I would say get a AMD Phenom II X2 555 for you CPU, then get an asus mobo that can unlock cores, and you have around a 80% chance to have a quad core. If you look at the reviews the black editions are amazing budget CPU's. Also it's going to take around 1-3 hours to build depending on how much you know about computers. they most annoying part is wiring it all up. EDIT: You should also buy your parts on Newegg.com, they are amazing
Yeah, I'm heading out to the store now, having been up all night. I'm going to see how much more expensive the 8gig ram is over the 4gig, as it would provide that little "Edge" in performance. I'll stick with that motherboard. The reviews are great, and it's fairly cheap, so I don't see any problems. Sure it's a bit outdated, but I can always swap it out in a few years. Wish me luck!!!
I tell all my friends who are building computers, that 4gigs of ram if perfect for gaming, there are only a few games that would use most of the ram, but that would have to have the games fully maxed out (which requires a beast rig). Gaming if anything requires a good cpu and gpu. More ram is for heavy tasks, such as video editing. But if you want it, go for it, its your computer Good luck on building it!
4gb is plenty for gaming. Unless you're planning to run intensive video editing or 3d engineer modelling programs you won't need it.
Yep, I just made it yesterday. Dual 24" samsung displays ASUS M4A88T-V AMD Motherboard AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black edition CPU Galaxy GeForce GTX 550-Ti Graphics Card 4GB Kingston DDR3 RAM 1TB Seagate HDD Dlink Dual band wireless N card Corsair 650 watt PSU I got pretty much everything I wanted, and it only cost me 1370, all said and done. Not too bad for a pretty good gaming PC. I was expecting around 800, but meh, so long as I get a quality computer, I'm really happy. I ended up putting it together in about an hour, with no major problems. So far, it's treating me great. I might upgrade the HDD, because the write speeds are pretty bad for some reason, and the RAM to 8gigs, because I'm seeing a little over 50% usage while gaming. Let me know what you think. Anything I can improve on, hardware wise? Thanks!
did you get one single stick of ram or two? because dual channel works a lot better. If your seeing a little over 50% usage that is probably all that you will see. I have a 6970 overclocked and I max out games and i have never seen more than 75% usage. Also the write speeds of 6.0 gb/s are amazing Overall that is a really nice build!