New Intel System - advice needed

[duble]

I will be building my new PC very soon, I want to buy components in the next 2 or 3 weeks. I have been trying to decide which Mobo and CPU to get. Below is a shortlist of the components i'm looking at...any advise or recommendations would help alot. I'm looking at getting a 945 board, makes it easy to upgrade to a D/core when the price is right (and when HT is standard on all chips) and I can use the P4 CPU's until then - unless ofcourse the 820 will perform better - if so i'll get it str8 away. I will use the PC for - general office apps, multi tasking, encoding (video, mp3 and hi fi audio), internet, games (i'm not trying to build a state of the art gamer machine, just something to play the latest with decent performance), some programming and webdesign, image editing. BTW - I am not interested in SLI. Thanks.

Case

Antec TX1088AMG Metallic Grey SOHO Tower Case with 480W TP2

Motherboard

ABIT AL8 (Intel P4) i945P P4-LGA775 DDR-II Motherboard with PCI-Ex, Audio, Serial ATA-II, RAID, Firewire & GBit LAN
or
Asus P5LD2 (Intel P4) i945P Dual Core P4-LGA775 DDRII Motherboard with PCI-Ex16, Audio, Serial ATA-II, RAID & GBit LAN
or
Gigabyte GA-8I945GMF (Intel P4) i945G Dual Core P4-LGA775 DDRII Motherboard with Video, PCI-Ex16, Audio, Serial ATA-II, Firewire & GBit LAN

CPU

Intel Pentium 4, 640 (3.2Ghz) Prescott Processor, Socket LGA775 with 800MHz FSB, 0.09u & 2MB Cache
or
Intel Pentium D 820 (2.8Ghz) Dual-Core Processor, Socket LGA775 with 800MHz FSB & 2x1MB Cache

RAM

Corsair 1GB VS1024MBKIT533D2 DDR2 PC4200 Dual Channel Kit (2x512MB, 533Mhz) Value Select Series

Hard Drive

Western Digital WD2000JD 200GB 7200rpm SATA 150 Hard Drive with 8MB Cache (3 Year Warranty)
or
Seagate 200GB 7200rpm S-ATA150 Hard Drive with 8MB Cache (5 Year Warranty)
or
Western Digital WD2000JS 200GB WD2000JS 7200rpm SATA II Hard Drive with 8MB Cache (3 Year Warranty)

Drives

Pioneer DVR-A09XLB 16x DVD Writer Black 16xDVD-R/4xRW, 16xDVD+R/4xRW, 6xDVD+/-DL, 40xCD-R/RW, Retail
or
Pioneer DVR-109BK 16x DVD Writer, Black 6x Dual Layer DVD+R/-R, 16xDVD-R/+R DVD, OEM [AUST. VER] NO SOFTWARE

Video Card

Leadtek Winfast PX6600 GT TDH Extreme nVidia GeForce 6600GT 128MB PCI-Express Video Card with DVI & TV Out
or
Gigabyte nVidia GeForce 6600 GT 128MB PCI-Express Video Card with DVI & TV Out
or
Asus EN6600 GT TD nVidia GeForce 6600 GT 128MB PCI-Express Video Card with DVI & TV Out

If you have one of these mobo's or any of the components I am looking at and have had trouble, pls let me know...

 

[Yuriman]

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2456

Going off of their benchmarks, the Athlon64 seems to be just as good as the Pentium 4 in encoding, it keeps up or beats it in everything except sysmark04. They are also considerably cheaper so you can get other goodies .

As far as anything else goes, I would recomend the Maxtor Diamonmax 10 or Maxline III. They are considerably faster than the hard drives you have listed.

 

[millhouse]

Go with amd and save some money, then invest that money to get more stuff for your pc. Maybe better cooling or something.