Please advise me about my future setup before I buy...

[Pr0crastin8r]

I've been out of the PC/OC market for awhile, making do with my good ol' P3 733. But the time has come for an upgrade. I've been snooping around various forums for awhile and reading articles and tutorials and stuff, and I think I've come up with some gear.

Buying:

AMS gTower All-aluminum mid-tower case
Abit IT7 MAX2
Crucial 512MB PC2700 DDR-RAM
P4 2.53GHz Northwood C1
Antec TruePower 550w PSU

Keeping (from my current rig):

Geforce2Ultra DDR
Western Digital 120gb w/ 8mb cache
Maxtor 60gb

Now besides all the stuff on my list, I know I still need to buy heatsinks and extra fans and whatnot, but cooling gear aside, how does the above rig sound? I do want to be able to OC that baby to 3.00GHz if possible.

I also remember reading that bumping up the FSB changes the IDE speed too and that this can corrupt hard drives, ESPECIALLY WD and Maxtor drives, which I happen to have. Can somebody please tell me if this will be an issue with the above mobo and HDs?

[Ghost68]

i would reccomend corsair xms memory... the fastest you can afford it will really help in overclocking and the warantee covers overclocking

[Top Hat Theater]

yeah, I second the Corsair recommendation. Get a stick or two of XMS3200 C2 and fly.

~THT

[Pr0crastin8r]

ok, will do. it seems that the poll that i based my decision on just tipped over from crucial to corsair anyway :)

now, do you see any other possibly conflicts? im particularly concerned about the wd/maxtor thing...

[Tismedt]

The IT7max looks like a nice board. Does it have a loccked pci/agp bus? If not look around there out there. A locked pci bus would solve any hdd corruption problems. Also go with the better memory. XMS is the hottest thing going and the warranty is great. If you are planning on using the raid to its fullest you should look into matching hard drives. [drool] mmmmmmm twin 120 se [drool]

[Pr0crastin8r]

I do actually have two 120gb se's, but one of them is in the xbox right now... i might swap and put the 60gb in there, and put the second 120gb in my comp... what benefits would there be for me, boomer consumer, to use a raid config instead of plain old ide? would that mean that i would still only have 120gb of space b/c the second hard drive would be redundant? seems like a waste to me.