OT: New PC!

[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]

AgentZero said:

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?

Everything you need to know about SATA raid is in the board manual. Just remember to press (F6) when windows promps at the start of setup, and load the included RAID driver.

[Atrocities]

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Processor $400.00
Listed for $430.00
ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16 ATX AMD Motherboard $249.00
[/b] Listed for $173.00[/b]
Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive $104.00
Listed for $139.00
2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) $219.00
$220.00 (@ 1 Gig x 2)
eVGA 256-P2-N383-TX Geforce 6800 256MB DDR PCI Express x16 Video Card $219.00x2
$319.00

[AgentZero]

OK, AT, looks like I might get my motherboard from ENU, but for the rest, NewEgg.com's got em beat.
As for overclocking, I'll tell you a little story about why I'd never do it.

When I was in High School, I had the most brilliant computer science teacher ever. He was a bit odd, never actually slept, just took lots of 30min catnaps throughout the day, but he knew EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING PC related. One day, he let a few of the geekier members of the class play around with overclocking a few of the PCs, with explicit instructions to clean the dust out of their insides first, to be very careful, and to switch the machines off when they were done. Of course, they didn't pay him any attention because they were uber and knew what they were doing, so they didn't clean out the dust (of which there was a considerable amount), and they left the machines running when they went home. During one of Mr. Miaki's (MiaKI not MiaGI!) catnaps, a few of the machines overheated enough to ignite some of the dust, which in turn ignited some paper left nearby (so much for being careful!) and within a few minutes there was a nice fire going. Mr. Miaki never woke up because the smoke & fumes kept him unconcious, and though his life was saved by the fire brigade, he came out of it so badly brain damaged that to this day he has to re-learn to tie his shoes every morning.

And that, in essence, is why I wouldn't OC anything. Especially since I have my PC in my bedroom, and have a habit of leaving it on overnight. I don't think I'd ever sleep a wink after overclocking my machine, even if I had the most expensive phase change cooling system in the world. I know it's unlikely the same thing would happen, but one does not recover from the trauma of losing a friend like that very easily.

[Thermodyne]

AgentZero said:
OK, AT, looks like I might get my motherboard from ENU, but for the rest, NewEgg.com's got em beat.
As for overclocking, I'll tell you a little story about why I'd never do it.

When I was in High School, I had the most brilliant computer science teacher ever. He was a bit odd, never actually slept, just took lots of 30min catnaps throughout the day, but he knew EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING PC related. One day, he let a few of the geekier members of the class play around with overclocking a few of the PCs, with explicit instructions to clean the dust out of their insides first, to be very careful, and to switch the machines off when they were done. Of course, they didn't pay him any attention because they were uber and knew what they were doing, so they didn't clean out the dust (of which there was a considerable amount), and they left the machines running when they went home. During one of Mr. Miaki's (MiaKI not MiaGI!) catnaps, a few of the machines overheated enough to ignite some of the dust, which in turn ignited some paper left nearby (so much for being careful!) and within a few minutes there was a nice fire going. Mr. Miaki never woke up because the smoke & fumes kept him unconcious, and though his life was saved by the fire brigade, he came out of it so badly brain damaged that to this day he has to re-learn to tie his shoes every morning.

And that, in essence, is why I wouldn't OC anything. Especially since I have my PC in my bedroom, and have a habit of leaving it on overnight. I don't think I'd ever sleep a wink after overclocking my machine, even if I had the most expensive phase change cooling system in the world. I know it's unlikely the same thing would happen, but one does not recover from the trauma of losing a friend like that very easily.

Sounds like an urban legend..or.......

Cough Cough....bull****......Cough Cough

I've let the smoke out of a few processors and mainboards, but never had anything close to a fire. If one of those PC caught fire, it was prolly rigged to do so.

[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???