DescentBB

Well, I have decided on my system and I am close to making a purchase. The problem is I'm not sure if I want to go with an AM2 board or a 939 board.


I'm aiming at this at current:

Athlon X2 4200+ (possibly 4600+ if I decide to dish out the extra cash)

2 GB of RAM (possibly 4 sticks of 512 PC 800 DDR2)

GeForce 7950GT 512MB

Rosewill 550W Power Supply

Belkin UPS (battery backup)


For the motherboard, if I go AM2, I'm either looking at the Foxconn or Asus. But I want something I can trust that has a decent rating with good reviews. I don't want to read DOA's nor about heat issues.

I'm also not completely certain about the PC Case yet but that will come after I figure out my motherboard.

The reason I'm hoping for an AM2 board is it's support for DDR2 and because of the ability for me to upgrade to AM3 down the road without replacing everything. On the other side of the coin though, by the time AM3's come far enough down in price for it to be worth it for me to upgrade, I may want to just purchase a new board anyway. That could be 2-3 years down the road hopefully. The other problem is that the AM2 boards don't appear to be as upgradeable or as stable as the 939 socket boards from what have been seeing. However, I'm still not 100% sure of this so I have room for doubt. I just want to make sure that this system is as stable as I can get it.

Don't get a Rosewill PSU or a Belkin UPS, get Antec and APC.

i have a rosewill 550 and its running just fine.

I have an antec true power 2 430 watt running on a dual athlon mp 2800, 6 ide hard drives, 2 optical drives, 3 sticks of ddr, 6 pci cards, agp, and about 6 fans.

If you need a 550 watt psu, there is something wrong with the psu.

I have two Belkin 1500va network UPS units; I see absolutely no reason to not buy more if I was in the market for them. Their performance has been excellent since day one; my computer can run for 20-25 minutes without AC power easily. One drives the computer, the other drives the monitors and LAN/Internet equipment so the load is split evenly at about 20% each.

I have a 530w PSU running a single Athlon XP 1700+ (@ 2.4 GHz), a GeForce 6800 GT @ Ultra, 3 hard drives, 2 cdroms and one fan. It is running at about perfect, where it reaches peak efficiency without having excessive load. A new computer can run pretty well on a 400W PSU, however if you intend to get any of the newer video cards the power requirements for ATI or Nvidia's latest and greatest are going through the roof. It would be better to get 500-600 watts in that case so the PSU would be able run at optimal efficiency (IIRC from a test I saw on the net most PSUs run at peak efficiency in the 40-70% load range).

The efficiency of a PSU means the amount of output wattage vs. the input wattage. A 500w PSU running a computer that only needs 50 watts will end up drawing around 100 watts at the outlet, so it is very inefficient. However at 200-350 watts the PSU will only draw about 30 watts excess, so around 230-380 watts at the outlet, which is where most reach peak efficiency. Towards 450 watts output the PSU will start to draw over 500 watts at the outlet, at it's maximum 500 watts output, the PSU will likely draw 600-650 watts at the outlet to maintain the 500w output. If you can get a rough estimate of the total wattage you will require, aim for a PSU that will be at roughly 60-70% load when the system is pulling its maximum, that way you should reach the most efficient levels with room to spare for load spikes.

Mess... 550 watts is just wanksville. That machine will NEVER draw even 350 watts. A 400 watter will do you just fine.

Forget 4 x 512 RAM. It's widely understood that the overhead of managing another 2 sticks reduces memory performance slightly. Go with 2 x 1GB sticks.

Personally, I'd be buying C2D chips right now - even though I'm a real AMD fan: there's just no two ways about it - right now Intel is spanking AMD.

1. I'm going with the Rosewill 550Watt. I've done my homework. I've been researching this for months now.


I've looked into Antec PSU's and I'm not happy with what I have found. Repeated reports of people having theirs DOA.


As for 2 more sticks reducing memory.... I work in a computer repair shop and we always try to stick in 4 sticks. Why? Because that gives data 4 places to go into as apposed to cramming all of that data into 1-2 ports. It is more efficient from what I have been taught. My boss told me this directly and he seems to know a lot about this. He actually made chips (some being 512 RAM) for Micron. How do I know this? He has some of the sticks he made in the shop and we use them. However, if you have some info on this, I would be interested in reading through it.


I may not ever need the 550Watt PSU but it is nice to know it is there and available if I need it. I do plan to upgrade from this system if possible.


