Noobie with ?s

[justplainken]

After much deliberation (and spouse-convincing), I've decided to build my own pc. My last one is 7 years old and barely barely barely functions. I'm incredibly grateful for this site and the info it's provided me. Couple questions for anyone willing to take a moment:

I like Rob's suggested hardware. MSI's K9 has gotten a lot of mixed reviews at newegg, though. About half of the reviewers received a board that was DOA. I love that board for the price... should I still go for it? Anyone else have bad/good experiences?

Same thing for the Antec Sonata II, I love it, but have read several bad reviews about its short lived power supply on amazon. Should I be concerned?

I know that most reviews will be people who have a reason to come back and review the product (ie - a bad experience). I'm not sure if I should be concerned or just get what I want.

Also - I can't afford to buy everything at once. Some things can obviously wait (like a flat screen monitor since I have a CRT, etc).
But what about a graphics card? Can I run without one for a little while? I see that some MBs have integrated graphics, but can't always tell from the specs. Is it reasonable to buy a case, MB, CPU, and HD only? Or do I really need the graphics card right away? I'm not sure that I plan on buying a sound card at all. I might even skip on a new hard drive for a while and move my current (but tiny 10 GB) HD to the new case for a short time. I mainly use an external anyway.

Thanks! Looking forward to making final selections and buying them. I'll be sure to post my (hopefully) success story.

[machz990]

After much deliberation (and spouse-convincing), I've decided to build my own pc. My last one is 7 years old and barely barely barely functions. I'm incredibly grateful for this site and the info it's provided me. Couple questions for anyone willing to take a moment:

I like Rob's suggested hardware. MSI's K9 has gotten a lot of mixed reviews at newegg, though. About half of the reviewers received a board that was DOA. I love that board for the price... should I still go for it? Anyone else have bad/good experiences?

Same thing for the Antec Sonata II, I love it, but have read several bad reviews about its short lived power supply on amazon. Should I be concerned?

I know that most reviews will be people who have a reason to come back and review the product (ie - a bad experience). I'm not sure if I should be concerned or just get what I want.

Also - I can't afford to buy everything at once. Some things can obviously wait (like a flat screen monitor since I have a CRT, etc).
But what about a graphics card? Can I run without one for a little while? I see that some MBs have integrated graphics, but can't always tell from the specs. Is it reasonable to buy a case, MB, CPU, and HD only? Or do I really need the graphics card right away? I'm not sure that I plan on buying a sound card at all. I might even skip on a new hard drive for a while and move my current (but tiny 10 GB) HD to the new case for a short time. I mainly use an external anyway.

Thanks! Looking forward to making final selections and buying them. I'll be sure to post my (hopefully) success story.

I've been using the MSI K9N SLI Platinum for about 3 months now with no apparent problems. This particular MB has integrated sound if you want to utilize that vs. buying a sound card but there is no integrated graphics. You will have to buy a PCI graphics card. There are some very reasonably priced PCI cards out there now. I would buy one that will meet your future needs so you don't have to buy another one later.

As for hard drives this MB will handle an IDE hard drive like the one you currently have but I recommend the SATA HD. I would venture that your 10 GB HD is old and probably has no CACHE so you will take a noticable performance hit using that old HD.

My Antec Sonata II case is my second Antec case. I built my last computer using the Antec Sonata and it is still running like a swiss watch two years later. My current PC build with the Antec Sonata II case is running fine for the last 3 months with no issues.

RAM for this board is somewhat expensive also. But you can start out with 1GB and move up to 2GB later if you like.

[justplainken]

Thanks for the info - I hadn't thought about the cache on my old drive.
I hadn't priced memory yet - thanks for the heads up.
I really do need a somewhat-high-end graphics card anyway for what I want to do, so that's just as well. What I want to do is buy all the neccesities, (MB, hdrive, graphics card, processor, case, mem) put them together and make sure that there are no problems, then buy the peripherals. It'll take a little bit of time to set up my systemand software the way I want anyway.

Thanks again!