Building First System, Your Input please...
 

I would like your help/opinions on a few things if possible. I'm building a system for the first time and would like to build it around an AMD Athlon 64.
So far this is what I've come up with that both seems to give a good amount of performance and fits within the budget:

AMD Athlon 3500+ - Does it overclock well? and with the following board? Is there a better board choice for this chip?

MSI Neo 2 Platinum - In the little reading I've done these seem to match closely to what I'd be needing.

Antec True Control 550 PSU

I'm not set on any of these items but gives you an idea of what I'm looking at. The other parts I'm looking at are a graphics card from $125-200, memory chips of 1GB and a full tower ranging in price from $80-150.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Jmke- Thanks for the input thus far!

AMD Athlon 3500+ - Does it overclock well? and with the following board? Is there a better board choice for this chip?

--> make sure you'll buy a .09 µ cpu (codename winchester), these overclock higher.

I'd go for the Epox 9nda3+ it still has a few problems but so does the MSI and people who know what they are talking about choose the epox over the msi:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...6&page=2&pp=25

like piotke said, go for a 90nm 3500+

for the vidcard in the 200€ range, I'd go for a 6600 or 6600 GT.

you didn't specify howmuch you want to spend on the ram :)
if your budget allows and you're not going to overclock. get some ram that can handle 2-2-2-5. if you're going to overclock, safest bet would be ram with tccd chips. those will also do 2-2-2-5 at ddr400 and 2.5-3-3-7 at ddr500 or even more (rough estimate, it's no guarantee)

if you have the patience for it, wait for nForce4 SLI boards, and get 1x PCI-E 6600GT

can we get the epox boards already in Be?

a friend of mine ordered his at jacobshans; he says it'll be in store by the 14th of december.

http://www.br-webshop.be/ --> beerke already had one

Calantak, you know that MPL has all the latest gear! :)

http://www.mpl.be/search.aspx

Epox 9NDA3+ / Socket 939 / NVidia NForce3 Ultra / ATX motherboard [EPX-9NDA3+] FSB800 DDR400 ATA133 P80P Gigabit Lan 4xSATA Raid
€171



MSI K8N SLI Diamond / Socket 939 / nVidia nForce4 Ultra SLI / ATX motherboard [MSI-K8NSLIDD] Ht1000 nF4 UltraSLI 4DDR4 2Pe16 3P S² R A GL 1394 W
295.00

Asus A8N SLI / Socket 939 / NVIDIA nForce4 SLI / ATX motherboard [AS-A8N-SLI] Ht1000 nF4-SLI 4/2cDDR4 2Pe16 2Pe1 3P A GL R S 1394
166.00

I hope that's shipping included :^D

MPL is a known value and one of the first webshops, they ask a premium price for premium service, you can be certain that they will still exist in 5 years, unlike 99% of all webshops out there

in my humble opinion :*