if you can hold off.
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Then..., if you wait just another month and a half more there will be xyz processor and the new xyz graphics card.

its a never ending cycle
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Thats the Biz sweetheart.

right, and I normally wouldnt tell you to wait, but this is a monumental increase in chip performance thats been at least 5 years comming, and its only a month and a half away.
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For with what measure you measure it will be measured to you.

but i'm sure the conroe will come with a price premium too. with the 950 being so cheap, i'd go that route right now with the 975x board, and have the option upgrade to conroe later when they get all the kinks worked out.

you've said it yourself shinare that you wouldn't buy a first gen conroe.
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but other people do need to so all the bugs are worked out by the time I get one.
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The only change I would make is the Asus mobo to an MSI mobo. Asus puts a lot on their board for the money but if it ever breaks, you'll be waiting about 6-8 weeks to get it back from RMA.

Personally I plan to stick with AMD. My Intel experiences have been not so great.
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I've owend both asus and MSI mobo's and as far as reliability, they both have been good runners without problem. However, that said,I liked the Asus mobo better just because it was more stable under overclocking conditions. If you are not into that, then I would say either is good. But thats just my personal experiance. Whatever is cheaper.
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Is AMD planning Socket 939, 754 price cuts?
by Cyril Kowaliski - 10:16 am, May 1, 2006

DailyTech has some pricing information that suggests AMD plans to cut single-core Athlon 64 and Sempron processor prices on May 15, just a week before the expected launch of Socket AM2. Allegedly, the Athlon 64 3500+ and 3200+ will go down from their current $208 and $154 prices to $185 and $135, respectively. Meanwhile, Socket 754 Sempron 3400+, 3300+, 3100+, 3000+, and 2800+ chips will reportedly go down to $95, $91, $81, $76, and $65. These Sempron prices are right in line with the site's expected pricing for Socket AM2 Semprons, so the drop would make sense on that front. If the other prices are correct, however, there could be a gap between single-core Athlon 64 chips on Socket 939 and Socket AM2. There is no word yet on whether AMD is planning any price cuts for the rest of the Socket 939 line.

Goahed Makemyda wrote: The only change I would make is the Asus mobo to an MSI mobo. Asus puts a lot on their board for the money but if it ever breaks, you'll be waiting about 6-8 weeks to get it back from RMA.

Personally I plan to stick with AMD. My Intel experiences have been not so great.

good choice.
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For with what measure you measure it will be measured to you.

just out of curiosity, i tried to configure a similar system at dell.com
and XPS with similar specs is $2904
newegg - $2517 (sans the XP Home install, though)

it might also be worth mentioning that the newegg setup had a 7600GTX and the dell had a 6800GT.

now i'm just waiting on the quote from the goat

i'm just going with 2GB of DDR2-800 and one hard drive (a 150GB raptor) for the time being, i figure that will spare me a grand on initial investment. i can get the rest from goat in a couple of weeks.

anything after revision 301 for the intel board will support conroe after a bios flash. when i purchased from mwave about a month and a half ago, i got revision 302, so anything you're buying now should be good to go.
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Get a Mac.
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I'd definitely go Intel if you are going to be doing multi-tasking with desktop apps. The P4D benchmarks spank the AMD X2 benchmarks in most areas and I can personally vouch for how fast they are. I went with the 930 and I LOOOOVE it. Before with my AMD Opteron 142 it took 18+ hours to compress a 52 gig MSSQL DB to .rar and it crippled the machine from doing anything else. With the P4D I can compress a bigger db (60 gig) in about 4 hours and still use the machine for other purposes. I didn't even "feel" the compression in my other apps.

I'd also do DDR2 just for future use and expansion capabilities. The performance difference isn't that great today, but its nice to be able to use that ram for other machines if you ever decided to upgrade to 4 gig in the future.

I'd agree with the single raptor 150. By the benchmarks I've seen, it compares in speed to 2x 73 gig in raid0. I would have done a single 150 but I already had 2x 73 gig so I added another and did raid5. Also, make sure anything on the machine is backed up since you will have no drive redundancy. You might also consider 3-4 of those 500 gig drives in Raid5 instead and using them for the system+data combined but that depends on your usage requirements. Many of the new Intel boards 965/975 have the ICH7R chipset with onboard SATA raid5. So far I've been very impressed with mine. I ended up with a spare 250 gig drive in mine for large data storage and have used it pretty often. Having seperate drives makes large data compression work run faster.