Apart from Asus, the two above are pretty good. After more then a decade of building PC with Asus, I tried a Gigabyte MB this year for my home system...It is working fine and as can be and very tweakable if you know what you are doing. Asus in a way has dropped the ball in recent years but it is still quite okay though the built quality had cause me 3 times to have board that died on me less then 2 yrs of use. (to me as a hardcore Asus fan, that is a no-no) and I never even overclocked them.
Okay some of what I said you might alrady know lah but just take note of some pointers:
$800 can get you a pretty good system that will do alot if you willing to keep some of your own stuff on your previous system including the monitor.
Most of the shop mentioned here are pretty good....if you know what you are doing. I am a builder so trouble shooting and being very aware of most of the better brands out there means, I am out to get the best price from them...not for their "friendly faces and services"
heheeh. Most of the shop work out a system in which you can buy bundled component that will make up the basic PC system and you get a good overall discount for it. But you skip on a major part and their offered price will higher. Some might even want you to take a PC casing as part of the deal and if you don't you ca't get at the price they advertise in their price list. So ask if you see nothing stated in the pricelist.
It can be confusing to be there at Sim Lim to buy especially if you are not very good at building system or if the version of parts you get are the latest....or worst..the oldest. Then you should do some finger walking on your PC.
I have a
LINK that will lead you to a site that takes a number of shop's price list, scans them and publish them on a website. So click it to find out more. Some pricing are recent and abit older. Which is fine as you will still get about the same price ( or lower if you are lucky). But it also helps give you a wide overall view of what you can expect, want to set your mind on getting or work your budget out. Then and only then do you make the trip down to buy it. And try to stick to your planned items to buy and build...as being weak in the head could means spending more money then you should when the BBB bug bites you in your behind. heheh
For power ..take nothing below 550watt and don't try going cheap and buy no brand ones. Power supply these day IS JUST AS IMPORTANT a factor to a stable powerful system. But if you really really have to save abit then get at least 480 watt from a brand like Cooler Master which is priced quite good. I think the 500 or 550 Wat from Cooler Master is also quite well priced. ( it was not when I was looking at it during CNY heheh)
And make sure you settle on the CPU and motherboard first before you get anything else. This will also decide what power unit you want to get for example. Get at least 3 gig of ram...For RAM clock speed get the 800mhz I think they just fine. I am an old gamer too heh..
Try to get a Graphic card that is about $180 to $220. I think that is a sweet spot for the above average gamer. I think the 9600GT is pretty well priced these days. I saw one from gigabyte going for about tad above $200. Good stable board. Check if the board need to draw power direct from the power supply. If you don't know some new power graphic card need more power then the PCI express slot can provide so that mean you need to have a power supply that can supply enough juice to not just your PC's essential parts but also to drive that graphic card up heh. For graphic work, most of the modern cards are already right up there in the high numbers. 2D is just too easy for any card maket to get it wrong. The only thing you want to improve on that is a calibrating tool to ensure your get faithful reproduction of colours as you look at it on your monitor doing editing.
Try to salvage as many from your old pc to save some money...sometime it is beyond saving, for example if you are aready use to your keyboard and mouse..I see no reason to change them. If your monitor is great still ( especiall if you have a LCD that refresh at 2ms as oppose to 5ms or 8ms.) A 2 ms LCD screen is the best of the 3 I stated for smoother refresh rate and less ghosting when you are play fast action RPG games for example. But if you have to buy a new monitor...I now for a fact $800 will not make it heh. I built mine just after CNY for about $770. But of course I used my existing Cooler Master Aluminium casing, same wireless keyboard/mouse, DVD recorder, 2 existing SATA HDDs ( I did buy one more 350gig )
If you are not intending to overclock and you have gotten a really good PC casing and with ther right fan system built into the casing, to keep air flowing into your system and out of it...you can get away with using the standard INTEL CPU fan that comes with your DUO CORE CPU. It is more then enough. No need to consider any after-market CPU fan. But as I said...if you are into overclocking...you need to add more cash to your budget and fans is just the tip of the over-clocking iceberg you need to plop good money to archieve. heheh.
Hope there is enought tips there for you to go to "war" building your own PC.
