ChrisChennell

Reet. I finally found a game I want to play that my old athlon 700 cant cope with, so im planning to put together a new computer. I used to have a small business selling this kit, but that was a couple of years ago and havent kept up with the technology since. Ive put together a spec, but would appreciate someone having a look, as I know all too well the pita it can be when you buy something and it suddenly stops being supported / wont work with another bit of hardware etc. etc.
Looking for something that can handle games, programming and abuse and will last for about 5 years. By abuse i mean not religously cleaning registry every 2 seconds, not cleaning out the dust very often etc.

Spec :
550w psu
athlon xp 2800+
thermaltake venus silent boast heatsink & fan
samsung 512mb ddr400 ram (x2)
Asus 4x dvd rewriter (assume it does cds as well!)
sapphire radeon 9600xt 256mb ram
seagate 120gb 7200rpm 2mb cache hdd
sound blaster 5.1 digital sound card (cheaping out here a bit)
Inspire 6.1 6700 speakers
Asus a7v8x-x motherboard
and a black casecom case... if it matters
3com 905c 10/100 lan card (from current pc)

planning to use kb/mouse/monitor/fdd and an additional cdrw from current pc

BMWhere?

PSU sounds a bit OTT. I only got 450W for a dual processor AMD with 1GB RAM, 2xHDD, CD-RW, DVD, floppy, AGP GFX, TV Card, Firewire Card, Sound Card, Network Card + USB devices and thats playing well on the safe side and have no probs. With the spec you suggest I would think 300W would be enough, 350 would be well on the safe side for expansion, although check the recommended supply from the manufacturer.

I would also seriously consider going for a P4 with 800MHz FSB. Firstly, these days big increases in processor speed result in little overall performance improvement unless programs are running in Cache (larger cache is better). In reality, theres so much task switching and swapping out to HDD from the OS that the cache is rarely used. Particularly with games where theres lots of different code being run every time. A faster FSB will improve the time taken to access RAM and I/O devices (HDD etc.). So 333MHz to 800MHz FSB will make a bigger difference in real life performance than 2.8GHz to 3.2GHz CPU. Secondly, it would seem many driver writers never test on AMD machines, the result is lots of PC lockups I prefer the AMD chips, they're much more efficient then Intel's and I hate to support the corporates, but all my pentium machnes are very stable, but my AMD machines all have driver related problems problems

cong

right here goes dont buy the athlon...........
get a athlon 64 bit 3200+processor and 754 motherboard ddr500 ram at least 2 x 512mb ram so you get duel channel, 9800xt graphics card, dvd -+rw 8x, lan and sound built in are quite fiine and the rest is upto you want. give me a shout if you want help building a beast of a machine

ChrisChennell

I refuse to give in to the wintel lifestyle!... although i might if its cheaper. Im not going to go for the top of the line processor because you get raped over the price, its like half the price for a marginally less good processor. who makes the 754 motherboard?

cheers for the help
Chris

Rob Walker

I've just upgraded mine at the weekend..for unreal tournament out next week

went for a shuttle with an athlon xp 2500+... overclocked to 3200+ easy :-)
160 gig hd att 133 8mb cache
radeon 9600xt with 128mb ram (including halflife 2 voucher, which was nice!)
1 gig ram
8 * dvd writer

does the job nicely!

jason4656

i would go with a prescott chip 800 fsb with 1mb level 2 cache, not to expensive right now, you can get a 3.0 for around 190 quid i think when i priced it up the other day. Would also go for 1gb dual channel ddr 400. pioneer or lite on 8* dvd+-rw. Seagate 160gb hdd with 8mb cache quite cheap and very quiet, i just got one, cant even hear it where as the maxtor and wd ones are SOOO noisey. As for mbs, I would go with gigabyte usually, but been looking around at a few different ones lately, cant see i see any reason to change

cong

athlon 64bit 3200 proccessor 1mb l2 cache are £164 and motherboards are £65
cheap or wot?

ChrisB

Wouldn't touch a Prescott based P4 with a bargepole.

Uses too much power, generates too much heat and offers no real performance over the Northwood P4 when compared at the same clock speeds.

Athlon64 at 3000 (512k Cache) is very tempting at present.

9600XT is a good mid range card but I wouldn't expect it to cope with games for five years.

jason4656

there seems to be about 10 different versions of the new athlon chips, talk about confusing, even to me who has worked with this **** for years!!

jason4656

thats a pretty bold statement, whats ur source of information??

personally i have had no problems with them, to much heat? nothing that a nice heat sink cant deal with, uses to much power? had no problems running them on 350w psus? Is there some bad write ups about them somewhere?? Personally dont rate athlons at all, but not to sure on the new range of cpus

ok i just did a little bit of reading up to clarify this thread, yes the prescott will run a little hotter, however nothing to much to stop you from buying one. However it seems the performance over the northwood is negligable and in most cases on benchmarks the nwood came out on top, only a few of them showed the prescott to be better even though it had 1mb l2 cache.

But i must say that on about 90% of the benchmarks shown prescott came out on top of the A64, apart from a few games.

So i guess my conclusion is depending what you want to do, if you want to play games like splinter cell, quake, unreal tourn, then A64 would be good, if not then at this moment, northwood still seems best, but the prescott is far from **** and i would still consider buying one

swaussie

wow, as many opinions as hardware choices. Best thing to do is figure out exactly what you want, when you want it and to read a lot.

The AMD and Intel in reality might give you a few frames per second more here and there in different games, nothing you will really notice. Both do roughly the same job and both have plus and minus points.

