Typical "I can't make my own decisions on my new machine" thread..

T

trxjw

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 29, 2005
Messages
408
Well I think my current system has run its course and it's time for my standard 2 year overhaul. Most of the time I upgrade parts as I feel necessary, but I feel this is a good time to leap from 4x AGP to 16x PCI-e as well as dual core.
Current specs:
2600XP+
KT3 Ultra 2 Mobo
120GB WD 8mb cache
40 gb Maxtor which is so old I cant even remember the specs.
1 gig Mushkin mismatched Ram
ATi 9800 Pro

With my current program in school, I tend to do a large amount of multitasking with design programs like photoshop, illustraitor, flash, dreamweaver, image ready, etc. Not to mention the games I play (CS:S, HL2, FEAR, BF2). So coupled with that and the constant crashing my computer burdens me with, I feel this new machine will do quite nicely:
X2 4400
Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe nForce4 SLI
eVGA 7800 GTX 512mb (with another down the line if I manage to sell a kidney)
Corsair TWINX2048-3200C2PT 2GB Kit DDR400 XMS3200
1 Raptor 74GB (partitioned C: for OS / D: For Games)
1 WD Caviar 250GB (E: Page File maybe / F: Media Storage)
Enermax Noisetaker 600w SLI
Plextor PX-716SA 16X Internal Serial ATA Dual Layer DVD±R/RW CD-R/RW
Antec P180

I've been saving for a year with a few bucks from each paycheck to afford this build, so I really want it to be quality parts. I'm pretty set on the components, but a few suggestions are always welcome to help me finalize. Also, if anyone knows of any real problems with any of these parts, feel free to let me know. I'm not 100% on the storage setup as I don't have much experience with Raid or SATA, but I'd like to take advantage of it.

Thanks for the feedback in advance. I'm sure everyones sick of these threads by now.

Have a good holiday if you're celebrating.
:)
 
I have practically an identical system to you currently. I too am building a new system. (Coming up on three years with this setup.)

Anyway, your build looks pretty good. Here are my opinions

1) You could ditch the Raptor. Versus SATA 3.0Gb/s 16MB cache 7200rpm drives, it just isn't as badass as it used to be. I'm personally getting a pair of the WD 250GB SATA3.0Gb/s 16MB Cache drives.

2) Corsair XMS is pretty much crap these days. I see that XMS 2-pack is $224 after rebate at Newegg, but eh. Get Crucial Ballistix for overclocking or for stock speeds get Crucial Value or Patriot. You could spend 10 bucks more and get G.Skill 2x1GB pack. Or since you're tossing money around, Crucial Ballistix is like $290 for 2GB.

3) Power supply looks good. There is better (PC Power & Cooling brand), but you could do a lot worse too :)

4) Case is good, same one I am getting.

5) DVD burner... well... I've heard some bad things about that SATA Plextor, and Plextor drives aren't as good as they used to be. Again, there is better, but you could do worse. But if you really want to be rid of ribbon cables, it's your only choice. There are no native SATA chipsets for optical drives. If you open up the SATA Plextor it's got a regular PATA Plextor drive inside with a little card plugged into the ports to convert it to SATA.
EDIT: Addendum to SATA Plextor "bad things". It seems firmware revisions have cleared much of the incompatibility problems up. So that may be a non-issue.


A question though, are you planning to overclock? I assume so, if you are getting premium RAM. If you are, you could probably do better on the motherboard. The DFI nForce4 boards are generally considered the best overclockers. Would be cheaper than the A8N32-SLI as well. In addition, the full x16 on both PCI Express slots gives virtually no performance benefit to current generation cards like the 7800 GTX 512MB.

Hope I can be of some help.
 
Well I hadn't really planned on overclocking. In the past I've just had terrible luck with it and seem to be cursed when it comes to getting things to run stable. I'll certainly look into different types of ram. Originally I had planned on getting Crucial but my roommate - the self-proclaimed know-it-all of computer hardware - decided that Corsair was the best since he has it in his computer.

As far as the DVD burner is concered, like I said I don't know too much about SATA configurations as I've never really messed with it. So if I have another option around the same price tag, I'm open to that as well. The ribbon cables I'm not so worried about since the case has no window and nobody ever needs to look inside other than myself. I've never really had any major problems with cable management, so that can be delt with as well.

In reference to the motherboard. I think that at some point the 16x will start to offer some performance gains with new driver and bios releases, so I just assume get it now while I'm starting from scratch.

Thanks for the help. :)
 
Check the optical drive forum to see if they have fixed the issues with the sata dvd drives.

