Thinking of a new machine

jesus_thats_gre

Hi All

I know you get these questions all the bleeding time, but I am thinking of building a machine with the following components.

I do intend of overclocking too:

Antec Sonata Piano Black Quiet Case - 380W TruePower Silent PSU (CA-003-AT)
Asus P4P800S-E Deluxe (Socket 478) Motherboard (MB-052-AS)
Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz Boxed PC800 Socket PGA478, 1MB cache, Prescott
512Mb kit DDR PC-3700 EL Dual Channel Gold - OCZ__OCZ466512ELDCGER2-K
NEC ND2500A 8x DVD±R/±RW (Black) - OEM (CD-003-NE)
Western Digital Raptor 36.7GB S-ATA 8MB cache 10000RPM x 2
Western Digital Caviar 160GB Special Edition 8MB Cache Serial ATA - OEM (HD-012-WD)
Sapphire ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB DDR TV-Out/DVI - Lite Retail (GX-017-SP)
ThermalRight SP-97 (Socket A) Cooler (HS-013-TR)
Vantec SF12025L Stealth 120mm fan - Retail (FG-005-VT)

What do ye think?

Thanks

Dempsey

Are you planning to overclock? If not PC3200 will do

The ThermalRight SP-97 is for the Athlon Xp range. Look for a socket 478 one.

Everything else seems fine.

Love to get 2xRaptors raided myself with another 160Gb for storage:D

BloodBath

Aye it looks good. You are setting up RAID 0 with those raptors yeah?

The sp-94 is the intel version. It's the best heatsink you can get for an pentium4. Combine that with some artic silver 5 and a tornado 92mm fan and you will get a very nice overclock.


BloodBath

jesus_thats_gre

Yeah gonna raid the disk... I want Windows performance to be totally maxed out and any game to run well. I hate Windows slowing down and all..

Mutant_Fruit

just make sure you have a hardware raid controller. Dont let windows run it through software. That way if windows bugs out you don't lose all your info.

Plus hardware ones take away all that intense computational effirt windows would have to do if you ran it in software

jesus_thats_gre

Originally posted by Mutant_Fruit
just make sure you have a hardware raid controller. Dont let windows run it through software. That way if windows bugs out you don't lose all your info.

Plus hardware ones take away all that intense computational effirt windows would have to do if you ran it in software

This is hardware based yes?

Gerry

Nah, unless you splash out on a proper hardware raid controller, you will still have software raid. The onboard promise/silicon image/highpoint/whatever chip on your motherboard still leaves most of the calculations up to the cpu. The main advantage with having a software "raid" controller over having none at all, and just using windows built in support for raid, is that you can boot from the onboard raid controller. There isn't any performance benefit.

Slutmonkey57b

Currently prescott offers no performance gain, is priced higher and runs a lot hotter. Get an Athlon64 for a little more, or a higher clocked northwood for the same money.

Dempsey

I didnt see the Prescott bit either. Prescotts do offer slight increase on performance but only in a few applications. The price increase isnt worth it. Northwoods match Prescotts in most benchmarks and better for overclocking too, because prescotts run hotter at stock speeds.

Redrocket

or forget about intel and buy an Athlon 64? the integrated memory contoller will out perform the P4 in any game. yeah yeah the P4 is better at encoding who cares?

Mutant_Fruit

If you encode using Xvid rather than Divx you'll find the AMD's outperform Intels...

Its all to do with optimisations...

Dempsey

Originally posted by stevenk
or forget about intel and buy an Athlon 64? the integrated memory contoller will out perform the P4 in any game. yeah yeah the P4 is better at encoding who cares?

In the summer, with AMD changing their sockets and BTX coming out yer better off waiting cos the current 64's will become AMD's budget CPU's or even dropped, depending on sales.

