A good friend here at work has a 5-year old tower that he wants to update with new motherboard and chipset.

His primary usage is for media. Lots of music and video manipulation, etc...

His current set up is dual processor and he wants to do that again, but hasn't kept up with the latest and greatest. I mentioned that there were some pretty savvy compgeeks here at BC and offered to solicit your collective opinions regarding the best board, video card/driver, and dual processor chipset available today for reasonable cost.

So what do you all say?

What are the best board, video card/driver, and dual processor chipset available today for the uses above at a reasonable cost?

If his works out well, I may upgrade an old desktop of mine too.

Caveats:
No proprietary all-in-one crap. It must be standardized, upgradeable stuff with plenty of expansion slots and room for cooling fans, cards, etc.

Thanks to all in advance.!!!

I'll be back tomorrow morning to check in on this thread. CIAO!!!

Gonna need a new motherboard...Quad processors $9000
http://us.st11.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.c..._1931_30441667

Video Card...Digital Voodoo. $7000
http://www.tapestockonline.com/divohdfugrca.html

Hard drive...15000RPM, 146GB $16000
http://www.bestbuybusiness.com/bbfb/...c=FRBB10706419

Memory, Gonna need a couple sticks...16GB sticks...$21000 each.
http://www.nextdaypc.com/main/produc...inid=ND0130014

Gonna need a new CD-Rom too...752GB DVD-RAM tower...$4300

Ooops, Almost forgot the processors for the MB...$4800 each
http://www.thenerds.net/index.php?pa...8&pn=399889B21
Grand total
$139,500
Oh, he did say he wanted to stay in a certain price range right?

hmmmmmm......yeah...

...gonna hafta say.....mmmmm....no thanks.

Got anything a bit more....say....affordable???

Try Tigerdirect.com. They have good prices and alot of choices. ASUS motherboards are pretty good. AMD and Pentiums are good processors, stay away from the Celerons. Voodoo and ATI make good graphic cards.

What I look for in a MB is...
PCI slots
PCI express slots
AGP ports
COM ports(for that old stuff you have laying around)
SATA/RAID ports(faster HDD'*)
IEEE/1394 ports(Firewire)
USB ports 1.1 and 2.0 backwards compatible.
Digital/Analog Audio ports(dude, gotta here that music)
10/100/1000 Ethernet port(wait until fiber optic comes to your house!)

Video Card
Most memmory you can afford
Cooling
I hear PCI Express video cards are faster than AGP??
DV input/output
Analog input/output(for tv)
Dual VGA cards are nice too(for dual screens)

Everything else is typical stuff. CD-roms, HDD'*, etc.

Stick with name brand stuff and you will be good to go.

best mainboards are intel, but are a bit expensive at times. ASUS is another good choice, and they have a good return policy.

Intel core 2 duo and amd athlon 64 are good processors to go with

hard drives- western digital'* can't be beat, although seagates are quite good as well
Look for SATA II with 16MB cache

just my $0.02

and I agree with mike1995 as far as what to look for part spec-wise

also- I've had bad luck with maxtor hard drives, and about anything aopen.

Thanks guys!

Anyone else want to pipe in with their favorites or opinions?

Shoot, I almost forgot, stay away from BioStar. I toasted 2 MB'* once.

I have a good local buddy here that is a freaking guru and builds the fastest / quietest rigs I have ever seen and he just parted out a rig abnd has the mobo / cpu remaining plus a a 500 watt P.*.

This rig was a screamer when it was assembled for a few months maybe..

Retail Aopen i975Xa-YDG motherboard
- Stock Aopen HSF included
- Remote control
- External SATA port w/ power and cables
- Optical in/out
- Gigabit LAN
- Latest BIOS with support for Merom (mobile Core 2 Duo)
- Northbridge cooler upgraded to a Thermaltake Spirit II (original included)

Retail Intel Core Duo T2400 1.83Ghz CPU overclocked to 2.73GHz 100% stable on stock voltage
- Drops down to as low as 0.95v and 800Mhz when idle
- 3-year warranty
- Technical Note: Core Duo is essentially the same as Core 2 Duo, but was only made in a mobile version and lacks SSE4 and EMT64 instructions.

This setup out-performs every e6600 C2D socket 775 rig I've built so far, even when the C2D is clock 400MHz+ higher on a i975 motherboard! I don't know why, but it'* true!


Ultra X-Finity (titanium/silver) 500-watt power supply with flex force cables

Entire rig consumes under 78 watts for general computing!!! (7600GS that was part of the bundle has been sold)

$480 + FedEx Ground, insured, Signature Required

I can get a few $$ knocked off that yet for the BC crew..

EDIT : $440 SHIPPED AND INSURED VIA FEDEX / UPS for MOBO / CPU / P.*. ..I sent this to your PM also.

Pics of when the rig was assembled..shows mobo ..N. bridge fan,etc..


http://picasaweb.google.com/MnRepoMan/DUOCORERIG


Link to price watch on the mobo below.

http://www.pricegrabber.com/p__AOpen...rch=aopen+i975

The n.bridge fan.link..

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/Produc...uctCode=371328

Link to CPU on newegg...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819111179

3DMARK 03 RESULTS when it was mated to a 7900 GTO...

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k3=5014878

3DMARK 05 with same 7900 GTO...

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=2063049

And you still won't be able to play FEAR on max settings...

I've been using Asus boards and AMD chips for about 15 years on various computers. I used to use Western Digital drives until I had 5 of them die on me when they a bit over a year old, and just out of warranty. Checked with them just in case, and it was "tough luck buddy". I've been using Maxtor since then without problems. The newer PCI express video cards would likely be a better bet over the AGP.