Building a new system

[pacmania_2001]

I finally decided it was time to move on in the world of computing from my trusty Intel Celeron 400 so I am building a new system. Seeing that I don't keep that up to date with hardware news and reviews I thought I might see what your opinion is on a few matters.

1. Do you recommend getting an AMD 2400XP or a 2500XP chip? Is it worth the extra $10 for the 2500XP?

2. Should I go with a generic brand of RAM or a brand name such as Kingmax? Also should I go DDR PC2700(333) or PC3200(400)?

3. Is Benq and 4Kus reputable (decent anyway) names in DVD-Roms or should I buy a Liteon drive instead?

4. What's a good (or bad) brand in your experience for Hard Drives? Mostly the companies I am looking at are Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital and IBM and in the 80-120GB range.

5. For a sound card I am looking at either the Creative SoundBlaster Live! Digital Entertainment 5.1 OEM card or the Hercules Gamesurround MUSE 5.1 DVD card. Any other suggestions/comments on this or recommendations of other cards in the $50-100 (Australian) range.

6. Any recommendations on a motherboard (AMD chip)? Preferably including(doesn't need to be all) the following features: USB 2, Firewire (not essential, would be a bonus), 8X AGP, DDR333/400 RAM support, 333Mhz(?) system bus, LAN and approx 3+ PCI slots.

Thanks for any help. Once finished it should hopefully resemble the following specs:

AMD 2400-500XP
512 MB DDR 333/400
LeadTek 128MB DDR 4200 MyVivo
Creative/Hercules 5.1 Sound Card
80-120GB HDD
16X DVD Drive
48X12X40 CDRW
17" monitor

Cheers.

[Greg12]

1.) I dont' know anything about AMD chips, I use Pentium's.

2.) I'd say get the faster ram if you can afford it.

3.) I've heard Liteon's are really good but have you considered a DVD burner that would also be ur player. You could make DVDs.

4.) I have an Hitachi drive that works really well but it's only 20 gigs.



Why are you only getting a 333 system bus. Your gonna find your system get's bottlenecked because ur packing powerful parts and a slow ass system bus.

Get at least a 500mhz system bus, maybe even the new 800's if you can afford it.

I think your gonna hate your system if you get that slower bus.

[pacmania_2001]

Ah ok, I thought the 333Mhz was the fastest BUS.

I am going to get a DVD burner as the prices come down (still reasonably high in Australia) but for now going to stick with VCD/SVCD.

Thanks for the comments.

[pacmania_2001]

Just looking on the various computer store websites the fastest BUS (we are talking front side bus correct?) is 400 for an AMD board.

[mrtristan]

1. I guess that's up to you. I usually look at the prices of about four chips. I wait until the price difference between models gets to about $25 and buy the one below. Since you're upgrading from a 400Mhz celeron, I'm sure you'll be happy with either chip.

2. I've always stuck to brand name RAM. DDR400 is more expensive than DDR333, so I would get the PC2700 and buy more RAM. Either of the chips you're considering run at a 333FSB, so you probably won't notice much of a benefit with the PC3200. Faster RAM doesn't help with encoding times much, anyway.

3. Sorry, I can't offer much advice on this one either. I've had a Plextor drive for four years and it's still going strong. I've never had a problem with it and it's quiet. I put a Liteon in the computer that I built for my friend. He hasn't had any problems with it, but it's a little noisy.

4. I've stuck to Maxtor and IBM. I replaced a Maxtor drive under warranty. All in all it was pretty simple and I got a bigger drive in return, since they no longer manufacture 30Gig drives. My two other Maxtor drives haven't failed. I do a lot of capturing with my 120Gig IBM and it's running fine. I read somewhere that IBM is selling it's hard drive division to Hitachi. Probably a good thing.

5. I have a Soundblaster Live! card. Great sound, if you hook up some decent speakers.

6. The Asus A7N8X Deluxe board is great. I was going to use one, if I didn't go with a dual cpu setup. Here's two links to the 333FSB and 400FSB versions. There's a $10 price difference between the two. The board uses dual channel RAM, which is supposed to boost performance when running two identical sticks together.

Long URL 1

Long URL 2 -- edited because it caused display abnormalities in forum -- vitualis

[Greg12]

maybe you should look into Intel cause if your gonna be doing video work, sys bus is important.


I want one of those Springdale 800FSB chips.

You will want firewire in your system.

