Building a PC, need some advice.

[drothgery]

A lot of really good relevent information in these posts. drothgery, are those Athlon X2s for AM2 boards?

Yes; price is from newegg as of yesterday.

 

[ssampier]

Re-reading this thread is giving me ideas. I think I need a build a box to run Linux. For what, I don't know yet.

 

[XCorvis]

I'll second Rl'Halsinor's advice, especially #1! The power supply is badly underestimated by most folks. Also Schporto's good tip on Ars Technica's buying guides. I used Ars's guides to build my system, but I made a couple of tweaks to favor a quiet system. (See http://silentpcreview.com/ for great info.) I bought an Antec P180, which has been AWESOME. All kinds of noise-dampening features and very easy to use. The PS it comes with is a little light for a heavy gaming rig (only 430 watts), but it's very efficient and good quality.

I did go with an SLI capable board and one SLI video card, in case I want to expand things later. I suspect we'll see a lot more benefit from it when we start to see more multi-threaded games, but most likely I'll want to upgrade to a new DX10 compatible card when they come down in price.

 

[Rl'Halsinor]

I'll second Rl'Halsinor's advice, especially #1! The power supply is badly underestimated by most folks. Also Schporto's good tip on Ars Technica's buying guides. I used Ars's guides to build my system, but I made a couple of tweaks to favor a quiet system. (See http://silentpcreview.com/ for great info.) I bought an Antec P180, which has been AWESOME. All kinds of noise-dampening features and very easy to use. The PS it comes with is a little light for a heavy gaming rig (only 430 watts), but it's very efficient and good quality.

I did go with an SLI capable board and one SLI video card, in case I want to expand things later. I suspect we'll see a lot more benefit from it when we start to see more multi-threaded games, but most likely I'll want to upgrade to a new DX10 compatible card when they come down in price.

Thanks for the link. I am adding that to my favorites. Good stuff. And I think you are correct about seeing future benefits with SLi taking advantage of dual core chips but as you rightly point out by that time the DX10 will be fully realized!

A few questions, XCorvis, about the Antec 180. Is it true that they way they designed it that the power supply attachs to the bottom? Also, I want to upgrade my case for my steady, ever reliable Pentium 3 Asus board. Do you know if a P3 mobo should be able to mount in this case?

 

[XCorvis]

Eek! Brain fart. I actually have the P150, not the P180. Both are designed for silence. The P180 doesn't come with a power supply, so you can choose one.

From the Antec P180 web page, it appears that the power supply does mount on the bottom. It also fits "micro and standard ATX". Odds are that your board is one of those, but you should check that. Look up the model on the manufacturer website and see what it says.

http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID=81800#

 

[Bront]

I'm going to to be building a PC and was hoping to get some advice from those who know better than me?

I'm wanting to spend between $1,000 and $1,500. I want a mother board capable of dual video cards and dual processors, at least 1GB of memory and a couple high capacity hard drives put on a raid.

Don't bother with dual CPUs, either get a Core 2 Duo, or a Core 2 Quad. You'll get your two CPUs. They don't have a huge advantage in overall power though at the moment. Not only that, but you'll likely save $100 or so on the motherboard, and probably be able to overclock better.

As for a video card, you can get away with 1 Nvidia 8800 GTS 320 and get fantastic performance. It doesn't hurt to have an SLI capable board for later, but you'll crush almost anything out there graphicly with that (I think it's maybe 10%-15% slower at most to the GTX 768, AND it's half the price, and that's before overclocking).

The NVIDIA 680I chipset is top of the line for the Intel chip, so go that route.

I've been putting stuff togeather myself, so this is about what I'd look for on the Budget. All prices are at NewEgg.com
Core 2 Duo E6400 (1066 FSB. 2.13 Ghz) ($222, $0 shipping)
Sunbeam Quarterback IC-QB-SVBK Silver/ Black Steel Case (59.99, $15.69 Shipping)
ASUS P5N32-E SLI LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ($209.99, $6.94 Shipping)
GeIL 2xz1GB memory kit GX22GB6400UDCA ($164.99, $4.99 Shipping, Free 512 MB Sony Flash Drive included)
2 Western Digital 5000AAKS (500 GB drives) ($139.99 Each, $10 mail in rebate each, $0 shipping)
2 18X DVD burners with Lightscribe (Take your pick, run around $28.99 each with $5.64 shipping each)
OCZ GameXStream OCZ700GXSSLI ATX12V 700W ($139.99, $35 Mail in rebate, $0 Shipping)
EVGA 320-P2-N811-AR GeForce 8800GTS 320MB ($279.99, $20 Mail in Rebate, $613 Shipping)
Total is: $1,414.91 + 45.03 shipping - $75 in rebates = $1384.94
Specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.13 Ghz
2GB of 4-4-4-12 DDR2 800 RAM
1 GB SATA 3.0 HD (2x500 in raid)
NVIDIA 680I SLI motherboard by ASUS with 7.1 surround sound.
NVIDIA 8800 GTS 320 MB DX10 Video card.
2 DVD Burners
700 W SLI capable PSU
No OS.

