One word of warning. When I built my system (last Feb), I discovered that I had to install the SATA drivers manually (Windows didn’t have them). And, they had to be installed from the floppy drive that came with the hard drive. Fortunately I had a floppy I hijacked from another PC that I hooked up just long enough to install the SATA drivers that enabled me to use the hard drive, but without it I would have had to have gone out and bought one. Also, any future HD format will require me to do the same thing.
How does the price of SLI + dual 6600 compare against non SLI + 7800GT an non SLI + 7800GTX?
I would be inclined to go with the 7 series cards rather than dual 6 series.
I agree with most of the feedback above, particularly Shalmanese’s recommendation of a 7-series card over the 6800 (or even two of them). (That said, I do agree with the selection of the Asus A8N SLI even if you’re not going to be running SLI off the bat.)
Windows XP 64 is a very bad idea, IMHO and IME. I have a 64-bit processor and XP 64-bit (got both as a package deal straight from AMD), and I haven’t had as many incompatibilities and system instability since Windows 98 pre-SE. This was with as many up-to-date 64-bit drivers as I could find, FWIW. I think I stuck with XP 64-bit for about two weeks before reinstalling Windows 2000.
I also question the selection of the 36 GB Raptor. It was king back in the day, but 7200-RPM drives have caught up to it (actually 7200-RPM drives may have caught up with the second-generation 74 GB Raptor). (Site to back up that statement, though in the interest of full disclosure, that’s something like a $400 drive.)
For your perusal:
Gaming performance of current-generation 7200 and 10k RPM drives. (Mind that this is the 74 GB raptor, which, IIRC, is markedly faster than it’s little brother.)
And file-system performance of the same drives.
(FWIW, the Hitachi T7K250 drives in those graphs sell on Newegg for $85 and $115 shipped for the 160 GB and 250 GB drives respectively, versus $108.50 for the 36 GB Raptor. If you need to shave a few bucks for a higher-end video card, this may be the place to do it.)
Also, you may want to tell us what you’re considering WRT the case. There are some Antec cases that have good airflow, good aesthetic design (of course YMMV), and high-quality power supplies with decent to good wattage. Of course Antec cases cost a few bucks more, but those bucks are well spent, IMHO.
Also, FWIW, while Eonwe’s warning is a good one in general, I had no problems with SATA support when building my Asus A8N-E based computer.
Great point. I had exactly the same problem when I built mine. Except, upgrading from a laptop, I had to go out and buy/install a floppy drive just to load a driver. :smack:
I am a small computer repair shop (very new, and minimally equipped beyond a few basics) but I do have spare NIC’s, a 3 1/2, a couple HD’s and some misc RAM.
I should actually break even for the first time this month… 
Now for some income 
The motherboard he is looking at using has two SATA controllers. One is the SIL controller, the other is the NVIDIA controller. The NVIDIA controller is the preferred one, and has a native driver that does not require a driver during installation of windows.
I’m running an A8n SLI deluxe motherboard myself.
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240-pin DDR2 RAM doesn’t fit in a 184-pin DRR motherboard.
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A 512 MB 6600 is a terrible choice. It’s a lot of wasted RAM on a slow card. A 128 MB 6600 GT will smoke it and cost less.
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36GB Raptor is a terrible choice too. It’s gimped compared to the 72GB version and you’ll find 7200 RPM drives just as fast these days with several times the storage space.
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Windows XP 64 has terrible driver support. Avoid it.
A similar question from me, if I might use this thread as well. I’ve ordered a laptop (for various reasons; I know I could get a desktop for much less) for normal use, some gaming (things like Civ 4, Call of Duty 2), and I want it to remain a reasonable spec for some time.
The company I’ve ordered from has two useful selling points as far as I’m concerned - free 3-year collect & return warranty, and a built-in recovery partition for clean installs of XP from boot-up. The other specs are:
Intel Pentum M 780 (2.26GHz)
2GB DDR2 533MHz RAM
100GB (7200rpm) SATA HDD
Windows XP Pro
8 x DVD Dual Layer (-/+) Writer
nVidia 256MB GeForce Go 7800 GTX
17" WUXGA+ X-Glass TFT Screen (1920 x 1200 Res)
In terms of specs, thats pretty much top of the line. However, IMHO, for laptops, the ancillary factors matter more. Service, build quality, keyboard construction, screen brightness and clarity, weight and overall usability. You have to buy laptops as a single unit so theres very little you can do to improve it after you get it. Plus, you would probably want to hang onto it for longer than you would a desktop so these things are important.
Cheers, Shalmanese. It’s intended to be a “blow the money now on something to last” purchase. I agree entirely on the ancillary factors, by the way; the manufacturer has a very good reputation for build quality and after-sales service, which is a must for me if I’m buying a laptop. The most detailed review I’ve seen is this one.
You would be better off dropping down to a Athlon 3500+ or 3700+, and putting the cash into a better video card. The Geforce 6600 is a low-midrange card; the 512MB won’t matter a bit, the GPU and memory bandwidth will be a bottle neck before the card uses even a quarter of that memory. I would suggest a Geforce 6800GS or 7800GT if you can swing it.
And, as mentioned above, Athlon 64’s need 184 pin DDR memory, not 240 pin DDR2. Don’t bother with fancy, expensive low latency memory, unless you plan to do some serious overclocking; regular stuff like Corsair Value Select will be just fine, with almost no performance differences in real world applications.