[freak_in_cage_10k]

the extra 10 bucks for the 2500+ is well worth it! especially considering it is very overclcokable, if you ever want to overclock it you will be able to do so with very little (if any!) increase in cpu voltage (therefore v little extra heat output!)

you need to give your hard drive more consideration! make sure its 7200rpm, with a large cache (8meg is gd), personally i think Maxtor, IBM and also seagate and western digi are good makes! also, if you are having an 80 gig then you may need a hard drive cooler, or at least good ventilation cos those drives run hot!!!

considering the increase in price is so small, u may as well get the DDR 400 stuff dude, try to get 512 megs, anythign extra aint worth the money! the brand of ram depends on the price difference, if its small then go for it, i think you will struggle to find generic stuff with is ddr 400 n e way.

if you can, save yourself a bit of cash and get the 64 meg version of your graphics card, the extra ram on the card does NOTHING!!! if anything it decreases performance a little!!!! the ti 4200 is a gd card though!

you could also save yourself a bit of cash and get onboard sound. usually this is a bad idea as it uses your cpu resources and isn;t as good as a pci card, but the one exception is the onboard sound found on the A7N8 Duluxe- its an expensive board but you doget the best amd board around, along with onboard sound (which outperforms the creative labs autigy 1, and is 5.1!), and if u ever want to get into overclcoking, this is the board to use!

my personal favourite with drives are the Pioneer DVD 120s (vvvv good!!! 16x!!) and the Plextor Plexwriter 52/24/40A CD-RW. they are the best around and pretty cheap! plextor are the best when it comes to cd-rw, liteon are cheaper though and still gd!

hope this helps!!! remember, getting Motherboard i said is well wiorth the cash cos u save the money on the sound, and u get a kick ass board!!!

[pacmania_2001]

I am going to get the DDR400 Ram in a single 512mb stick. I think I will ask around the staff at the store and see whether they recommend the OEM or Kingmax to determine which I buy.

I think I will also go with the Asus A7N8X Deluxe board. I wasn't planning on spending that much on a motherboard but it turns out cheaper because (like freak_in_a_cage_10k said) it saves you the purchase of a sound card. Also it will save me the cost of a separate firewire card.

Thanks for all the replies. If anyone else has any suggestions, comments or tips for other parts please keep them coming.

[freak_in_cage_10k]

m8- you will benefit from an increased bandwidth (therefore speed) if you get 2 sticks of 256 (as opposed 2 1 512 stick). if the price diff is v small this may be worth it- it makes a diff for games although i am not so sure about encoding etc- it certainly cant do n e harm!

im pretty sure the kingmax stuff is much better, although whether its justifiable depends on the price

cheers dude

[pacmania_2001]

Yeh, the main reason I am not going with the two sticks of 256MB is price.

I am not really that serious about gaming so the bandwidth issue doesnt really worry me that much.

Cheers.

[bigmicka]

3. i was looking for one of these over the weekend. i had read about the various models of the liteon rom drives and thought it would be worth the small investment. the local swap met at coburg was on and i bought what i thought was a 163 model but ended finding the 166s model in the box. first test started of at about 6x and increased to 12x as it progressed further out the disk. 3.9gb movie took 4min40sec. for $60 great investment.

mic

[pacmania_2001]

Yeh I think I might go the Liteon drive, only $4 extra then the 4Kus one.

[lingy]

steer clear of asus a7n8x these are not the best boards they cause problems with dvd shrink and dvd2one they re ok for normal use though i had 3 and they all went the same way with these excellent tools

[freak_in_cage_10k]

steer clear of asus a7n8x these are not the best boards they cause problems with dvd shrink and dvd2one they re ok for normal use though i had 3 and they all went the same way with these excellent tools

really? i had no idea- i suspect it is strictly with the asus versions though m8, pleanty of other manufactureers to choose from!

also, make sure you get the revision 2.0 duluxe version m8

[Ducatti20]

Never had a problem with Asus boards, especially the A7N8X. As freak said, rev 2 is the way to go. I use these boards almost exclusivly for my customers systems, little bit higher price but worth it for the perfomance options and little extra's on the board.

[lingy]

freak in a cage 10k and ducatti20 have you used this board to do back ups(dvd) i still have one and im more than happy to stay with a7n8x deluxe although its in the box at present but it does crash my system ive swapped every thing around then finally went on asus furum and there it was plain as day a7n8x crashes with dvd2one and shrink have you any ideas how to fix this seems you no so much about them ps i notice you both have a7v8x boards
regards
lingy

[freak_in_cage_10k]

lingy- no m8, i have never used this board with dvd2one- it may be a gd idea to go on other forums (eg epox) to find out whether epox a7n8x have similar problems, i doub they will though!

[Cobra]

I built my own PC up I chose the Asus A7N8X Deluxe with an Athlon 2600+ and 2 x 512MB PC2700 RAM modules. It works flawlessly - only managed to crash it once (using Operation Flashpoint) in the three months I have been using it. I run Windows XP on it.

