OT: New PC!

[AgentZero]

wildcard06 said:
Oog, that's a ton of bread, man. What are you going to be running that you need an SLI set-up? Just curious.

I just made an AMD 3700+ system from the ground up in late May and it is still running. I would recommend Thompson's book - Building the Perfect PC

Well, considering that I've gone from a pricetag of 4,179.88EUR to 2,028.97EUR for essentially the same cost, its looking positively affordable at the moment. SLI, well that's mainly for running FPS at insanely high resolutions at insanely high speeds. Kind of a 'can your machine do this?' to all my console owning friends. And, traditionally, the video card has been the weakest part of my rig, so it's also me making sure that my new system will be OK in that department for some time to come.

[Fyron]

10/100 ethernet is all you need for Internet. The best broadband is only ~8 MB/s, one twelth the bandwidth of a normal NIC.

I would go for high quality sound (ala Swan m200s) over quantity mediocre sound (ala low end home theater speakers) any day, but that's me. Home theater setups are really only worth it if you go high end. Those creative ones might give you a lesser experience overall than the Swan m200s. Of course, the quality costs more.

I know Alienware makes wicked gaming machines...

Alienware is just brand name. It is pretty easy to build the same machine, minus the god-awful case, for half as much money.

[kerensky]

For home theater sound, you might want to look into Klipsch audio speakers. They sound great and have a price tag of about $400US.

[Atrocities]

Damn that is an expensive system... I remember spending near abouts $2,000.00 on my blue box back in 2001. I had the latest everything and within a month..... after building said machine, it was obsolete and I could have built it for about $500.00 less.

But good luck to you.

[AgentZero]

Well, it's currently quite a bit cheaper than my current system which cost me 2,500.00EUR and I had to cut a lot of corners to get it for that, so I'm relatively pleased at how it's going so far. BTW, here's the system as it stands at the moment...

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Processor $400.00
ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16 ATX AMD Motherboard $249.00
Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive $104.00
2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) $219.00
eVGA 256-P2-N383-TX Geforce 6800 256MB DDR PCI Express x16 Video Card $219.00x2
SONY 1.44MB 3.5" Internal Floppy Drive $10.00
NEC IDE DVD Burner Model ND-3540A $38.99x2
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS (7.1) Channels PCI Interface Sound Card $93.00
Klipsch PROMEDIA ULTRA 5.1 470 watts 5.1 Speakers $299.99
Sennheiser HDR120 Wireless Headphones $49.00
NEC Display Solutions 19" 16ms LCD Monitor $299.99
Logitech Media Keyboard $19.95
Razer Diamondback Mouse $49.99
Enermax EG701AX-VE SFMA(24P) ATX12V 600W Power Supply $129.99


Total $2439.89
Total(EUR) 2087.19EUR

Yeah, the price has gone up, despite getting a cheaper HD and knocking out the network card, but that's coz kerensky talked me into an expensive speaker system. Things like heatsinks et al I'm still considering so any input on them (or anything else) is still appreciated.

Edit: Any point on splashing out on a liquid cooling system with this setup? Are liquid cooling systems considerably more efficient that air cooling?

[JAFisher44]

The only reason to use liquid cooling is if you are going to overclock your PC (which you should not do)

This is what RAID is, http://computer.howstuffworks.com/scsi6.htm

Raid has nothing to do with SATA. It is a backup system for SCSI.

[AgentZero]

No, overclocking bad. I've always seen overclocking as a way for people who are unwilling/unable to afford the performance they want to still get it, but I personally don't think the risk is worth it (burn out a $300 dollar processor trying to get $500 performance, & you end up paying $600 for a $300 processor). Oh, and overclocking is also quite usefull when highschool geeks are trying to sound cool.
"I got a wicked PC!"
"Is it overclocked?"
"No."
"rotflmao! u n00b! Mine's overclocked and it's l33t!"

Thanks for the linky explaining SCSI, it makes a bit more sense to me, but I wasn't able to find anything on that site about SATA. Wassup wit dat?

[Thermodyne]

JAFisher44 said:
The only reason to use liquid cooling is if you are going to overclock your PC (which you should not do)

This is what RAID is, http://computer.howstuffworks.com/scsi6.htm

Raid has nothing to do with SATA. It is a backup system for SCSI.

Why should you not OC your system? Why not buy a cheaper low end chip and run it at the same speed as the high end parts?


Water cooling is a viable upgrade to air cooling; some of the cooling tower kits are quite nice. Air is the most dependable, but can have some limitations with today’s chips during hot weather. The next step up and the first to really be advanced cooling would be water cooling with pelts. The pelt chills the CPU and electronically moves the heat the water cooled side of the pelt. These work well, but can have some condensation issues and are not cheap. The top of the line is phase change. This method uses refrigeration equipment to chill the CPU down to around -30c at start up and maintain temps around 0c to 15c during normal operation. Again, condensation can cause problems and the cost of the chiller would buy you a nice mid level PC.


That is one use of raid. It is not only for SCSI systems, it can be used with IDE SCSI and SATA. The board in question includes a SATA raid chip and SATA is faster than IDE, so naturally you would go with SATA raid. For performance, you would build a stripe set so that you could use the bandwidth of both drives at the same time. If you were interested in data integrity, then a mirror would be better with each drive having exactly the same data. With three or four drives, a raid 5 would give you some of both. A little more speed and almost the same data integrity.

Your last statement is at best, uninformed, and as such should be removed.

[mac5732]

I'm looking to buy a new comp as well... what is better, Geoforce pci express 6800 or geoforce 7800 gtx???

[Renegade 13]

The right kind of dust in the right amount can be explosive in air. For example, grain dust is highly explosive when sufficient quantities are suspended in air.