OT: Building A New System

[hicksz]

I believe what happen was Nvida offered Valve software a video card but it had to be liquid cooled. I don't remember why though. But ATI was able to offer a card at that time that didn't and that's why Valve went with ATI.

[Atrocities]

Thanks guys. Here is what I want to do.

I want to buy a new case, one that has bette cooling and such.

I would love to run dual 200 GB Hard Drives. My blue box is raid, but I could never figure out how to take advantage of it. Now it is just to old to use. (And unreliable)

I know nothing about the new motherBoards or the FSB features and such. Hence I am asking.

Ideally I would like to set up the new system to be:
P4 2.5 (or higher)
1 gig (or more) Ram
GeForce Fx 5700 Card (Already have)
2 200 or 180 GB Hard drives
DVD Burner/Player/CDRW/CD Recorder Rom
(May be one of each, DVD Burner, and a CDRW/CDR drive)
Lots of cooling and a quiet system.
I have considered buying a premade system, less all the troubles of trying to get a new system to work well. But the cost is an issue. Additionally the cases they offer SUCK.

I will be running XP on the system as the OS. That is going to be spendy unless I can use my extra HP OS disk. (For some reason I got two of them when they sent me this replacement PC Last year.)

I mainly want the system for video and photo editing. This system works well, but it lacks the HD space. I am running an exteranal HD with it now and still both HD's are full. Video takes up a lot of space. Ideally what I need is a good DV - Video deck that will communicate with my system as well as my Sony Digital Cameras do.

I could spend the big bucks and buy the Alien PC, but I would rather pay off other bills first.

[Fyron]

If you want lots of cooling and you want it to be quiet, you will want to get liquid cooling. Better cooling than fans, and makes no noise.

[Atrocities]

Humm, I had not considered that. Thank Fyron, I will check it out.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

how much does liquid cooling cost?

[Atrocities]

That is a good question, probibly several hundred bucks.

[hicksz]

Atrocities

I have been looking at buying this case from Antec. It has a lot of room and good airflow. You could do liquid cooling or support 5 fans for airflow. It also comes with a 430W Power Supply.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...129-115&depa=0

Some of the new motherBoards have onboard RAID. The ASUS motherboard I suggested supports RAID 0/1.

I would recommend you try to go higher on the P4 if you can until the price gets crazy. Probably no higher than 3.0 or 3.2. Extreme Editions are too expensive. The P4 you get should have a C in the name. This is why:

'C' designator:
This letter designator identifies Pentium® 4 processors that support Hyper-Threading Technology † and an 800 MHz front side bus. For example, the Pentium® 4 processor at 2.40C GHz supports an 800 MHz front side bus and Hyper-Threading Technology1.

Here is a document to help you understand the 800Mhz bus with DDR memory.

http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/Dual_DDR_SB.pdf

Basically to achieve the 800MHz bus you need 2 or 4 identical DDR RAM sticks. The motherboard manual will tell you how to install them for 800MHz configuration. Buying one stick of RAM won't give you the 800MHz bus speed.

I recommend that you try to get 2GB of RAM depending on what games you play. Some of the newer games are requiring 500MB of RAM. But recommend 1GB of RAM.

I like Seagate HDs. I think the 10,000RPM HD are too expensive for the amount of storage they give you. For you internal HD, use Serial ATA cable for better airflow (smaller cable) and faster data transfer. 2x200GB HD should be fine for video and photo work.

I think you should have a DVD Burner and a CDRW/CDR drive. The DVD burner will be great for backups especially with 200GB HDs. Make sure you get a DVD burner that has +/- DVD R and +/- DVD RW so you don't have to worry about which format to get.

There was an excellent article in the March 2004 copy of PC World on Quiet your PC. Here is a few of the links they provided:

www.quietpc.com and www.siliconacoustics.com

If you were to buy a prebuilt system, I would go with Alienware too.

Also, good job on the Romulan ship in your STM post. Have you thought about making the Romulan Scimitar?

I'm going to bed.

[ March 20, 2004, 09:12: Message edited by: hicksz ]