Will this be a decent system?

Will this be a decent system?

I just ordered a bunch of parts today and want to see if anyone saw any glaring mistakes that I might have made. First of all I want to say that I am not interested in overclocking. I did the overclocking thing back when overclocking a celeron 300 to 450 was the rage. Actually it goes back to when I overclocked my 486 sx 25 to a sx33 but I don't think it was called overclocking back then. My first priority is stability. I intend to run my computer 24 hours a day seven days a week. Anyway here is what I bought, Let me know if anybody sees anything that is off.

I bought an Athlon XP 2100 retail chip ($10 more than the oem). I chose this over the oem chip because the oem chip came with a 30 to 60 day warranty and the retail version came with a three year warranty. I don't know if changing the heat sink to a better one later on will void the warranty or not. By the way, is the stock retail fan noisy or not? The motherboard I selected is an Asus A7V333. It's supposed to be a stable, decent performing motherboard. I've never had an Asus board before but have heard they do well. The board comes with raid capability but initially I will run only one drive which is an IBM 60GB ATA100 I bought a few months ago. The ram I purchased is two pieces of Crucial/Micron 512MB pc 2700 (333). I know the Athlon 2100 is a 266 bus but I bought the pc 2700 so when the 2800xp...3000 xp's come down to $85 next Thanksgiving, I won't have to be upgrading my ram. This was my thinking anyway... I know the hot ticket then will be a 4.0ghz with 800 mhz memory but somebody else can play that expensive game.

The case I bought is a full tower (ANTEC 1200) and a PC Power and Cooling Silencer 400 watt power supply. Hopefully these two items will last through several upgrades. I have a Lite-On 16x DVD player that I got free on Black Friday and a Pacific Digital 48x12x48 cd burner I also got on Black Friday for $19. I'm scavenging my U.S. Robotics 56K modem from my present system. I don't think modems have changed much in the past couple of years but somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

I failed to mention a video card. I am leaning toward buying a GeForce TI 4200 128mb but haven't quite decided yet. Let me know if you have any suggestions. I am also planning to run Windows 2000. What will I be using this machine for you ask? Mainly internet, but I am also wanting to play a few games. I may even do a little bit of video editing maybe once or twice a year.

Sorry this is such a long post especially since it's my first. I'm open to any ideas anybody might have. Thanks.

Sounds like a good system. I would have recommended a better video card, but since you don't play games much, it will be quite sufficient. Of course, with a system like that, it's a shame it doesn't have a faster vid card ;P. No really, it doesn't sound like you need a better vid card.

good choices. if you dont play games much i think ATI cards are supposed to have better 2d image quality and stuff so a 8500Le or 9500 Pro would be better than a geforce i think, great for games too though.

Welcome to the OC forums! Stay awhile, why don't ya?

a ti4200 will run any game out there at full frame as long as you dont crank up all the framerate killing settings (4x AA, 1600x1200) in the newer games.

Just you make sure you don't get a "Winmodem." I don't know if they sell those anymore, but they use CPU cycles instead of relying on their own built-in processor, slowing the entire system down.

You might want to consider getting a new harddrive, as I suspect you have one of the IBM drives (IBM 60GXP) that was prone to failure.

Your box looks very strong otherwise. You might want to consider getting a top of the line heatsink, such as a Alpha 8045, so you can put a quiet 80mm fan on it. This will increase stability, as well as decrease the noise the box will put out. You might want to check out the sound/ video card forum and take a took at the "What is the best ti4200" poll before you make your decision on your video card.

Good luck!

I have the XP2000 Chip running on the Stock Heat Sink and Fan...the Fan is alot quiter than my orginal Thunderbird 1.4 Fan that let everyone know I had cut on my computer...

O yea..grab some ASIII...I ran prime with stock everything for about 8 hrs the first time I put everything on and the highest temps got were 55C...some say this is hot..but I thought it was decent being stock...now that the ASIII has settled..i'm 43C idle and 52C full..

I will be upgrading heatsinks and to a better quiter fan..but you can live with the stock in the beginning