If you aren't afraid of IDE cables, then you have many other choices for your burner. Remember, a quality part doesn't have to be the most expensive. Lite-On and NEC make some really really good dvd burners. Get the latest from NEC and it will only set you back about $50 instead of $140. That way you could buy a couple games to play on your new shiny computer. Plextor isn't the name on everyone's mind for the best burners on the market, and they come in waaaaay more expensive.

Also, you might try looking into the Opteron 1XX series cpu's, They are socket 939, generally run more stable, and usually cheaper than the similar athlon parts. Basically, you could get more for your money.

On that note, if you aren't going to overclock, the ASUS mobo is a great choice. They are known for their stability when not overclocking. However, if you are not going to overclock, there is no reason to spend alot of money on really high quality ram. You could always just go with some crucial value ram 1gig sticks and save some more money.

If you are interested in raid, you could throw that extra money into more HD's. Look into two very fast drives that you can stripe together in raid 0 for your system drive, and then some very large drives for storage. If you delve into Raid 0, make sure that you back up those drives, and don't keep anything on there that you can't afford to lose. An example of this would be to keep what you are working on currently on the raid drives, and back it up at the end of the day to the larger drives. For programs like PS and the like, having a page file on a different physical disc is a good thing so having multiple HD's is a blessing.

For harddrives, the 250 or 300 gig diamond max 10 or maxline III hardrives with 16mb cache are very fast (like almost raptor fast in most situations).
 
It's not so much whether or not I fear IDE or SATA, it's more the idea that I don't know the advantages/disadvantages of the two. I don't need 500 gigs of storage, I'd be fine with 250-300. So would I be better off with a 300 gig Maxline III and partitioning it instead of running two smaller drives with a a 200 gig backup in raid 0? Since I dont know how to go about configuring raid, is there any risk of me destroying something?

I'll be sure to look into other optical drive options. Thanks for the heads up on that.

As for the RAM, do you have any specific type in mind? If you do, could you point me in the direction of where to find it? Thanks again.
 
Other than what's been mentioned about RAM selection and the SATA DVD drive, it looks good. I'd recommend Crucial or Patriot as said earlier for RAM, and the NEC 3550A for the drive.
 
Solid.

Any ideas on the Hard Drives? I'm a bit up in the air since I don't need a huge amount of storage, a 250 gig would suit me just fine. Should I just grab one 250GB maxline III and call it a day? I was under the impression that the raptor was still blowing 7K rpm drives out of the water so that was originally why I had added it to my build as my boot drive.
 
trxjw said:
Solid.

Any ideas on the Hard Drives? I'm a bit up in the air since I don't need a huge amount of storage, a 250 gig would suit me just fine. Should I just grab one 250GB maxline III and call it a day? I was under the impression that the raptor was still blowing 7K rpm drives out of the water so that was originally why I had added it to my build as my boot drive.
Click to expand...

Yeah,... and I thought 200 gigs would be enough memory ;) .

The raptor still wins in gaming tests by a little bit, but why take 74gb when you can lose a little speed and get like 4X the storage for a small (probably not even noticable) performance loss, and at the same price to boot.

I would still go with a two HD setup, because you would be dealing with potentially very large swap files when using photoshop and the other graphics creation apps. Having two physical drives (as opposed to two partitions) could provide significant performance gains. If you don't deal with anything that you absolutely can't lose, and can't backup to a dvd or two, then I wouldn't bother with Raid 1 or 0. Raid 1 is good for redundancy of important files. Raid 0 would be good if you work with very very large files, like non-linear video editing and the like.

For ram, value ram from any company that you've heard of before would be good. Look for tight timings, but higher latency memory doesn't affect the performance of athlon64's and X2's nearly as much as with other processors, so in this case go for quantity over quality ;)
 
Well, I guess you can never have too much storage. I think I'll grab a pair of 250GB Maxline III's and set them up the same way I had my original drives planned. Hopefully the extra 200 gigs Ill have on the primary drive wont go to waste. ;)

Thanks for all the help. :)
 
trxjw said:
Well, I guess you can never have too much storage. I think I'll grab a pair of 250GB Maxline III's and set them up the same way I had my original drives planned. Hopefully the extra 200 gigs Ill have on the primary drive wont go to waste. ;)

Thanks for all the help. :)
Click to expand...

Well, you could set the drives up in RAID 1, which will give you 250 gb of storage, but redundancy in case a drive ever fails. Then, if you end up needing the space later on, just break down the array and start using the other drive.
 
NulloModo said:
Well, you could set the drives up in RAID 1, which will give you 250 gb of storage, but redundancy in case a drive ever fails. Then, if you end up needing the space later on, just break down the array and start using the other drive.
Click to expand...

I see. I'll be sure to look into that when I get them. Thanks for the help everyone.
 
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