Build an $800 Gaming PC - Hitting the Boards (
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| Product | MSI K8N Neo4-F |
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| Web Site: | www.msi.com.tw |
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| Price: | $85 (
check prices) |
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| Pros: | One of the least expensive nForce 4 boards on the market |
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| Cons: | No FireWire, no SATA-II |
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| Summary: | Gets you into nForce 4 goodness on the cheap, and is ready for dual-core CPUs later on. |
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| Rating: |
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Kingston, Corsair, OCZ, Crucial… when you're buying basic DDR400 RAM without concern for extreme low latencies or overclockability, the brand is less important than the price. We found a good deal on Kingston modules (
check prices), but memory prices fluctuate perhaps more than any other component. Just make sure you stick with a major name brand. Some of the off-brand stuff can be flaky, and we frequently hear reports of users running into problems with it.
It was a major goal to populate our system with 1GB of RAM, up from the 512MB in our previous
$800 Gaming PC. Many games these days benefit from more than 512MB of RAM, especially massively multiplayer online games that frequently load a wide variety of textures in those areas crowded with unique players.
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