Hello everyone!
I am planning to build a PC and as I am new to it I thought I would come get some useful information. I am wanting a good gaming computer that can also do the basics, is reliable and will work well for as many years as I can get out of it. I would like to keep my budget under $1000 CDN. Here are some thing's I was looking at, and I am unsure of a video card I was going to go with NVIDIA and I haven't begun to look at towers, if anyone can give me there opinions on any of this I would greatly appreciate it.
Hey guy's thanks for the replies a friend of mine had recommended this case COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UW Black Aluminum Bezel , SECC Chassis ATXMid Tower Computer Case, anyone have any thoughts on it as well as my setup i've been looking at?
The case looks good. I would give it a try over the Antec 300. I, and others i've seen, have had problems with the quality of the audio connections on the front, other than that it's been a good case for me. With a budget of 1000$ CAD I wouldn't spent too much on the case anyways.
Is there any particular reason why you are going with a micro-ATX motherboard? The mid-size cases you've been looking at fit full size ATX motherboards perfectly and you'll likely getting better bang for your buck with a normal ATX board. I haven't built an mATX machine before so anyone please correct me if that assumption is wrong.
Easy places to cut cost without cutting much performance is getting rid of the sound card and using DDR2 ram instead of DDR3. On-board audio is fairly good nowadays unless you are looking at doing production level audio work. You'll get a lot more out of your money if you take that cash and use it on the GPU instead.
IF your not restricted to a small case, you should try to stay away from mATX mobo's. It can cause problems when it comes to upgrades in so many ways. I cheaped out on my mobo with an MSI K9M6SGM-V but when I put in a HIS IceQ 4670 Turbo vid card It took up the PCIe slot and forced me to shift my PCI wireless card. Not that big of a deal, but I then had to move my HDD sata connection from slot 1 to slot 2 on the mobo cause the vid card overlapped the first plug, now I'm limited to 1 sata without using y cables.
Then I got a new PSU, the braided cables(which are much nicer) didn't allow as much bending in the cords so I had to move my HDD up a few spaces on the rail.
Basically what I'm saying is if you don't HAVE to get an mATX board, you shouldn't. My problems were pretty small, but they were annoying. And I lost ports and connections because of the boards size.
You'll most likely be limited to the amount of devices you can have running at the same time as well.
ATX is much better, space wise, install ease wise, and upgrade wise.
As for a vid card, It depends on what you need. If you can fit it into your budget, I'd suggest the HD4870 for sure. A great card leading the pack.
$1000 is a pretty good budget, Over the last 6 months I've built mine for about $600 and I'm running AMD 5000+ x2 Black Ed. 4GB PC5400 DDR2, WD Caviar 500GB HDD, RoseWill 500W PSU, Pioneer 16x DVD-RW, 2x 80mm case fans, HIS IceQ HD4670 Turbo with a 22" Acer Monitor...
I don't see how you can't get a great computer for $1000. In Canada, The best places are usually tigerdirect or newegg.ca for prices. Keep an eye out for good barebone kits on those sites. I know barebones can sometimes be a little disappointing with some of the items included, but sometimes they are amazing deals :)
