What would you do different?

[Nomad84]

I will be building a new computer very soon. It will be used for poker/casinos and the related software (PT, PAHUD, etc.), homework (word processing, spreadsheets), and general web surfing. I will also use it to copy dvds and xbox games. I may also keep some movies and xbox games stored on the hard drive, along with tons of media files. None of this should be too taxing on the computer. I won't be doing any real gaming. My goals are to have a computer that will run very quickly, process large PT databases as quickly as possible, not need to be replaced or significantly upgraded for at least 3 years or so, and to run quietly so I can datamine at night in my bedroom. Budget is around $1000, but is flexible. I am pretty comfortable with most of the choices I've made so far. I'm just curious what you would recommend that I do differently. I plan to buy everything from Newegg within a couple of weeks. Here is what I have so far:


$104 Antec Sonata II case and power supply
$164 Asus A8N-SLI motherboard
$267 AMD Athlon 64 3500+ 1GHz FSB Socket 939 Processor (Venice core)
$84 Corsair ValueSelect 2x512MB Dual Channel Memory Kit (PC3200)
$61.50 Asus EAX300SE 128MB PCI-express video card
$166.50 Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 8MB cache 300GB SATA150 hard drive
$47 NEC IDE DVD Burner (dual layer, OEM)
$14 TRENDnet 802.11b/g PCI Wireless Adapter
$30 Logitech X-230 2.1 Speakers, 32 watts

Total cost: $927.97 + $36.04 S&H = $964.01



I already have 2 monitors and a keyboard and mouse. I am getting XP Pro from a friend. There is no real need for 64-bit Windows, correct?

I am pretty sure that I don't need that nice of a motherboard, so if you have other suggestions, I'm listening. I will almost certainly never have any use for SLI, but I like some of the other features of that board. Also, if I can spend an extra $50 now and know I won't have any trouble, it's worth it.

As far as video goes, I have absolutely no clue what video card I need. I am not necessarily trying to go as cheap as I can, but there isn't much sense in spending more than I need to either. I won't need to do anything more taxing than play poker on 2 monitors at 1600x1200, so what would you recommend? Also, will I be able to run 2 PCI express video cards in the future without using SLI on this motherboard? If I get 2 LCDs later on, I'd like to be able to add another similar cheap video card and just use the single DVI connection on each. I might even keep a CRT or 2 if I did that. Not sure just yet, but I'm curious what options I'll have available.

Other than video and motherboard, my only real question is about hard drives. Since I will be running PT and dealing with huge databases, would I see a significant improvement in performance if I ran 2 hard drives in RAID 0? If I did this, would it be advisable to use only these 2 drives, or should I get 2 smaller drives (in RAID 0) for PT databases and use a bigger drive for everything else? If that is the case, should I get get a 300GB main storeage drive and just get a Raptor 37GB 10k RPM drive for databases, etc.? Or is all of this just overkill?



Thanks for any input.