Thing you can do to tweek the price:
Add a Soundblaster Soundcard (Adds About $100-200)
Cut down to 1 GB of ram (Saves about $70)
Swap 500 GB HDs for 250 GB HDs (Saves $60 each)
Drop one DVD Burner (Saves $35)
Go with a 550 ANTEC PSU (Saves $10-20)
Drop down to a 1.83 GHZ CPU (Saves $40)
Upgrade to a 2.4 GHZ CPU (Adds $90)

That case has gotten great reviews as a quiet case, and is priced well. OCZ PSUs are good, as is GeIL memory, and ASUS motherboards. I only use Western Digital HDs, because I've never had one die within the first 5 years (I've had every other brand die on me, I've been building computers since 1996). The dual DVD drives are good for disk copying, or burning multiple coppies, and stock cooling with this should still be quite quiet.

Hope that helps

 

[Bront]

I'm not a gamer, but I know who does:

Extremetech 'Bang for the Buck' Build

For those on a budget

Neither are the alpha or omega of builds, but I think they are good starting points.

They're old links. Most of those prices have droped, and some better bang for buck hardware has come out.

 

[Bront]

1. Whatever you do make sure you have a good power supply. I wish I had a dollar for ever person who spends big $ on hardware and then to save money goes cheap in the power supply unit. BIG MISTAKE. Your psu is your backbone for your entire system.

QFT!

Seriously, a majority of stability problems are caused by an underpowered or cheep PSU. Going overpowered will not hurt you, and will actualy reduce heat, AND a PSU not under heavy load will give more consistant voltage. Fluctuating voltage can kill your parts, even if you don't overclock.

2. Forget the dual card set-up. It is a waste of money. So is a dual card motherboard. The increase in performance is not that much. You'd be much better off with a good single card.

Ditto. A dual 8800 GTS 320 setup will do better than a single 880 GTX setup, but you're talking about spending $600 or so on your videocards at that point. It's a luxury, not a nessessety. The 8800 GTS 320 is fantastic, and at a good price point.

3. As for the dual core processors: YES! I like AMD but Intel's offerings just can't be beat. If I was going to build now I'd go with an Intel set-up.

Core 2 is the best bang for your buck, low and high end. We're talking 50%+ performance bost low end X2 vs Low end Core 2 Duo.

4. Why a RAID set-up? If you know what you are doing, then fine, but RAID has been known to fail. A good SATA drive will do you well.

Raid is nice and fast, but isn't always needed. Newer boards support multipe RAID types though. I recomend RAID 1 (Mirror) is good for safety on your system drive, and RAID 0 (Striped) is good for speed on yoru app drive. Just remember, you're exponentialy increasing your risk of data loss on your RAID 0 drive.

5. A minimum of 2 gigs of memory is the recommendation if you are a gamer.

You can get by with 1, but 2 will future proof your system for the most part. I highly recomend it any new system get 2 GB.

 

[Bront]

Just a few quick notes on what's changed since then...

AMD's continued to slash CPU prices, and has bumped up clock speeds, so now most Athlon 64 X2s are competitive with the Core 2 Duo in the same price range; the ~$225 model is now the 5200+, rather than the 4200+, which gets you another 400 MHz.

The price of their recommend video card -- a GeForce 7950GT -- has dropped slightly, and the 320 MB version of the GeForce 8800 GTS has been released at just under $300.

... and on what's likely to happen soon (in the next 3-6 months) in the consumer desktop space

AMD's ATi division is expected to
- launch their line of DirectX 10 video cards (Radeon 2xxx)

nVidia is expected to
- launch their midrange and low-end DirectX 10 video cards (lower-end GeForce 8xxx)
- possible release a tweaked high-end card, depending on how ATi's new cards stack up to the 8800 series

Intel is expected to
- make some small improvements to its high-end parts (move to 1333 MHz FSB, top-end model goes from 2.93 GHz to 3 GHz and uses less power)
- introduce a low-end, single core Core 2 variant (800 MHz FSB, 1 MB L2 cache) sold as the Celeron 4xx; this will replace the current Pentium 4-derived Celerons
- introduce a low-midrange, dual core Core 2 variant (800 MHz FSB, 1 MB L2 cache) sold as the Pentium E2xxx; this will replace the current Pentium 4 and Pentium D
- make some major price cuts

Just a note:

Unless something's release is within a few weeks or revolutionary, I generaly advise not worrying about what's coming out next. There's always something better on the horizion, so you need to know what you want and what you're willing to pay for, and go for that.

 

[IronWolf]

I only use Western Digital HDs, because I've never had one die within the first 5 years (I've had every other brand die on me, I've been building computers since 1996).

This is funny! Every computer geek I know swears by a different HD manufacturer. I tend to steer away from Western Digital because I have had their drives die on me. Whereas I have always had good luck with Seagates drives.