Advice on building a computer.

In My Humble Opinion
1

It’s been three years since I built a new machine, so I’m a little out of the loop. I’ve done some minor upgrades here and there, but my current machine has pretty much reached it’s limit (besides, I could use another machine around the house)

Mainly, I use my machine for RPGs and Civ type games. I also get into making MP3s and maybe some video editing soon (VCDs). I don’t really have a budget, but I like to buy decent parts for a decent price. Leading edge technology tends to make my wallet bleed too much for my tastes.

Here is what I was thinking of…

Motherboard: Soyo Dragon 2 w/intel 865pe chipset
Is this a decent chipset? Would a lesser chipset suit me better?

Chip: Intel p4 about 2.2 2.6 or 2.8
I’m an intel gal, so it may be hard to sell me on AMD.

Memory: 512 of something
I need some education on memory. I don’t have a problem finding something to match the motherboard, but I don’t know what would be best. Do I even need more that 512? Do brand names matter anymore?

Sound card: Creative Labs ?
Not too sure yet. I’m limited on speaker space, so a really nice card may be lost on me since I don’t have the room for the speakers that would do a high end card justice.

Video card: GeoForce4 128 ?
I’m not playing video hungry FPS’s, and I don’t play DVDs on my PC. I want something decent that won’t make my wallet bleed. Do brand names matter here as long as it’s nvidia chipset?

Case: Some type of MidTower
I don’t need anything fancy, just decent. I have no clue on what capacity power supply I need. I’m clueless on what type and how many fans to cram in one either.

Hard Drive: EIDE 60gig
I think 60 gig is sufficient. I have 40gig now, and I’m not short on space. I was thinking Maxtor, Western Digital or Seagate. I’m kinda clueless on the specs for access time or rpms.

Monitor: 17" w/trinitron technology
I don’t have room on my desk for anything bigger and I sit kinda close to the monitor anyway. 17" seems to be fine

CDRW: A decent Plextor
I’ve had good luck with my current one, so Plextor it is.

OS: Win98se ?
Here is where I really need some advice. I currently use Win98se and I like it. I keep my drivers updated, and I rarely have crashes. It seems to play nice with all my games as well. I don’t see a need to move to WinXP right now, but I’d like to hear any arguments on why I should upgrade. My concerns are game compatibilty, and that whole ‘registering the OS’ thing. (I hate the idea of it) Plus, it’s be another $200 something outta my wallet.
Okay, that’s about it. Is there anything else I need to be concerned about? Any advice or opinions on my choices?

2

You said that AMD hardware would be a tough sell, but I’ll say that the Asus A7N8X mobo is mighty sweet, and AMD processors are cheaper than Intel. I love the Deluxe model of the A7N8X because it comes with onboard dual Ethernet, Firewire, USB 2.0, and quality onboard sound, among a long list of other features. It’s also quite reasonably priced if you shop around.

For the video card: If you really need the best 3D performance possible, the expensive Radeons are where it’s at right now. Personally, I would go with a mid-range Radeon, but that’s just me. Between the mid-range nVidia and ATI cards, it comes down to what you prefer. You probably won’t notice much of a difference. Some of the Radeons can do some nifty video input and output.

On the video editing front: Get as much memory and hard disk space as you can afford. It should also be as fast as possible. A gig of RAM doesn’t cost a whole lot more than 512 megs. A seperate hard disk for the video editing is recommended by my friends who are more hardcore about it than I am. For doing short clips with simple (read: cheap) video editing software, I get by just fine with a seperate partition on my 60 gig drive.

OS: I personally love Win2k Pro. Rock solid stable and cheap now that XP has been out for a while. No registration issues like with XP.

Standard notes about buying parts online: Always, always, check a site like resellerratings.com for information about any online retailer that you might be buying from. Many of the places with the cheapest prices also have the worst ratings. I personally prefer newegg.com because they have great reviews and good prices, and they’ve always come through for me in the past.

3

The 865PE chipset is a fine choice. You’ll not go wrong with one of these. You may not need it now, but it’ll have more “legs” for future upgrades.

RAM’s pretty cheap now - I just picked up 1 GB of Mushkin’s “Blue Line” DDR for $150 on one of their specials. I wouldn’t go with any less than 512, at any rate. Do check that the RAM you’re about to buy is qualified to work with the motherboard - there have been some compatability issues.

“Decent” cases - Antec’s got two pretty popular ones at the moment - the Lanboy and the Sonata. Both come with power supplies and can be found at Amazon. I wasn’t too keen on either’s styling, so I went with a Lian Li PC-7B case and an Antec True Power 385 W power supply, which will be fine for a hard drive and two DVD/CD-RW drives.

