Help Me Spend Money

Ned · Post by **Ned** » Sun Sep 11, 2005 10:51 am

Help!,

I think I am going to walk a friend through building a machine (He is heading off to college soon). I want to essentially just build mine again, but that would be silly since I built mine a year ago, and I'm sure stuff is a little better now. I'll post my specs (so you can see the medium/average specs it has), if anyone has ideas on how to tweak it up a little bit.

I mainly am wondering which Athlon64 processor, socket type, and motherboard. I like my ASUS K8V SE DELUXE and would like to stay ASUS with onboard sound and ethernet, etc. Oh and a nice case, the one I got was rancid.

CPU AMD 64 |3000+ ATHLON 64 (socket 754)
MB ASUS K8V SE DELUXE K8T800
HD 160GB|WD 7200 WD1600JB 8MB%
DDR 512MB|DDR400 CL3 PC3200 (three)
VGA CHTECH GF 6800 128MB
DVD+/-RW NEC ND-2510A
CDRW 52X32X ASUS CRW-5232QT

Thanks for your help

Mobius · Post by **Mobius** » Sun Sep 11, 2005 3:08 pm

Conventional wisdom would dictate a socket 939 Athlon64 and nForce4 mainboard. To leverage the power of the nForce4 solution, a SATA Hard Drive featuring NCQ (Native Command Queuing) would also be a good idea.

I'd also read up some reviews of that particular video card. How noisy is it?

My new box is almost totally silent - and I must admit, that it is much nicer to have a quiet box, than one which sounds like a 747 taking off.

Dunno what price that video card is, but I got Gigabyte Silent-Pipe Radeon X800 XL GV-RX80L256V) PCIe and it's great bang-per-buck as well as being completely silent.

DCrazy · Post by **DCrazy** » Sun Sep 11, 2005 3:10 pm

Silence isn't an issue in college dorms.

My Dell XPS sounds like a jet taking off when it starts up (before the fans scale back) but you can't hear it over all of the ambient noise.

Is the Athlon64 really necessary? He's not going to see any advantage of it. I'd say go with one of the dual-core P4's instead.

BUBBALOU · Post by **BUBBALOU** » Sun Sep 11, 2005 7:14 pm

DCrazy wrote:My Dell XPS....

poor soul

DCrazy · Post by **DCrazy** » Sun Sep 11, 2005 7:20 pm

Believe me, I would much rather have built the system myself, but the free 17" flat panel roped my parents into it. Along with the 4 year service plan (idiots... I'm a fricken CS major, I don't need the damn service plan).

Edward · Post by **Edward** » Sun Sep 11, 2005 7:31 pm

Well one BIG thing that is often neglected is Hard Drives. I have a friend who has two Raptors (10 000 RPM )in raid on a system with specs from 9 months ago and you would not belive the proformance. For example in half life the levels load over 3x as fast as a 7200 RPM, 120 GB, 8 MB, HD.

Also a good move is to have a HD dedicated to the OS so that if XP needs any files during a file transfer there are no intruptions. Best situation is to have 3 hard drives one for os one for games and programs that rarely need to use the HD at the same time. And finnally one for Music Movies and virtual CD drives.

Ned · Post by **Ned** » Sun Sep 11, 2005 9:19 pm

Thanks for the ideas,

I threw caution to the wind and did the following:
1 MB ASUS K8V SE DELUXE K8T800
1 VGA EVGA|GF 6800
1 CPU AMD 64 |3400+ ATHLON 64 754
3 DDR 512MB|DDR400 CL3 PC3200 RTL
1 HD 160GB|WD 7200 WD1600JB 8MB% - OEM
1 CDRW 52X32X52 ASUS CRW-5232A3 BLK R - Retail
1 NEC 16X DVDRW DL ND-3540A BLACK RT - Retail
1 SW Adobe|PS Element/Prem Ele WIN RT - Retail
1 SPKER Altec Lansing|VS3121W 2.1 OEM - OEM
1 CD MS|WIN XP HOME w/SP2 % - OEM
1 CD MS|OFFICE STUDENT/TEACHER 2004 - Retail

I know it's not the sexiest system in the world, but it replaces a flea bitten HORRENDOUS one that barely runs. Should be suweeeet, as long as nothing arrives DOA.

Stay Tuned,

Matrix · Post by **Matrix** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 7:36 pm

Ned wrote:Thanks for the ideas

It doesnâ??t look like u used any of them though.

Get rid of the S754 crap and get a S939 with a Venice core A643200. Then you will have dual channel ram and a better CPU / Socket setup.

Buying S754 at this time is just shooting your self in the foot.

And 3 DIMMs? Who does that?
Stick to either 2 or 4 so you can run dual channel. (Huge performance boost)

And please don't buy a VIA MB

And that MB only has an 800MHz Hyper Transport.
Itâ??s an outdated board, not the right thing to be putting into a new build.

Also buying an AGP board for a new system is a mistake, I did it a couple months ago and I'm kicking my self. It really murders your upgrade options. None of the new/good MBs are AGP anymore. (Also none of the new video cards for that matter

)
The only reason to get an AGP board right now is if you want to keep your current AGP video card, which you are not doing.

Go with either a DFI for ASUS NF4 PCI-e board.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 7:39 pm

Aggreed, Socket 754/AGP is a huge and costly mistake.

Ned · Post by **Ned** » Wed Sep 14, 2005 8:33 pm

I DO appreciate the input; unfortunately the order had to be placed quickly, so I couldn't get full feedback or permission from Y'all

before doing it. 'The Dad' was willing to pay and only a few hours to make an order.

The machine is going to be fine. Mine is great for my needs and not even as good as the one the kid is getting. He is not a gamer, etc. Doom3 played flawlessly on my 754, AGP etc. The main thing is to keep him away from viruses, etc.

3 RAM slots to keep cost down. By the time 1.5 Gb is obsolete, so will everything else in the system, so getting better 1 or 2 GB single sticks didn't worry me. If he needed video editing speed we would have gotten him an FX-57.