Need hardware suggestons (on a tight budget)

My Dell has finally shown its true colors, so I'm going to take the major components and move them into a new rig.

I need a motherboard with DDR2 and a PCI-E slot. Will also need a decent PSU (450+), case, and heatsink (to cool a 3.4ghz LGA775 P4 550). I've been out of the loop for over a year, so I'm begging you for some help in saving me more grief in compatibility issues, etc. Simple and cheap!

I guess I'm going to compusa today and will figure something out.

Don't buy brick and mortat retail you'll just pay too much. Buy from NewEgg or some other reputable online retailer listen in the Vendor Discussion Forums!!!

Pinky, for a budget, you will be hard pressed to do better that servercase.com.

http://www.servercase.com/miva/miva...v+Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=SC&Category_Code=PCC

I us the CK01F myself. For $35 it is pretty close to the big antec/chieftec that lots of people get for twice the cash.

Well, thanks for the suggestion(s), but it's too late. In general I prefer saving a few bucks online, but hardware is cheaper than its ever been - retail isn't that bad on my wallet.

Installed and working from Compussr (I had to haggle with the manager to get the online price for the motherboard ):

MSI 915G ($109 with onboard raid, so I guess the adaptec pci card is heading for the classifieds)
Generic black Compusa case ($30)
Zalman 7000B AlCU heatsink ($39.95 plus $5 for the 775 socket adapter)
Maddog 450W PSU ($39.95 after a $30 rebate)

Cruising error free through a windows install for the first time in a day. Hopefully I don't get any funky errors.

*points at General Hardware*

How'd it go? Things all hunky dory?

9mmCensor said:

Things all hunky dory?

Click to expand...

Yup, smooth as silk. Looks like the SATA drive may be dead, can't get to to format but bios does see it. I heard it may be the Intel sata chipset and the Maxtor, so I'm going to see if I can find someone with another board to see if it formats and sell it.