New PC time

[beavereater]

I wanna upgrade to something that will last a while, get my moneys worth and to play games in as good a quality possible while not spending all my earnings. Because I have all the basics (Monitor, keyboard blah blah) it's the main parts I wanna change. Here they are, and the total cost...anyone see any reason to change something, let me know. Thanks!!

GIGABYTEAti RADEON X800
GA-K8NXP-SLI Socket939 / nVIDIA nForce4 SLI
Athlon64 3500+ (Venice)
SoundBlaster Audigy2ZS Digital Audio
RAM 1GB×2
MAXTOR 300GB / 7200rpm /16MB cache

$1400

[yoda313]

Hi,

Looks good And since you said you want it to last awhile its good you got a 64bit chip. You'll be able to upgrade to Windows XP64 when you're ready for it.

Though you might want to check if it has a pci-express slot if your a serious gamer. That's the newest graphic port.

Kevin

[beavereater]

Hi,

Looks good And since you said you want it to last awhile its good you got a 64bit chip. You'll be able to upgrade to Windows XP64 when you're ready for it.

Though you might want to check if it has a pci-express slot if your a serious gamer. That's the newest graphic port.

Kevin

You mean if the board supports PCI Express...I'm sure it does...and that card is a PCI Express card.

[neomaine]

beavereater,

I'd drop that 300gb drive and get three drives. Assuming you'll be doing some video work, I'd get:

- 80gb drive for OS and programs.
- 2 x 120+gb drives for video. Use one as source drive and one as destination drive. (Process 1 use D: source and E: dest, Process 2 use E: source and D: destination.....)
- All NTFS. Maybe put your games on one of the 120+ to keep the OS drive as clean as can be. Then again, once installed, games tend not to change a whole lot.

It'll greatly minimize fragmentation.

Not sure if you'll need 2gb of ram. My experience shows 512mb to be adequate and 1gb to be more than plenty. Use the extra on the drives.

[waheed]

Nice system

Make sure your MB supports dual channel.

[beavereater]

Nice system

Make sure your MB supports dual channel.

Thanks...took a while to figure out. Lots of reading!! Still, I would like to buy something decent for cooling as well. I've always had cooling issues with my PC here.

Does the temp of the room affect the PC's temp much. Would liquid cooling be the way to go. It's hot and humid here.

[dfgh11]

If I had a 8MB cache for the OS and a 16MB cache for storage space, that wouldn't make the 16MB cache drive pointless would it? I mean it would still be fast, the 8MB wouldn't be slowing anything down?

[waheed]

anyone see any reason to change something, let me know. Thanks!!

SoundBlaster Audigy2ZS Digital Audio

You might want to consider the new Soundblaster X-Fi series of sound cards.

[ROF]

Three questions:

1) Why are using a sound card with less capability then the onboard sound?

2) Which graphics card are you pairing(SLI) with the x800 or are you buying two of them?

3) Why spend $1400 for a sub $1000 system??

I just built a system similiar to what you've listed for a customer and it was similiarly priced but had twice the RAM (2GB DDR 400MHZ) and twice the hard drive capacity (twin 300GB Maxtors).

[ROF]

Does the temp of the room affect the PC's temp much. Would liquid cooling be the way to go. It's hot and humid here.

The room temperature has an "add-on" effect to case temperature. Your case is pulling in air from outside the case, blowing it across your components, and then exhausting it out of the system. if the air coming in is 100 degrees, that's the ambient temperature of the case while shut down. This 100 degree air is only going to increase in temperature as it flows through your system. With water cooling systems starting as low as $20 for mini-coolers, you may want to consider such a device in places where you aren't running a PC in optimal conditions (room temperature 75 degrees or higher). You will reduce your power consumption by purchasing the water cooling system as your case fans use much more power than a mini-water cooler.

[redwudz]

I have a Gigabyte K8NXP-9, my profiled computer, non-SLI. I'm happy with it. I doubt you have much trouble with CPU temps. My 939 runs about 27C, maybe a degree or two more when encoding, this with the stock AMD cooler. That's about 2C under the case temp. The Southbridge, video card and the HDs produce the heat in my system, not the CPU.

I'd go with SATA drives. They run cooler and no configuration is required. I use three SATA drives, boot, edit and archive. All 80G, because I got a good price on that size.

Make sure you get a capable power supply. SLI MBs especially use a lot of power. I have a 580W, but I have 4 HDs, 3 opticals and a Zip drive.

If you run XP64, it can use 2GB, at least a lot better than XP32. Spec them for dual-channel (Matched RAM modules)

BTW, I'm not impressed with XP64. Still using Beta drivers and little software takes advantage of it. Maybe Vista will be different.