My First Build. Would Welcome Any Suggestions Please!

[abid]

change the power supply to 600 watt ++ if u want to overclock.... correct me if im wrong

[viperslayer]

if ur still here get the new GTX295 ..

[bedhead75]

Interesting choice of motherboard and graphics card. The motherboard is crossfire capable but the graphics card is not.

 

Did you particularly want a Nvidia graphics card?

 

I would suggest either downgrading to a motherboard with a single PCI-E x16 slot or looking at an ATI graphics card. The 4830 is only around $20 more than the 9600 and would give you the option of adding a second card if you needed more graphics processing power.

 

Your suggestion is a good one, and appreciated, but my circumstances are a little different. I purposely chose Nvidia over ATI because I'll be dual-booting wth Linux, for which ATI provides notoriously bad Linux drivers that don't always work. I don't mean to be argumentive...I'm just giving people a heads up for the things they need to consider if they intend to switch over to Linux instead of using Vista, which for me will only be reserved for playing games. I also went with the Gigabyte board because it's already been tested (review in www.phoronix.com) that everything works in Linux, and for a P45 board with an easy overclockable bios that had all of the features I wanted, it was a great deal on Newegg after the rebate. The fact that it supports crossover with two PCI-E X16 slots is just an added bonus in case I ever decide to take advantage of that with ATI cards.

I've actually put everything together and running memtest overnight gave no errors. Now I just have to install the OS's. I also upgraded to a 9800GT and a 650W power supply. I was too late to change over to G.skill memory as was previously suggested, but I hope the Crucial memory I'm using now won't be a problem if I only want to overclock the CPU a little.