Computer geekery

[plonq]

Here is my current shopping list (subject to tweaking here and there prior to purchase).


Sorry guys, no Mac for me this time around.  I'm open to ideas and suggestions if you've had good/bad experience with any of these, or think I'm setting off in the wrong direction.

Motherboard:
ASUS -- (A8V-E-DELUXE) (VIA K8T890) AMD SOCKET 939 / 8 CHANNEL AUDIO / DUAL CAHNNEL MEMORY / 10-1000MBPS GIGA LAN / 8X USB 2.0 / SATA / RAID 0,1 / IEEE 1394 / (3 PCI / 2 PCI-EX1 / 1 PCI-EX16 / 4 DDR 400 / MAX 4.0GB MEMORY)
CPU
AMD --  ATHLON 64 (3200+) SOCKET 939 (64 BIT) (RETAIL W/ COOLER) (3 YEARS MFG WARRANTY)
Memory
2 x Generic --  PC-3200 DDR (400MHZ) 512MB W/O ECC
Video
Sapphire --  (RADEON X800 PRO-VIVO) (RETAIL) 256MB DDR / PCI-Ex16 / TV-OUT / VIDEO-IN / DVI
Hard Drive
Seagate --  (BARRACUDA SERIAL ATA V) 200GB (8MB) / 7200 RPM (SATA) (5 YEARS MFG WARRANTY)

The two components I'm wavering on the most are the CPU (I'd save $60 going with the 3000+) and the video card (because there's a question of availability).  I'd love to go with an X850, but I'm not eager to part with big dollars when I'm pretty sure an X800 will meet my needs for a few years.

Comments

[kfops.livejournal.com]

I've always had a really positive experience using ASUS motherboards, they're my first choice in building machines... and often times I'll wait to get an ASUS instead of buying other brands.

As far as the CPU goes, do you think you'd miss that 200Mhz? With $60 you could buy yourself a lot of bread, eat that and then as you're falling asleep everything would seem a lot faster! Sometimes it's just as easy to buy the slower chip, save the money and then at some later point when prices have fallen just do a big chip-swap for something with way more than 3200.

Personally, I'm sort've a Kingston RAM guy, but obviously a lot of folks don't want to shell out for that, which is understandable.

Looks like a pretty good shopping list to me, either way!

[plonq.livejournal.com]

I've gone ABIT for my last two motherboards and they've never steered me wrong in either case. Unfortunately none of the local suppliers are offering up much from ABIT these days. Ah well - nobody ever got fired for buying ASUS. Failing that I'm somewhat partial to Gygabite for some reason, and not even entirely put off by MSI lately.

Whatever became of Soyo? They seem to have fallen off the radar lately.

[kfops.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've heard good things about ABIT, too.

I just got a bit of a grump-o on for at one point I did an upgrade and my wholesaler was having trouble getting the ASUS board that I wanted. He recommended another brand... can't remember off the top of my head what it was now (and it's probably best not to mention anyways, lest the name sticks), but it was a rather well-known name.

No end of problems!

Once bitten, twice shy, I guess.

[plonq.livejournal.com]

Do the letters ECS come to mind?

[gedrean.livejournal.com]

*cackles* You got bitten too!

[plonq.livejournal.com]

Indirectly. I've been called upon more than once to help out friends whose ECS motherboards self-destructed on them in fairly short order. I don't know what their current fare is like, but their earlier boards were trash.

[furahi.livejournal.com]

I'd never had any problems with ASUS either...
except..
My K8N-E's onboard NIC seems to be dieing ;_; I just bought the thing in January -.-
Sure, warranty would be nice if a trip up to the US wouldn't be more expensive than getting a new motherboard here :P

I think Soyo went out of business

[plonq.livejournal.com]

I had toyed with the Nvidia chipset motherboards, but unless things have changed, the Via ones have typically been more stable - albiet a percent or two slower.

[anthony-lion.livejournal.com]

If I were to set up a new desktop/tower I'd scratch that S-ATA disk and instead get hold of a couple of 10K or 15K Ultra-SCSI disks.
Three or more of those, connected to a RAID controller does wonders for the overall speed of the system...
At work, old PIII/500MHz servers with 256MB RAM and serving 100+ users are just as responsive as 1GHz+ desktops with 512MB RAM.
(Servers run W2K, PC's WinXP Pro)

With todays fast processors, the only REAL performance-bottleneck today is the relatively sloooooow HDD speeds.

