My friend is putting together a computer for me and I have been looking at these parts. I would like some feed back as to thier suitability... I'm looking to use the computer to use Maya6 (3D software) and play games like Doom3 and Half-life2... will these parts suffice? any other suggestions? note: I cant really afford anything more expensive than the total of these parts... (also please consider I have very limited knowledge of anything computer related so please answer with as little jargon as possible)

Processor:

Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz Prescott Skt478 FSB800 1MB Cache Retail Boxed CPU With 3 Year Warranty

Motherboard:

Asus P4P800-E Deluxe Socket 478 Intel 865PE - Sound G-Lan IEEE1394 USB2 800FBS SATA Retial Box

RAM:

Kingston 512 DDR400 PC3200 Memory Module X2

Hard Drive:

Western Digital Caviar 120Gb 7200rpm Hard Drive - OEM

Fan

Coolermaster Intel P4 (Prescott) upto 3.4ghz CPU cooler with Copper Insert Retail Boxed

CD Drive

Sony CRX230A - 52x32x52x Internal IDE CD-RW Retail Kit

DVD Drive

SONY 16x48 INT IDE DVD DRIVE – OEM

Graphics card:

128MB NVidia GeForce 6600GT AGP 8X GDDR3 DVI TV out

Thats all.... I would really appreciate feed back...

My friend has the same board and cpu. The board takes a little long for the 1st post. The cpu is great for 3D.

I'd scratch the optical drives and pick up a LG DVD burner which does DVD-RAM, which can be formatted in 3 secs. Drag-n-drop to copy & delete files. The burner does all other kinds of cd/dvd disks including dual layer. Great for back-ups.

You've done your homework. Nice selection. I'd go for 2gig of ram if money is not an issue.

Does Not Compute...

I don't know what evil and sickly warped world you live in or what lies you have been fed puke: ; but I would shoot the person that is destroying your CPU freedom :dead: , simple consumer math will tell you for the cost AMD is far better then Intel and in spades if you are gaming you go to a high end LAN party and the power house pomputers will be the AMD rigs wheather they be: overclocked, underclocked, water cooled, jet cooled, fan cooled or what ever other way you can think of. I would look at building this system with an AMD 3500 64 or better and use and Asus A8N-SLI Extreme motherboard. For the price of a mid range Intel You can get a top end AMD and don't ever let you think that the speed of a chip is why you should ever buy a chip, they are wrong. You can get a Intel but I would not bother with the added expence besides there are some chips you will find on a Intel board this chips bottleneck the new generation of ships you will upgrade to AMD shrinks them dow and puts them on the CPU where they realy should be.
If you are spending alot of money on a PC you should look at who much you are going to up grade if you are just going to toss the rig in two or three years then go Intel if you want to up grade and max your money go AMD.
But Chootoes either way looks good.

Addition...

If you are playing HL2 and Doom III, I would look at a video card with 256 Mb RAM. I have two PCIe Asus Extreme n6800 Ultras in SLI but that is more then you need at this time but a single card would be good and you can get the second one at a later time, like when the card comes down in cost, i had a tech grant to spend or loose and I had the money so I got two this time but normaly I would buy one and then the other of what ever in this it maybe when the cost droped a bit. This will give you alot better and cleaner game play then a 128 if I was to go with a 128 on your system I would look at the 128 ATI cards over the Nvidia... Yes someone that has $1200.oo in Nvidia hardware is telling you to Buy ATI, Nvidia build some of the best first market cards out there ATI waits till Nivdia releases a card before the build their replie ATI always have alittle more pop to them for the money :bounce: :knock:

Thanks for the replies...

As I said, I really dont know too much about computers, except what i wanna do with it...

the proccessor you recomended appears to be almost 50% more expensive than the one i am getting... i really cant afford something like that...

but i still appreciate the feed back and will reconsider my choice before i dish out the cash...