Hard drive - for regular IDE, you can’t go wrong with Western Digital’s Special Edition “JB” line, which spins at 7,200 rpm and has an 8 MB cache. With the 865PE chipset, Serial ATA, or SATA is an option, but what I’ve seen so far is the current drives can’t physically pull data off the platters fast enough to really make SATA’s speed increase useful. In two years, this will likely be different, but, since you bought the 865PE board, you’ll be ready for it.

Optical drives - What can I say? You already know what’s good. :slight_smile:

Sound - most new boards have some sort of sound built in, so unless you need every last CPU cycle or want ultra-high quality, you don’t need to buy a Sound Blaster board. Of course, you can easily add one later if you desire.

Video - you’ll probably do fine with an nVidia Ti4200 or 5200. You can find either for under $100. Side benefit is these boards will have smaller or no fans compared to the high-end boards, making the overall computer quieter. Some of the high-end boards have been compared to leaf blowers and small jets.

OS - If you don’t mind buying the OEM version, you can get it for $140 or so - you just need to buy it with hardware.

4

Motherboard and CPU - I don’t know much about Intel machines - I would go witha AMD 2500+XP and an Asus A7NX8 Deluxe Motherboard. The AMD processors easily beat beat Intel machines on price per performance. The 2500+ is less than $100, while a 2.4ghz P4 will run $150 for the 533mhzFSB or $170 for the 800mhzFSB version. The 2500+ also overclocks really well; many people get them running at 3200+ speeds will little problems.
The A7NX8 Deluxe has really good onboard sound, easily matching a Creative Audigy card, saving you money there. The built in LAN ports are good too.

Memory - Go with Crucial or Corsair. 512 Megs should be more than enough. Get the PC3200 type RAM.

Video Cards - Both Nvidia and ATI make top rate cards. Don’t get the Geforce4MX. For your needs, a Geforce4 Ti4200 would be enough, or maybe a Radeon 9500 or a Geforce 5200 Ultra.

Case - not too familar with good power supply brands, but get at least 350 Watts, if not 400 or more. Stick as many fans as you can tolerate the noise from into it.

Harddrive- try to get a 7200RPM disk with 8meg cache. A 80 Gig drive is only marginally more expensive than a 60 gig, so you might wanna look into that. Western Digital has worked well for me.

Monitor - your choice is good.

OS - WinXP has worked very well for me - vastly more stable than Win98se, and it handles large amounts of RAM better. Plus XP home isn’t more than a $100. XP Pro is only needed if you need advanced networking abilities or want to build a dual proc machine.

Also, I highly reccomend www.newegg.com for finding your computer parts.

5

Thank you all for the input so far. These are the types of opinions and explanations I’m looking for.

Newegg.com seems to come up alot when I search through pricewatch.com. I’ll take the advice on running any others through resellerratings.com before I order from them.

6

If you do go AMD, which I strongly suggest, you can get a motherboard based on the nForce2 MCP-T chipset which will feature excellent onboard sound. The Asus A7N8X Deluxe v2.0 board is good, as is the Abit NF7-S v2.0. I prefer Abit, but there’s nothing seriously wrong with the Asus for casual use. Make sure you get a v2.0 board if you care about CPU upgradeability, as the original A7N8X Deluxe and Abit NF7-S feature an older version of the nForce2 chipset which doesn’t support AMD’s newest CPUs. The Asus A7N8X (non-Deluxe) and Abit NF7 (non-S) do not feature an onboard sound chipset.

On either Intel or AMD motherboards, DDR RAM is installed in pairs for optimal performance. 512MB of RAM should be more than enough for you, so you’d get two 256MB sticks of DDR400 (PC3200).

As for videocard, I’d suggest the ATI Radeon 9100. They only cost about $60, while providing excellent image quality and the capability to watch DVDs or play games, should you decide to do that at some point. Brand doesn’t matter, as long as it says “Radeon” and “9100” somewhere, it’s all good. You can substitute the Radeon 9000 Pro if you wish, but stay away from the Radeon 9200.

As for the HDD, I suggest the Western Digital Special Edition series. These drives are nice and fast, and more importantly offer three year warranties. Warranties on HDDs industry-wide have been dropped to one year, except on the high-end models.

I do suggest you make the upgrade to Windows XP. Not many hardware manufacturers still offer Windows 9x support and drivers, and XP really is a lot better.

Otherwise, you’re pretty much all good. I prefer Lite-On drives over Plextor, as they’re cheaper and more reliable, but Plextor is OK.