As for Core 2 Duo, the new chips are more expensive BUT more powerfull than the Athlons. However, I don't need that kind of power right now, nor will I probably it even be that usefull for me for another few years. All I will be doing is gaming, using it for low-poly game modeling in Maya, Blender, and possibly Lightwave on dual monitors. I won't be able to afford a C2D for a while most likely. I may research it more though but I don't like Intel. From what I understand, Athlons are far more efficient per data cycle than Intel processors are. Besides, I can afford the Athlons due to the price drop. Otherwise, I wouldn't be buying anything at all PERIOD. If the Athlons hadn't dropped in price, I would probably be buying a generic 64 processor.

Belkin or APC I've heard are pretty good. I'm kind of leaning towards APC though.


What I need, is info on a decent motherboard more than anything. The rest is easy to figure out and less important to me.

Ok, to clear things up on the RAM issue, from what Darkside said, is that you used to have to pair them up before SDRAM so maybe I am mistaken. From what he said, they changed the system so that it can only write to one at a time now. At the time he mentioned this, we were dealing with RDRAM which you had to pair.... thus why we had to use dummy sticks for the empty slots. However, he just made the statement in general at the time that 4 sticks are better than 2. It wasn't until a week or so after that, that I found out that he had worked for Micron in the past.

Athlon64 motherboards have issues with more than 2 sticks of RAM, 8 times out of 10.

I own a DRI Lanpart UT Expert, one of the best boards for Athlon64, and it does not like more than 2 sticks of ram - the fact is the traces to the RAM are a bit longer on an A64 board than an intel board - remember the memory controller is on the CPU.

The thing about Athlon64s you do not need to worry about with C2D is that memory timings are a very important factor - get them wrong, or having the bios not get them quite right will lead to stability issues.

My personal recommendation is if you want AM2, and you do not need the virtualization addtions to that AM2 sports, go use a socket939 board, as DDR2 isn't adding any useful performance benefits for Athlon64, as most websites that tested both will atestto - and there is no cost difference between equalivant CPU Models. Power seem not to be important to you, so...

PS: if you don't need the power, get a more reasonable video card, or a beefier power supply - 550W is barely cutting it for a card that suck down 200W easy.

Dude, your thinking of the GX2. I'm thinking of the GT, two completely different cards. GX2= 2 7950GT's.

7950GT= upgraded 7900GT with more RAM.


From what I have read the 7950GT really doesn't need much more than 420Watts with an X2. But it is a good idea to have a 550Watt at least. 600Watts is OVERKILL and is not efficient. It was recommended to me by a quite a few people not to get a 600Watt PSU for this unless I go SLI or need a GX2.

My 7800GT draws 219w with load with 256 megs, the 7900GT w/256m draws 202 with load. Draw your own conclusion.

Krom wrote: I have a 530w PSU running a single Athlon XP 1700+ (@ 2.4 GHz), a GeForce 6800 GT @ Ultra, 3 hard drives, 2 cdroms and one fan. It is running at about perfect, where it reaches peak efficiency without having excessive load. A new computer can run pretty well on a 400W PSU, however if you intend to get any of the newer video cards the power requirements for ATI or Nvidia's latest and greatest are going through the roof. It would be better to get 500-600 watts in that case so the PSU would be able run at optimal efficiency (IIRC from a test I saw on the net most PSUs run at peak efficiency in the 40-70% load range).


blah blah blah blah

TY Krom. i have a 550 for exactly that reason. expansion room

fliptw wrote:My 7800GT draws 219w with load with 256 megs, the 7900GT w/256m draws 202 with load. Draw your own conclusion.

Where did you guys get those values ? nVidia specs the 7950GX2 w/ 143W. X-BitLabs measurements show peak values of 84.2W for a 7900GTX & 48.3W for a 7900GT.

Also, let me quote from the X-BL article:

According to the PCI Express x16 1.0a specification, up to 72 watts of power can be transferred through the +12V lines of the mainboard as well as through the additional power connector, i.e. 144 watts in total. Additionally, some power can be consumed from the mainboard’s +3.3V line (this line is used to simplify power conversion for some chips on the graphics card). It means that a modern graphics card cannot have a power draw of over 150W, at least mainboard and PSU manufacturers make their products basing on that supposition.

An older article states that the 7800GT peaks at 56.70W BTW..

my numbers are from here which im guessing is total system consumpution. my bad.

There's always one (or more!) of these gadgets:

http://www.thermaltake.com/product/Powe ... /w0130.asp

ROFL.

thats pretty cool