Yeah rice eater i feel your pain with not know what to spend your money on.

I just built a new rig last year so im still on that opty 165@2.6ghz 2gb mem and 7900gt it runs really good.

Rice Patrol, just PM me or update this thread if its still around and ill try to be the best help i can be.

 

btw you can have RAID with IDE...


xue, PM me, I have a machine that you might be interested in.

 

Yeah thats a decent setup Rice Eater. And yeah he would want a bigger HD being that there ISN'T EVEN ONE THERE! lol :P

The only things I would probably change would be to go with a better mobo (Biostar mobos suuuuuck, at least they're better than Foxconn tho...) and maybe go with a different GPU. Maybe bump it up to more of a $100+ price range and get an 8600GT or a 2600XT.

For photo editing you'll want a nice video card and monitor for sure. I'd go with a 2000-series Radeon HD for photo editing. nvidia is the best for video games but those Radeons produce the most accurate picture, color and quality wise. Monitor wise, for photo editing especially, I'd suggest you go dual monitors. Your main monitor you'll want to be REALLY nice, but your second monitor can be as cheap as you want. The reason I suggest dual monitors is because being able to move all the tools and swatches and the history bar and everything else over to the second monitor and away from the main image is really useful. You can easily full screen your image on your main monitor and still be able to access all the tools you need on the second one.

Anyways, I'm always willing to help, lemme know.

 

lol..I wonder what happened to the hd that was on the list...oh well it was a 160 Wester Digital sata 3.0

 

If you pick your parts right, you can run Mac OS X on your PC. http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?act=idx

 

I dont think biostar mobos suck. Noramlly what makes a mobo sucks is the chipset on it. Any mobo with a via chipset wold be classified as the suck and via chipsets suck but a board with a nice intel or nforce chipset will probably be ok.

 

When picking out a motherboard, I would buy one that is very good. The reason is because if you want to upgrade later, you will not be restricted if you have a good motherboard. You might be going with a lower end processor right now but what if you decide that you need to get a more high end (like a quad core or 64-Bit) processor. In that case, you kind of stuck if you buy a motherboard that is not compatible. If you are going to be doing image stuff, you might want to seriously consider a 64-bit processor. A couple months ago I was thinking about building a new rig and it came out to around $1000 (a little over) but that was with a 64 bit quad core Pentium processor. If you are already going to spend $600-$700 on the computer, I would consider saving a bit more and building a computer with a 64-bit processor and a 4 cores. That way, in the future you won't have to worry if your computer is compatible with the program you want to run. You never know, maybe you will decide to get into video processing and a faster computer will be helpful. There is an old Mac thread on here that has some good price break downs on PCs. It would really suck to build a computer and find out a year or so down the line that its not fast enough to run the applications you need.
The one I would get is the EVGA nForce 680i SLI Motherboard. This board can support a wide range of Intel processors.