The A64 doesnt overclock aswell as the P4 due to the lack of the AGP:PCI lock. P4's are cheaper and ill overclock to a better performance at the moment

Woden

the latest socket 754 motherboard on the nf3 150 chipset have working agp/pci lock anandtech had an article had a review where they got the fsb on a chip to 350mhz. thats fairly quality imo.

i don't think now is a good time to upgrade to a athlon 64 platform though with the socket 939 and nforce3 250 chipset on the horizon.

the prescott question is a tricker one. at higher frequency i think it is meant to outperform an equivalent clocked northwood but i've yet to see anything on that but i do think they overclock quite nicely as well as the northwood, but you will need some serious cooling on it and the thermalright is the way forward hear. the tornado fan recommend has massive airflow but apparently its noisey as hell.

there is also the new range of graphics cards comeing out soon, and the nvidia ones a power hungary swines, so while the antec sonata is a nice case and antec make great psu's 380w may not be massively future proof.

however ati's cards are meant to still have fairly regular power consumption 80w i hear for the latest X800's which is still capable of going in a shuttle. anyway just somethings to think about.

data

BloodBath

Well if he's buying now the prescott is not a bad choice. Depends if he is overclocking or not. If it's purely for gaming purposes and your not overclocking i'd say go for the athlon 64.

If you do plan on overclocking the prescott is good. At stock speeds at 2.8 the 2.8 northwood slightly outperforms it. This gap gets narrower as you go up to 3.0 and narrower again as you go to 3.2. They level out at about 3.4 and past this the prescott outperforms a northwood at the same speed.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1956&p=24

The prescott is a great overclocker. Better than the northwoods. You can get both chips up high but there is a greater chance of doing so with the prescotts. You have to get lucky with the northwoods.

Also the prescott has sse3 instructions and once they start being implemented into programs they will run a lot faster on a prescott than any other processor. The new version of divx will apparantly have sse3.

The 1mb of cache ain't a bad feature either.


I'd say get a 480w psu though just for the future, good makes are antec, thermaltake.


BloodBath

jesus_thats_gre

Originally posted by Dataisgod
there is also the new range of graphics cards comeing out soon, and the nvidia ones a power hungary swines, so while the antec sonata is a nice case and antec make great psu's 380w may not be massively future proof.

however ati's cards are meant to still have fairly regular power consumption 80w i hear for the latest X800's which is still capable of going in a shuttle. anyway just somethings to think about.

Yeah was considering that. The PSU will be replaced in the the long term to facilitate any graphics cards upgrades in the future.

Originally posted by BloodBath
Well if he's buying now the prescott is not a bad choice. Depends if he is overclocking or not. If it's purely for gaming purposes and your not overclocking i'd say go for the athlon 64.

If you do plan on overclocking the prescott is good. At stock speeds at 2.8 the 2.8 northwood slightly outperforms it. This gap gets narrower as you go up to 3.0 and narrower again as you go to 3.2. They level out at about 3.4 and past this the prescott outperforms a northwood at the same speed.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1956&p=24

The prescott is a great overclocker. Better than the northwoods. You can get both chips up high but there is a greater chance of doing so with the prescotts. You have to get lucky with the northwoods.

Also the prescott has sse3 instructions and once they start being implemented into programs they will run a lot faster on a prescott than any other processor. The new version of divx will apparantly have sse3.

The 1mb of cache ain't a bad feature either.

I'd say get a 480w psu though just for the future, good makes are antec, thermaltake.

Anything I have read about the chips have said the same thing! I read a reviews of the 2.8 prescott with the same board and similar RAM, and speeds of 3.7 are concievable with just air cooling. Above 3.0 GHz, the Prescott starts to come into its own.

jabaroon

Dataisgod, do you know when the nForce 3 250 is due out?....am stalling on my AMD 64+ purchase until I get a mobo that has the 250....but am gettin itchy!!

Ta,
Jab

Woden

hmm there seems to be two on kompletts website one with a back order time of 5 days what ever that means and another one that won't be around til early june so it seems to be about another month. these are socket 754 nf3 250 boards though i don't know when the socket 939 variants will be out though