[runawayprisoner]

My friends having me build him a new computer. He's payin with daddys credit card :lol: And he's a pain in the arse to work with, he picked out his case before the motherboard, so i had to find him a good micro atx board, when the full atx which was better was also cheaper. But heres what i ordered for him as he was on a tighter budget. What u think? Much better than my current one

DFI LP JR P45-T2RS LGA 775 Intel P45 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
Core2 e8400
OCZ plainum(?) 800mhz ram
Evga 9800Gtx+ 512mb card.
All housed in the ThermalTake Lanbox Lite.
And a Rosewill 600w psu.

Since we're talking about a E8400 here... I think a cheap G31 board from GIGABYTE would also do 4GHz on that processor easily... hence a DFI board would be overkill.

No, I won't mention P5E-VM HDMI here because those sons o' beeches increased the price of that board back to its original. Was $90 before.

Now anyway... reduce the board, then use the difference in board money to get a better graphics card. Preferrably GTX 275 or HD 4890 if you can afford either. Since that board is $150, and a GIGABYTE G31 is about $50 brand new, you already saved a good $100 for the graphics card.

Trust me, you won't be disappointed.

 

[runawayprisoner]

hmm. will take that into consideration. But he's pretty dead set on that case :lol: Which would be better, the 4890 or 275(which may not fit. As the 4890 supposedly has a 10-15% increase from the 4870.

In my opinions, hack the front of the case, then "relocate" the HDD elsewhere, or use an ultra-slim SSD. Or give up on the lanbox and get a normal case or another "normal-looking" mATX case.

Portability doesn't come cheap. And with that price range, you wouldn't get anything that is good enough. Then you need to take cooling into consideration as well.