I recently replaced the HDD in a 386 portable with a CF-card, and it now performs almost as fast as a Pentium based laptop when running Win3.11

[plonq.livejournal.com]

I can get a 200GB Barracuda 7200RPM 8MB cache drive for CDN$147.95

I can get 4 of those and RAID them for just under $600.00

I can get a 146.8GB Seagate Ultra SCSI 10K RPM 8MB cache for about $809.97

If I go with the 15K RPM that jumps to about $1957.99

That doesn't include the cost of the controller card.

If I was looking to run a server with 100+ users to it then I wouldn't even hesitate to buck up for Ultra-SCSI. It wouldn't even be a matter for discussion. On the other hand, am I really going to see a 7.5x speed improvement at 10K, or an 18x improvement at 15K when I'm surfing the web or playing Counter-Strike?

[anthony-lion.livejournal.com]

I guess, not having to sign the bills helps...
(That's my boss' job :-)

But even getting a stack of 36GB SCSI-3 drives and RAID'ing them helps to increase speed... (In a raid you don't always need the largest drives)
A pity that all the 9 and 18GB SCSI-2 drives I have laying around at the office won't fit in my PC... (HP Hotplug drives) I even have decent RAID controllers for them. Maybe if I take the drive-bay out of an old server and taped it to the top of the maxitower...
Would probably have to replace the PSU, too.

[tamarik.livejournal.com]

What type of RAID are we talking about here? RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5?

[anthony-lion.livejournal.com]

We only use RAID 5.

If the server is speck'ed right, and has a decent controller, the users won't notice any lag if a disk fails.
If there's one thing I've learnt it's that server disks do die.
(They run 24/7 after all, and never go into any power-save modes)

[tamarik.livejournal.com]

Don't go generic on the ram. It looks like you're putting together a gaming system and there's nothing more aggrivating than trying to peg down a memory problem.

I highly suggest going with Corsair's pre-paired packs. I'm running some of their 3200 and I can overclock the ram waaaay past spec and not have a prime95 hiccup. It's too bad I got shafted on the processor and can't get it above a 10% OC. Check Newegg on the price of the Corsair, they typicall have damn good prices.

The 3200+ is the way to go as far as CPUs. The HTT on it clocks at the easy-to-calc 10x, so if you ever want to OC the processor, they're really simple to do.

[plonq.livejournal.com]

From their web site:

"Newegg.com does not currently ship internationally; we only deliver to locations within the United States and to Puerto Rico."

OC is not a big concern for me at this point, but my figuring is that if that changes down the road, memory is one of the easiest parts to replace if that's what's standing in my way.

[gedrean.livejournal.com]

http://www.crucial.com/ Much better value for ram. generic ram sucks. Also, look towards the nForce4Ultra boards, tehy've been very awesome

[plonq.livejournal.com]

What advantage does the nForce4 offer over the K8T chipset?

[tamarik.livejournal.com]

They don't suck.

Seriously, VIA chipsets are nothing but trouble. I've never had one that didn't require some kind of voodoo to get running stable. Meanwhile the nForce chipset systems I've built have been the closest damn thing to plug-and-play for PC systems I've ever seen.

[plonq.livejournal.com]

I've never encountered any stability problems with the VIA chipset. I've done some more reading since last night, and it appears that the nVidia chipset motherboard outperforms the VIA one on most fronts - though the authors of the report were quick to point out that this was only at maximum stress levels on both chipsets. In RL performance there is very little difference.

My main reason for going with the nVidia-based one would be for the SLI feature - though that would be a matter of future expansion. I'm not about to plug in dual 6800 cards just now. The nVidia board also costs 30% more, so I have to weigh whether it's worth paying 30% more to get a feature that I may never use.

[anthony-lion.livejournal.com]

What's an SLI feature?
(I'm a bit out of it when it comes to what's the latest and greatest buzzword... )

[plonq.livejournal.com]

The short answer is that it supports dual GPUs.

[anthony-lion.livejournal.com]

GPU?

Not CPU?

You mean that they support two graphics cards?

Well, the Desktop PC I use at the office recently got a ATI Sapphire PCI card with dual connectors.(One 'VGA' and one of those newfangled 'loads of tiny pins' connectors)
At the same time the 19" Sony Trinitron monitor was swapped for two 19" Sony TFT monitors...
I disabled the built-in card, though, but a colleague says it can use that, too, but it will slow the system down a bit...
(He tried)

[tamarik.livejournal.com]

Most all systems support two video cards, however newer nForce4 systems support dual 16x PCI-Express GPU's that work in tandem for 3d acceleration and such. Kinda like the old Voodoo2 SLI...

Addendum

[plonq.livejournal.com]

... though I admit that I'm definitely leaning toward the nForce one just now in spite of the price difference.