7

Okay, here is something I had no clue about. I was going to go out and grab one big stick of 512mb. But now it looks like that would be bad? If it is supposed to be installed in pairs, why does it look like my motherboard has three slots for memory? Shouldn’t it be an even number?
I’m not doubting you, I’m just confused. Or am I just confused on what memory my MB takes. ( here is the soyo MB I was looking at) Maybe I should download the mb manual real quick and read up about this before I go ordering parts.

8

You might profit by reviewing the recommendations on

http://www.sharkyextreme.com/

They periodically make recommendations on components to
use to build a “high end” or a “value” gaming machine and there is a link to the latest article on the main page of the web site.

9

For a lot of good information on memory, you can check out crucial.com. They are a maker or various types of RAM, but I’ve found there to be a lot of good general purpose advice on their site.

10

Hey, don’t forget speakers. I just bought some Klipsch 2.1s and they are really nice. I am an AMD fan myself, all of the last 5 machines I built are AMD. You can use the money saved on going with AMD and use it for the speakers.
My video card would be a NVidia TI4200 and I really like XP. It has been a lot better than 98 for me.

11

I haven’t run across an 865PE boqrd that didn’t need RAM in matched pairs.

Forgot to say last night - if you’re not planning on overclocking, and just want a stable system, have a look at Intel’s D865PERLL or D865PERLK boards. The PERLK has, among other things, Firewire, a bejillion USB ports, SATA RAID, integrated audio (off the top of my head, can’t remember if it’s 5.1 or 6.1 channel) and Gigabit Ethernet. The PERLL has all that except the Ethernet is plain ol’ 10/100. Either can be had for roughly $120-140

Also, www.anandtech.com has reviews of motherboards, drives, video cards, etc as well as discussion forums.

12

I am in an almost identical situation as you. My 1.2Ghz T-Bird has given me a few years of great service, but I am porbably going to go back to Chipzilla.

My tentative specs are:

Abit IS7-E

P4 2.6C or 2.8CGhz @ 800Mhz

1GB PC3200DDR

I will be utilizing my existing hard drive, GF3, case and power supply.

13

I will just chime in to say that AMD is superior, IMO, to Intel if for no other reason that cost. As far as performance goes, your average user will probably not see a difference in speed between an Athlon XP 2200 and an Intel 2.2 GHz, but the AMD will cost less (and yes, I know that technically the 2200 won’t actually run at 2.2 GHz, but I believe that it is still the equivilent of an Intel 2.2 GHz, right?)

Oh, and the GeFroce Ti4200 is a great video card. It’s not top-of-the-line, but it is one of the best values out there right now.

14

AMD vs Intel
I guess my adversion to AMD comes from years of reading game forums. When AMD started to get more market share, I would often see posts in gaming forums related to bugs in games that only AMD users had. I know that it’s been a few years since I’ve seen these types of posts, but the bad taste kinda stuck.

I guess I really don’t have a reason to mistrust AMD anymore, and I know that they are cheaper. I’ll run the numbers on my proposed set-up. If I see a price that’s substancially different between the AMD and the Intel, I’ll have to give it some thought. If the difference is only marginal, I’ll probably stick with Intel.

15

On Intel boards, its fairly critical that you install DDR400 RAM in pairs, otherwise performance will be severely compromized. I’d THINK the board should still work, just at fairly reduced speed. On an AMD system it’s less important, as installing RAM singly will DEFINITELY work. There’s less of a performance difference too, generally about 5-10%, though hard 3D rendering tasks can benefit by up to 20-25%.

A note on Intel chipsets: The two current models are i875P (Canterwood) and i865PE (Springdale). i875P features Intel’s Performance Acceleration Technology, or PAT, which offers a 1-10% performance improvement. i865PE is a good bit cheaper than i875P. Otherwise, the chipsets are identical. Some manufacturers claim to have enabled PAT on i865PE chipsets, but this is akin to overclocking and will void your warranty, as well as making Intel “very, very disappointed in you, young (wo)man.” :wink:

16

To add to what indyz said: if you plan on editing or processing video, plan on two big hard drives.

I run two 40’s and I still find myself running low on space and wishing for more speed. Here’s the problem: if you upload an hour or two of DV from your video camera, you are going to be handling files that are several gigabytes in size, per file. If you need to do any processing (such as resampling or stripping out the audio channels or whatever), you are going to be copying HUGE files. Bouncing between drives is the only way to go for this kind of stuff.

Even messing around with VCD’s or SVCD’s means you are throwing around 700MB files – tiny compared to DV, but still big enough to merit dual drives.