Need help completing budget system - $500

I'm looking at building my own system for the first time. For years I've owned commercially made towers that I would squeeze extra years out of by upgrading. So I know my way around a motherboard. The problem is that this last computer was really poorly made. Clearly going a little cheaper screwed me over. Also, I had recently dumped a bunch of money into RAM, a new power supply, a new video card and a new internal SATA card. So it occurred to me that now was a better time than ever to just take what I have and work towards a fully self-created system having already so many of the pricy parts.

My question to you guys is where do you think I should go from here to read up on how exactly to do this? I guess I'll need to know what I am still missing and what the best I can afford is for each component. I'm also thinking about things like dual-core vs quad-core and amd vs intel.

My details, specs, and needs are below. Hope this helps you help me.


Approximate Purchase Date: As soon as possible, I've got a project in Sony Vegas to complete.

Budget Range: $500

System Usage from Most to Least Important:
Streaming media to media players
Basic video and audio editing (nothing overly complex) - Sony Vegas, Sound Forge, Photoshop
Good Web/Email connectivity
Some gaming

Parts Not Required:
Keyboard
Mouse
Monitor
Speakers
DVDR-DL
OS - Win 7 64-bit
Power Supply - Antec Truepower New 23652 TP-650 650-Watt EPS 12V 80Plus Certified SLI Ready Power Supply
Video card - EVGA GeForce GTX470 1280 MB DDR5 PCI-Express 2.0 Graphics Card
RAM - Corsair Memory 4GB PC2-5300 667Mhz 240-Pin DDR2
PCI cards:
- WinTV PVR
- Vantec 6-Port SATA II 150 PCI Host Card


Preferred Website(s) for Parts: newegg, amazon

Parts Preferences: Am more interested in quality than name brand but I'm not sure I know enough to choose between AMD and Intel or quad and dual core.

Overclocking: no, never have

Additional Comments:
I would like an affordable case that will provide the following:
- ROOM!! So sick of micro consumer models!!
- lots of hard drive slots (3 maybe)
- lots of SATA ports (I lost three now in one shot because of the size of my video card)
- 2 optical drive slots
- 10 or more USB ports
- 2 Firewire ports
- 3 PCI slots (my current tower had 1 so I couldn't use my PVR and SATA card)
- I'd like to run my current 6GB of RAM for video editing, don't know how that affects which CPU I buy
- flashy and nice-looking are irrelevant to me. Case mods dont interest me in the slightest.

to be honest i think your better off not using the memory you have..
also forget about using that sata card too unless you really really need the extra connections,
the onboard sata ports of these motherboards are much faster. especially my first choice.

not using your memory:-
cpu:- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx…N82E16819103849
ram:- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx…N82E16820231312
motherboard :- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx…N82E16813128443
case :- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx…N82E16811119197

using your memory..
cpu:- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx…N82E16819103849
motherboard:- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx…82E16813130265R
case:- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx…N82E16811119197

Thanks for the thoughts! Any reason for AMD over Intel? I was recommended an i5-2400 by someone else.

no reason except you said you wanted it mainly for video editing so the more real cores and memory the better and i thought going amd would give you the best of both, the i5-2400 is certainly a good cpu and well worth considering also.

Let me get your opinions on the following about mobos. I've had the following advice:

I was recommended this combo:
1. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboD…t=Combo.689147

and someone else told me that it was no good because it doesn't allow the use of Quick Sync and that I should instead get this:
2. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc…82E16813130579

The argument being essentially that the mobo either should have video output and Quick Sync OR that it doesn't matter because of my video card. Which is it? And which of those two boards do you think is better for me?

The only other one I'm looking at is:
3. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc…82E16813128502

I think if we refer to them by the bolded numbers, it'll be less confusing. Thanks!!

you wanted it mainly for video editing so the more real cores and memory the better

What do you mean 'real cores'?

very sorry for the late reply, first time i've seen it.

can't comment about your links because all i get is a bad request error when i click on them.

as for the real cores question.

every cpu has a certain number of processing units inside it, that are called cores, single,dual,quad, etc

now some cpu's have the ability to make each real core act as if it's 2 cores(intel call this hyper-threading on their cpus) i won't go into the details on how they achieve this because it's complicated, but basically it's done by duplicating certain parts of each core.

now if we have a dual core cpu, it finishes encoding a video faster than a single core cpu,
but if we had a dual core hyper-threading cpu with 2 real cores and 2(what i call) virtual cores this would be seen by the operating system as a four core cpu, and finishes faster than a dual core but not faster than a quad core cpu with 4 real cores.

so when it comes to working with video's the more cores you have the better(video editing software is usually able to use all a cpu's cores unlike most games software that are limited to using only 1 or 2 of a cpu's cores)

here's a good link where you can compare different cpu's against each other, this is a comparison of the 1090t v 2400 http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/146?vs=363

The argument being essentially that the mobo either should have video output and Quick Sync OR that it doesn't matter because of my video card. Which is it? And which of those two boards do you think is better for me?

to answer this argument, no i'd say it doesn't really matter, all quick sync is doing is using the inbuilt gpu core.
video encoding/playback software nowadays can do exactly the same but using your video cards gpu.

Just wanted to comment a little on heat vs budget systems. Note if you are going cheap protect your rig by investing $60 on a liquid CPU cooler. Not only does it save on Power Supply draw, it also greatly reduced the head within the case. Budget cases are not known for their good heat management. For a budget CPU look at the Corsair H60.