I’m about to start building my next computer from the ground up. I’ve got the parts more or less selected, but I’d like some feedback or, as the case may be, warnings about potential incompatabilities. I’m shooting for around $900 for the whole thing, so keep that in mind when suggesting alternative parts.
The following parts will be salvaged from my last computer:
CD-ROM: Sony (I think) 52x CD-RW: Pioneer 24x10x40 DVD-ROM: 16x (can’t remember the brand)
First and foremost, will these parts play nice together, or will there be conflicts? I had initially been considering the Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro, but opted for the AOpen after reading a recent Anandtech article on it and for price reasons; any thoughts? Also, the case fans I’d initally wanted (purple quad-LED Logisys 80mm fans) are apparently unavailable at the moment; any suggestions for a decent, cheap case fan? Finally, my last computer didn’t have any case fans, so I’m not sure about how to set 'em up. Do I connect them to the motherboard or to the power supply? Either way, will I need extra hardware to support 5 fans or are there enough connectors to go around?
I don’t know what the last computer you had was but the fan on my 8 month old athlon is extremely loud. Much louder than any computer I’ve heard before. Maybe you should consider a liquid cooling system?
5 fans are going to be pretty loud. I hope you can stand it. Most motherboards have at least a couple of headers for fans and that should be in the specifications. Have you considered an ATI based video card?
Good performance at a fairly reasonable price was my main motivation. Socket A processors are a dying breed; Socket 754 looks like it’ll be “value” line but will remain relatively upgradable in the medium-term. It doesn’t hurt that Microsoft just released a beta copy of a 64-bit Windows XP, either .
As for the water cooling, I’d love to, but the money isn’t here right now. It’s certainly an option sometime down the road. Really, though, I’ve grown up with the whir of computer fans; doesn’t bother me too much.
Seriously, though, the Athlon fans are LOUD. I could never hear my last computer (admittedly a P2) from more than four feet away; I can hear this one (Athlon 2600+ based) from the bathroom.
I’ll second Dutchboy’s comments. I have been into computers before processors even had fans and I’ll tell you that this sucker is LOUD. I may have to get water cooling soon, because this is almost unbearable now. Trust me Its too loud. Anyway, as as far as saying that socket A is going to be obsolete, I don’t really understand that. You know, I used to believe that it was smart to buy with the ability to upgrade. However, I don’t upgrade processors till the mobo is obsolete anyway, so I guess its pointless in my experience to buy with the intention of upgrading the mobo. I’ve never managed to keep the same one.
I’d suggest the Abit KV8-MAX3 motherboard, just based on the overall superiority of Abit boards. Also, I’d go with a Radeon 9800 Pro videocard. Geforce FX cards have rather poor DirectX9 support, which means their performance is weakest where you need it most: new games.
As for noise level, it all comes down to the fan chosen. Retail fans on AMD processors are as quiet or quieter than those on P4s. OEMs or end users can choose different cooling solutions, unfortunately it’s very common to get a dirt cheap heatsink and slap a loud fan on it to take up the slack. A good inexpensive cooler is the Thermalright ALX-800, with an 80mm fan that suits your needs noise-wise. A Vantec Stealth 80mm would be good.
AMD have a habit of releasing new CPU cores which run faster and can be readily overclocked, and then carrying this core down to older CPUs, and this keeps those systems based upon such CPU/motherboard&socket combinations more viable.
AFAIK this has happened with the Barton core where Duron Cpus have been upgraded, and the temptation to overclock is irrestistable since that core can run far higher than any rated Duron released.
Such a situation appears to be developing with the Athlon too, as the lower end 64bit CPU is apparently not very differant at all, it is easy to see how some of the memory management and larger cahce memory architecture could keep the XP3200 viable in the furture.
This to me os the whole beauty of AMD CPUs, you don’t necessarily have to replace your motherboard with every new core, wait long enough and they will update your existing CPU.
It surely makes financial sense too, it means you can have all your fabrication plants making just one core and yet provide products that can be sold to those who need to upgrade lots of older systems and at a more affordable level, thus you keep a wider customer base.
I’d probably set the 52X CD-ROM drive aside. You already have two optical media drives installed and the 52X would be redundant since you have the DVD-ROM drive to cover your CD / DVD reading needs. This will also leave you some room in case you want to add another hard drive to your system later on. When you set things up, you might want to keep the hard drive by itself on the primary IDE channel and put the DVD and CD-R/W drive on the second channel. You may not get optimal performance while doing direct CD-to-CD copies, but chances are good that you don’t spend a lot of time doing that anyway.
If you have the budget, why not spring for an internal DVD burner and scrap both of your read-only optical drives? This can come in handy if you want to back up your system to DVD instead of spanning a bunch of CDs.
Actually, CD-to-CD burning is exactly why I’ve kept all three drives. On my old computer, the HDD and CD-ROM were on the primary chain, and the DVD-ROM and CD-RW were on the secondary. It was the only configuration that allowed me to burn CD-to-CD in a reasonable amount of time and play DVDs as well (with the DVD-ROM on the primary chain movies were unwatchable due to skipping.)
I don’t have the money for a DVD+RW drive yet, but I’ve got my eye on the MSI DR8-A to replace the CD-ROM; it does well in benchmarks and only costs around $130. The case has four 5.25 drive bays, so I’ll have a little elbow room. As for the fan issue, I’m only planning on two case fans (intake and exhaust). If I have to get more for cooling reasons, which I don’t think I will, Logisys makes a neat 5.25-bay front panel fan RPM regulator that can manage up to six fans at once.
I’ll second the recommendation to look at an ATI 9800 video card with one caveat, ATI hasn’t released a (good) 64 bit driver for the Radeon series yet. Of course this won’t cause problems unless you run the 64 bit WinXP beta (and apparently the beta does include beta ATI drivers, though I’ve read that they’re not very fast). [discussion here]