The PSU is probably a little over the top, max you might need is a 450 watt but this depends how many Hard Drives you have, DVD burners, type of graphic card etc, again working out your specs and finding the wattage usage of the devices and buying the appropriate PSU is the best bet and you will very rarely run max wattage on any device.

HDD, you are probably better looking at a SATA drive at the moment with an 8Mb cache. Slightly or much faster (depending what article you read) and future proof.

Graphic card, why not try to pick up a 9800Pro? If you dont need bleeding edge and want something that will last a while yet, have a read about these. They will play any game on the market TODAY (not saying in a year or two's time) and you can get one at a good price. The 9800XT is really an overclocked version of this ( a few bells and whistle added on but much the same ).

If you can wait a few months a new range of devices will be coming out, namely PCI Express, 64 bit processors, DDR2 ram, but all this will cost good money as it will be premium stuff for a lot of months.

But like I said, do a bit of reading and make an informed choice for yourself, not what someone else thinks is best as everyone has an opinion on what is best but everyone has different needs

ChrisB

Easy to find information on how hot the Prescott runs

HardOCP measured a 3.2Ghz at 162 deg F under load with Intel stock air cooling

Once Intel can get it up to 4Ghz+ then I'll have another look but at around 3Ghz I see no advantage in going for the Prescott (unless you want to heat your house with it )

Slightly more specialised review / tests of a Prescott in a Shuttle SFF unit here.

Geddon

Personally I prefer AMD chips due to hating the 'do do do ding' intel advert
I would recommend 2x Maxtor 120gb SATA discs and stripe themwith RAID 0. You may as well make the most of disc speed if everything else is fast.
ATI graphics appear to be the way forward.
Gig of Ram is essential.
Have an nforce ASUS board myself with 2 built in 10/100 lan cards, on board sound.
Oh and get a 17" or 19" TFT if you havent already

Graz

Well here is what I'm putting togther for my new machine:

ASUS A7N8X-E-Deluxe nForce2 Motherboard (x8AGP+Gbit Lan+6Ch Sound+SATA+1394+SATA-RAID+USB2+WiFi port)
Athlon 2500+ Barton (Should overclock to 3200+ if I feel the need)
Corsair TWIN-X Memory 512Mb (2x256)
160Gb SATA HDD
Plextor DVD Burner
Sony DVD ROM
Hercules Radeon 9800SE All in Wonder Video Card (hopefully will softmod to a 9800 PRO)
19" Iiyama Vision Master Pro 454 Monitor
Logitech Cordless Desktop MX

A bit over £900 for all that lot. I've never been a great believer in paying a premium to have the latest, fastest processor. I can drop a 3200+ into this at some later stage when the price has dropped. After that a new motherboard and processor for A64 or Pentium.

Think I'll try a process of continual upgrade this time rather than keeping a machine for 5 years+ and finally getting fed up with it being too slow. Softens the financial blow a bit.

Graz

ChrisChennell

Cheers for all the feedback -
As per the advise ill ditch the ott psu - I knew it was ott but they cost so little and I dont know the power requirements of stuff currently - my 700 athlon runs off a 300w psu so i thought 2800 would want a lot more.

Im also choosing a different motherboard as my friend who just got one of the ones ive picked out is having troubles with it. Im going to get a board with decent onboard sound and ditch that creative 5.1 card

Regarding graphics cards - i think i was a little unclear on my requirements here. I dont expect to be playing games at full resolution with perfect graphics in 5 years, but i do want to be able to play them. I dont think this is too unreasonable considering ive had a diamond viper 2 32mb in my pc that is only just giving up on playing games and thats mostly down to a total lack of software support for it.

Also going to find a hard drive with an 8mb cache.

and go for a full gig of ram.

And ive decided not to step out of the athlon fold, but i do need to know what are the current versions to avoid - about all i know at the moment is that celeron started out meaning s***e and now means about the same. And duron was its equivalent for amd. So what are the ones to avoid.

Cheers

Dr Nick

Hi Everbody!

OTT PSU only a problem if you intend to leave it switched on all the time I guess, otherwise, if its cheap why not.

I note rob is getting UT2004

I am currently running the demo on my PC which I upgraded recently.

I can tell you it really blazes away at 1280x1024. I get about 5700 on 3dmark03

My spec is currently

p4 3.0ghz
2x 512 mb memory
800 mhz dual channel 745 (i think) mobo
Radion 9800ultra gfx (Sapphire I think was the cheapest at the time)
seagate 7200 rpm hard drive
onboard sound card

Regarding the soundcard I used to have an audigy in there. but it is so unstable. So I took it out. No performance hit and everything works fine.

Of the above, I would say that the things most important in the performance of my PC are: fast gfx card, fast processor, fast fsb. Memory is probably OTT because I am running Windoze ME.

Cheers

Graz

I got DDR 400 too! Okay the 2500+ Barton is 333MHz but I also intend to have a fiddle with the FSB clock at some stage.

Now come on Scan wheres my bits, delayed due to unexpected order volumes indeed!

Rob Walker

I bought corsair valueselect and an xp2500+ barton as well

Upped fsb from 166 to 180
upped cpu voltage a notch.

and bobs your uncle.. 3200+ in 5 minutes.. not even tried pushing it any further.
Ran a prime number test and the cpu temp was hitting 50. not bad

Dr Nick

Getting a bit off topic I know but what sort of score are you overclockers getting on 3dmark03 with your oc'd AMDs?