Just to defend the choice of hard drive - the Raptor makes a huge difference when the OS loads as well as during the loading of maps(a common thing in any MMORPG) so it will make an impact. Thats also why you should always have your OS on the fastest drive.
I agree about the video card - 512mb is a bit of an overkill for todays games
Ditto about the number of pins on the ram you want
The older Raptor isn’t really faster than today’s 7200rpm drives, at least at load times - Cite. The more recent 74 GB Raptor barely beats out the other 7200 rpm drives, by just a couple seconds. Also, 36GB will fill up quite fast, given how large today’s games are. My FEAR, NWN, & Steam folders are each over 4 GB, BF2 2GB, CIV 4 1.5GB, and so on.
On the video card, it is not exactly 512MB being overkill for today’s games, its just you have to have a powerful enough GPU to match - todays high end GPU’s have 2 to 3 times as many pixel pipelines in their GPU, as the 6600, and are higher clocked, to boot.
I can’t really speak for the 36gb one, but since I got myself the 74gb model I’ve gotten visibly faster load times in quake4, battlefield2,DOD source and win2K(seconds instead of minutes to turn on/shut down). I only have a gig of 2100 ram so the Raptor’s 8 mb of cache might be why I am seeing such a huge difference, but I feel its definitely worth the $150 for a 74 gig OEM one.
For your PSU, I’d get one from a reliable manufacturer with rock-solid power; you don’t mention a brand name and that worries me. Fortron is a regular top finisher in power supply showdowns, and the big one that Tom’s Hardware did proved that Fortron knew their stuff.
You’re making an interesting mistake with the RAM, because AMD systems don’t support DDR2 yet – you’re looking at 240-pin RAM for a 184-pin motherboard! Get any of these (DDR 400 or PC3200, depending what you choose to call them) and choose a reliable brand (Kingston, Viking, and Corsair are all good).
I wouldn’t bother with 64-bit Windows; games aren’t optimized for them yet, nor are the drivers. Your graphics card (no matter which you buy) will probably run slower on Win64 than it would in WinXP, and might be buggier and crashier. Ditto your motherboard drivers. Putting 64-bit Windows on a home-brewed machine this soon is asking for a system with Gremlins pre-installed.
Speaking of video cards, I’d go with a 6600GT at 128MB (in fact, I just made that same trade-off about two months ago) or even a 6800 at 128MB. 512MB of RAM will be wasted if your pipelines can’t keep up. Don’t bother with two cards or SLI mode - the marginal benefit doesn’t justify the cost. Unless you’re paying the premium for a 7800 and it’s still not fast enough, doubling up cards doesn’t make sense financially. Like the rest of the peanut gallery, if you’ve got money to burn, hop into the 7xxx series to get the extra pipelines.
I’d also look at incrementing to the Manchester or San Diego CPUs for more cache, although I honestly doubt he’ll be thrashing the CPU that much.
Everyone else has said what I was going to say about the hard drive. You can get a 10K drive in the 74GB size that will be fine, and then a 200GB 7200rpm drive for miscellaneous storage / backups.
On preview, Palooka and I seem to be sharing a brain today.
Overkill for what else you’re having. Buy lower now, upgrade later. And get a quality brand - don’t skimp.
Good manufacturer. Consider a Crossfire motherboard. Also consider he DFI LAN Party boards.
Good choice.
2GB is good. But is this the right type?
A good choice for a low-end rig, something you’ll upgrade in 6 months, but you should not skimp on this component. Go for a 7800GS
Not worth the extra cost. And they’re noisier and hotter. Get a bigger, slower HDD. And get two of them to put in a RAID 1 mirror. HDDs are cheap.
I must disagree. There’s nothing quite like a floppy in an emergency. Get a USB one if you can’t stomach an internal one.
DVD Writer, please.
For those on the bleeding edge only. Give it 6 months. In the meantime get the 32 bit XP Pro.
I note that you haven’t mentioned a case. Since this is a gaming rig, you might want to think about transportability, in which case you might switch to a Micro-ATX or mini-ATX motherboard. I’d suggest Shuttle but that would probably exceed your budget. Anyway, with a small case, noise and heat are important.
And what about the monitor?
It’s not so much transfer speed as latency that is important with todays drives. The 10K RPM drives will always have better latency just by simple virtue of physics. While it may not show up in benchmarks very easily, overall, it will just feel faster and less sluggish.
He said in a later post that he’s planning to use a Power Magic. A quick check shows this PSU to be in the $15-20 range. When I see that kind of price on a 550W PSU, flashing red alarms start going off in my head.
When I built my Athlon 1800+ with a GeForce3 Ti200 and 1GB PC2100 almost four years ago, I purchased a supposedly high wattage power supply in that price range. After a month or two of mysterious and mostly random reboots, I finally wised up and got an Enermax. My problems were solved.
Cheap power supplies provide unsteady voltage which promotes unsteady operation and can even damage system comonents. CPUs are especially picky about that kind of thing. Bargain PSUs also frequently fail to live up to their wattage claims.
Besides price, a generally good way to judge the quality of a power supply is the weight of the unit. Better PSUs have bigger transformers, thicker wires, and bigger (and more) capacitors to adequately smooth the voltage.
I built a nearly identical system four years ago… with an equally crappy power supply! No surprise then that we had the same results. If only these results had been published before then. Tom’s Hardware recommends Fortron, Verax, and Herolchi.
They also list brands that are likely to fail loudly, with smoke and possibly fire, if loaded to 100%. I’ll let drachillix skim the article for these counter-recommendations. :eek: