OT: Building A New System

[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 ]

[Fyron]

Be very wary of anything you buy at Fry's... very shady stores.

[hicksz]

Originally posted by narf poit chez BOOM:
how much does liquid cooling cost?

Premade liquid cooling cases at this website:

http://www.koolance.com/

go for 240 to 270 dollars.

[Roanon]

A good case is not a case with lot of places for fans. More fans = more noise = not a good idea normally.
There also is a big difference in fan noise, and usually cheaper = more noise. Over here, you can get CPU fans from 10 to 80 € - and you hear the difference. Very much. Same for power supplies. Also check out the latest graphic cards not only for performance, but a few companies (ASUS has started it) are offering cards with more efficient, noise-reduced fans. Up to a few years ago, the graphic card fan usually was the loudest and crappiest, this is not a must any more.

ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe has had a lot of failures lately - 2 out of 3 for me, 5 out of 12 I know, and I won't buy another ASUS board for some time. They have started ruining their good reputation some time ago, and now it's really bad. Everything within warranty, but still annoying. Right now, I recommend AMD and EPOX Boards. Stick to the VIA chipsets, though, nForce is still not good. With latest drivers, there are no big problems with VIA now.

RAM: Corsair or Kingston (don't know Crucial), expensive but very good. No no-names - too many failures, and memory errors can happen at odd times after some time of perfect service, giving you a hard time to find out what is really wrong with your system.

And remember: no Windows XP Home if you want to utilize more than 512 MB RAM.