In my opinion, that Asus motherboard is one of the best there is. Although, I have heard some great things about Gigabyte's motherboards, so it may be worth a look.

pacmania_2001, if you want me to send you full details of our system and how we built it, give me a shout. My e-mail address is cobradmx259@hotmail.com.

And remember! Invest £5 in a decent static kit - it's better than blowing a motherboard!

CobraDMX

(Forgot to mention, if you use MSN Messenger, I am sometimes on there too, might be faster than an e-mail)

[lingy]

cobra dmx have you used dvd2one then you havent said cause its shit with a7n8xdeluxe ive tried and tested it you havent have you

[pacmania_2001]

Has anyone else had any other problems with the Asus Deluxe board with any other applications? At the moment I wouldn't be using DVD2One so it doesn't bother me about that but if it causes any other problems I will probably look at another board.

@CobraDMX. Yeh, if you could send me some of the details about your system and any tips you have it would be much appreciated. My email is pacmania_2000@hotmail.com or just click the button above.

Cheers.

[rallynavvie]

To my knowledge there aren't many boards with onboard FireWire. I think whatever Sony uses in their systems has that. I think USB 2.0 and 8x AGP are getting more common as onboard options. Just make sure to have some PCI slots to use for those extras, the cards for them aren't that expensive.

I've had a LiteOn 163D and have a 166 and like them both. Either has given me in excess of 10x rip speeds, and the 166 has a much shallower profile in your case as compared to regular optical drives. The only complaint is they're a bit loud when doing high-speed rips. It sounds sort of like a jet spooling up. Not so bad when you're just watching a movie on it though.

I have a Hercules GameTheater XP 7.1 card that's absolutely fantastic. I had to go Hercules since the SoundBlaster equivalent was causing IRQ conflicts for some reason. The only hassle is the breakout box that has to tag along to other places with the PC if I want sound but when it's at home it fits in with the rest of the A/V equipment I've got next to my PC. It actually sits right on top of the stereo receiver it feeds into with its digital optical output. It has 1/4" headphone and mic jacks, coaxial stereo line inputs, 2 USB, and 1 parallel port on the front of the box and a whole host of I/O on the back. The cable to the box is obscenely thick though (I've nicknamed it "The Snake").

I use Maxtor and Western Digital IDE hard drives. I own Seagate SCSI drives and certainly wouldn't be opposed to owning an IDE drive from them. I think the 8MB cache ones are worth the little extra cash.

I'm a dual CPU guy so I don't know too much about singles. It seems to me that even though a P4 has a higher bus speed the AMD equivalent in clock speeds runs the same with less bus. Maybe the difference was pretty minute when I was testing those systems or maybe AMD has a different architecture that compensates for that.

Get a good case though. I'm partial to the Lian Li line of cases. Their aluminum towers have a nice layout.

[freak_in_cage_10k]

pc mania m8- bear in mind that although the Asus a7n8 duluxe may have problems with dvd2one, that doesn;t mean that Abit,Epox etc boards are going to have the same problem! it is quite possible that the problem lies just with the Asus version!

the 8 meg buffer or your hard drive is worth the extra money

an AMD 2800+ is just as good, if not better, as the 2.8GHz P4, a 2400+ AMD is as good as a 2.4GHz P4 etc etc

unless u r getting the a7n8 duluxe board dont use onboard sound! get a sound card, however, the a7n8x onboard sound is better than a lot of the autigy cards!

[pacmania_2001]

Ok, this is confusing me. I thought that Asus only made the a7n8 Deluxe board, but obviously this is incorrect, correct?

If so do they all have the same features as one another and around the same build quality?

On a side note: My 1000th post and first as a moderator.

Cheers

[freak_in_cage_10k]

congrats on the 1000th post/moderator honour thing m8! im a little under 1/2 way there dude

i have jus read wot i said earlier and it didn;t make sence lol

basically, Asus, Epox, A Bit, Chaintech etc all make motherboards featuring the N-Force 2 Chipset (and it is this chipset that u want not the fact that asus make one called the a7n8x). the name for the Asus' motherboard with this chipset is the A7N8X dulux. it is a popular version, but ABit currently have the most popular motherboard (with this up 2 date chipset called the )

so, basically, the good motherboards have the NForce 2 Chipset on them. Asus' are very popular, as long as it has the nforce 2 it will be a good performer man.

asus is the only one (on newegg at least!) that claims it has the soundstorm, but all the other boards have the mcp-t audio processor which means they all have soundstorm, they just dont officially say it (probably a patent thing man!)

check this out, for info on the abit version:

http://www.abit.com.tw/abitweb/webjsp/english/pt_main_back.jsp?pPRODUCT_TYPE=MotherBoa...DEL_NAME=NF7-S