Working on a 6 yr old Compaq PC has motivated me to build from scratch and this is what I have come up with. I am not a gamer, BTW.

DFI LanParty UT NF4 Ultra-D


AMD Athlon64 3000+ Venice core


Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 160gig SATA HD


xFx GeForce 6600LE video card


pqi Turbo DDR SDRAM 2x512mb


Sunbeam NUUO 550 watt PSU


RaidMax xA case


ASUS DVD/CD burner combo drive


Samsung floppy drive



I am building off this platform so that I have room for growth and improvement in the future, at the moment I just want a reliable and faster machine than what I currently have....a 697mhz Celeron w/320mb ram(Compaq)

 

looks good but I wouldn't get a Maxtor hard drive. They aren't very reliable. I used to work at best buy and the techs there would bitch all the time about Maxtor hard drives and the only hard drive that ever failed on me was a maxtor.

 

You could play most games with that system, so I'd say yes.

I'm kind of confused with the floppy disk though...rather unnecessary.

 

It's different for everyone, me and my friends have only had WD's fail on us and we have like 10 Maxtors. Anything else above those 2 should be good though.

 

I've heard that from a few people now. I have this exact same HD in my comp as we speak and have had no problems with it, it's quiet too, and the price is right. What about Seagate? Are they good drives? I know the Raptor or Barracuda is, but that's overkill for me, are their entry level HD's worthy?

Although i'm not a gamer, I'd like to dabble in it every now and then if I could.

LOL, the floppy would allow me to flash my BIOS

 

:werd: i have 3 maxtor's and have never had a problem with any of them. no matter what you say you are going to get, there are always going to be people who disagree and say that they suck..

 

true story. Although, the one thing that has me worried is the contention that Maxtor's have issues w/NF4 chipsets

 

Seagate and Western Digital make good Hard Drives.

 

:werd:

I'd get a Western Digital or a Seagate just to save yourself the hassle. My friends at best buy say they see Maxtor hard drives failing 10:1 over all other drives... they get a couple of them a week.

 

Couple issues here....WD and Seagate cost a little more than the Maxtors I could use a Maxtor, but I'd likely have to update the software and firmware in order to avoid any data corruption issues. Too much trouble, I don't like Maxtor that much.

Also, I am going to keep my current 160gig Maxtor as my secondary drive. Since it's going to be used for storage purposes only, I can plug it in as my slave IDE drive w/no worries/issues, right? I plan on getting a SATA drive for my main HD, I wonder if having the SATA as primary w/the IDE as secondary will cause any problems:nervous: