New PC Advice Sought

kayos

Right folks due to the fact I now have a BattleField Vietnam addiction I'm on the market for a new PC So far heres what I have spec'd

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3200+
GPU: PowerColor Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB
RAM: 2 x DDR PC400 512MB TwinMOS CL2.5 (for RAID 0)
HD: 2 x SATA Samsung Spinpoint 160Gigs
PSU: NorthQ NQ-4001BL 400W (17dB)
MB: MSI MS7030 K8N Neo Platinum

Cooling bits:
CPU: Zalman 7000A AlCu heatsink
GPU: Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer R3.0

My main question here is on the mainboard, I'm changing my mind every time I read a different review comparing the Abit KV8-Max3 and MSI K8N Neo Platinum mainboards. I my eye's the pro's of each are

Abit Pro's:
The Abit Max3 board has an extra SATA RAID Controller.
All the temp/fan speed/voltage monitoring in windows.
Abits good name

MSI Pros:
GigE is built into the chipset itself (better network perf and less CPU usage)
Built in hardware firewall.

And I'll be honest the Abit comes with some nice goodies(Secure IDE to keep all my pr0n sorry I mean work safe ) and software. Where as the MSI is lacking in that respect. Both boards support Cool n Quiet and both boards seem to be working fine if you overclock the chip to around 2.2 Gigs on standard cooling (I wonder what I'll get with the cooling bits above). The Asus K8V SE Deluxe was in the picture till I saw a review where they where way down in performance against the other two boards.

Any one have any comments and the above spec and more importantly on the mainboard? Also any comments on Jes-Computers would be good to cause thats where all this will be coming from.

Kayos

Creamy Goodness

abit and msi are both very good brands.

i havn't used msi myself but i have used abit for my p4 build. i have to say the package i got with my motherboard (IC7-G Max2) was unreal

1 rounded floppy cable
2 rounded IDE cables
2 sata cables
1 IDE - SATA convertor
2 molex - to sata power connector convertors.
and loads of other things.

on another note i've never heard of that brand of psu before. i'd contact col_loki before purchasing as he knows his **** about PSU's

believe me i've have had bad experience with psu's before and imo they are the most important part of any pc. if it's not powerful enough it can blow and take your whole system with it.

ARGINITE

go with the abit board if you cant wait other wise wait a little while till the new socket 939 are around and pci express.

kayos

Originally posted by ARGINITE
go with the abit board if you cant wait other wise wait a little while till the new socket 939 are around and pci express.

The 939 platform is out of my budget at the moment with the cheapest CPU I can find (3500+) for them coming in at twice the price of the 3200+ on the 754 platform. Although if I can find it a bit cheaper it would be nice to have Dual DDR with the AMD64's built in memory controller . The mainboards are pretty much the same price so its just the CPU prices thats putting me off the platform at the moment.

The Abit board does have a slight problem with the DIMM slots as the AGP slot is placed a bit close and might take one of the DIMM slots out of action depending on how big the Video card is. Also the CPU positoin is meant to be a bit tight with the standard heatsink so I dont think the Zalman will fit. Heck I think I've just answered my own question .

The NorthQ PSU is reviewed over on the german Tomshardware site and there was nothing bad said about them in fact from what I can make out they rate fairly high.

Any way keep the comment coming lads they are all welcome..

Dempsey

Go for the Abit board.

Never heard of that PSU Brand

Get a Thermalright HSF and a 92mm fan. I used a SP-94 on my P4 and the CPU dropped 5'C Idle and 13'C Underload compared to the Intel HSF

Everything else seems in order.

Col_Loki

That PSU might be dodgy, ive also never heard of that brand.

On the motherboard thing, if your thinkin of overclocking then you have to go with the Nf3 250 chipset........ ie the MSI. While i really like Abit motherboards, Im not a fan of VIA chipsets and this wont do you any favours for overclocking.

2.2 Gigs on standard cooling (I wonder what I'll get with the cooling bits above).

With no PCI/AGP lock you will get the same 2.2ghz and then your hard drives will get corrupted or something along those lines.

The NF3 250 motherboards have the PCI/AGP lock .

kayos

Hmmm the more and more I read the more it seems no 754 mainboard has got it right just yet. Acording to many the Abit KV8Pro is the one to get for the OCing side of things (http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjI5) heck 2.45Ghz out of a 2Ghz chip, I wont be saying know to that. But again they used a prerelease bios so I'd be waiting for that to be released before I'd be bringing it up that high (seemingly out this week). I've seen loads of complaints about the MSI K8N aswell in terms of memory support, not being able to install windows and other problems... For each board ppl are either complaining or saying they are the best..oh this could take a while to make up my mind but so far the KV8Pro and the 3000+ is looking mighty interesting..

As for the PSU which do you recommend? I was going for that PSU as it has a 120mm fan and the connecter for SATA on it, plus is fairly damn quiet. but on the same hand I dont want to be returning it to germany if it goes pop!!

Col_Loki

The KT800pro is supposed to have an AGP/PCI lock but i havent seen one with one yet (havent been looking majourly hard either). The BIOS release might be a good key to that then, but it means waiting before getting the full overclock.

Abit boards are brilliant, from that point of view i cant fault it.

As for the PSU which do you recommend? I was going for that PSU as it has a 120mm fan and the connecter for SATA on it, plus is fairly damn quiet. but on the same hand I dont want to be returning it to germany if it goes pop!!

The 120mm fan versions dont mean its silent. It can in fact be noisier than double fan versions.

In general the manufacturers will claim that the power supplies are much quieter than they actually are. Alot of them come with variable fans and adjust the speed according to the stress on the PSU..... thus can be silent while browsing the web and noisey when playing a game (where its less noticable). General problem is people with higher power needs as the fans will be running faster when idle.

There is a great and safe mod you can do to the fortron 120mm's so that they run the fan at 5v which is extremely quiet and still cools the PSU decently...... i will add much more info on this later on.

The quietest are Zalmans, be-quiets, some Antec's (especially the 380w single fan version - fitted to the sonata).

[just a copy and paste from the link in sig] .

kayos

Right after much thought this is what I'm going for..

ZALMAN CNPS 7000A-Cu
MSI MS-7030 K8N Neo Platinum
HDD SATA 160GB Samsung SP1614C 8MB
128MB Powercolor Radeon 9800 Pro RTL
CPU AMD Athlon 64 3000+ OEM
DDR PC400 1GB Mushkin Dual-Kit Level 1 (CL2)
Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer Revision 3.0

Along with a Aopen DVD/CD Combo and a Antec Sonata case from Elara.

I was looking to get a termialright SLK heat sink along with a 80mm Papst fan but Jes are out of them at the moment and I'm putting the idea of any big overclocks on the back burner till its needed i.e. if Doom 3 / HL 2 need more power then I'll OC it. I should be able to get 2.2Ghz out of it and still remain nice and quiet with all the above.

So any other advice for me ppl?

silverside

Looks good.

I would get the OEM instead of the retail version of the graphics card, and get a DVD burner instead of a DVD-CDRW. Sonatas are great cases.

I would also get an IDE drive instead of a SATA drive.
SATA is more expensive and more hassle, for not much if any performance benefit. Granted the cables are neater but until SATA support is included in Windows, I would wait.

SATA drives still need drivers, and AFAIK are IDE internally with a converter chip, so that the effective transfer rate is around the same.

silverside

Just to let you know, I am running an AMD64/3000 in a Sonata with Thermaltake silent boost cooler. CPU temps are around 38C idle/net browsing/playing music (with the fans running slow), they get up to 46/47 when gaming. The Zalman should get you even cooler than that. Make sure you install 'Cool n Quiet' dirver which underclocks the Athlon64 dynamically.

Thats with 2 hard drives and a 9800pro , with no extra fans apart from the stock 120mm rear one.

Col_Loki

Good choices, will make for a very nice system. 2.2ghz should be no probs prob .

Id stick with the SATA for a couple of reasons, there neater, there more future proof, there hot swapable, slightly faster, and you can Raid them with your onboard controller at a later date.

Its definetly a pain that you have to install drivers, make sure you have a floppy drive even if its only a spare that you can use for a few mins. You will need it for the SATA installation and also for flashing your BIOS.......

Definetly go with a DVD burner, there only €70 , the combo drives are a waste of money and DVD blank media is cheap. I have the LiteOn 8x one and its very very quiet, great drive and i love it. The NEC 2500 is also a decent option, although i found the NEC's a little noisier.

astrofool

get a sata drive. IDE ports will be disappearing off motherboards soon (as in over the next year or so, intel only has one on their new ones).

kayos

I'm deffo not going for IDE drives. The SATA as Col_Loki said can be used in a RAID Array on my MB (the two 160Gig spinpoints will be going into a RAID 0 array).

The OEM Version of the Powercolor card is not available on JES but still the retail is cheap enough and cheaper than on Komplett by around 20yoyo's.

I shall not be fitting a floppy drive to my PC (its like so 90's ). I do however have access to a couple of them for initial set-up. I wonder would sticking all those drivers on a USB drive be a good idea...

I'm not interested in CD or DVD burning atm so a DVD and CD combo drive is all I need. I'll go for a burner when I need one and the prices are a bit cheaper (i.e. give dual layer another while). I think the 320Gig's of disk space wil keep me going for a while without needing to burn any form of disc...

@silverside what mainboard are you running? Any problems with it? Does the PCI/AGP Lock work on it?

Batbat

The main thing to worry about is your GPU and your processor, the Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB is a good choice for the price, Im running BF Vietnam with that card at high resolution with max detail

Re CPU any P4 2400+ will do, I would not recemend AMD 64 atm, the current crop of motherboards dont make good use of it so Ive heard, wait till later in the year or get a cheap P4

silverside

kayos:
Asus k8vse deluxe. Works like a dream. I dont think there is a PCI agp lock on it but i am not interested in overclocking anyway : If I need more performance i'll just add an x800 when they become cheaper, or install 64-bit-XP when it comes out.

Windows XP setup NEEDS a floppy on initial setup if you have a SATA drive. (well maybe if you try really really hard you could do it from a usb key thingy or slipstream the drivers onto CD). Why not install a floppy? it is handy if you want to reflash your bios/dvd/gfx card. and it's hidden behind a panel on the sonata anyway.

silverside

well there is one *tiny* problem. The onboard sound doesnt work when I have a PCI soundcard installed. It would have been handy to use the onboard sound for listening through headphones, and the PCI soundcard for speakers, but no-can-do apparently.

Col_Loki

The OEM Version of the Powercolor card is not available on JES but still the retail is cheap enough and cheaper than on Komplett by around 20yoyo's.

Think he ment the Sapphire "lite" version for €195, also a good choice.......... either or, if tomb raider is worth the extra then go with powercolor if not then sapphire is a better choice (cheaper).

well there is one *tiny* problem. The onboard sound doesnt work when I have a PCI soundcard installed. It would have been handy to use the onboard sound for listening through headphones, and the PCI soundcard for speakers, but no-can-do apparently.

Did that ever work for you? You could always use the front port audio if you have it on your case?

silverside

Col:
well the front port onboard audio worked until I installed the standard driver for my soundcard. I would hook up the soundcard to the front ports, but I don't think there are any pin-outs on the card itself.

kayos

Originally posted by Batbat
The main thing to worry about is your GPU and your processor, the Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB is a good choice for the price, Im running BF Vietnam with that card at high resolution with max detail
Re CPU any P4 2400+ will do, I would not recemend AMD 64 atm, the current crop of motherboards dont make good use of it so Ive heard, wait till later in the year or get a cheap P4

Horse's for courses and this horse is expected to run in the BF Vietnam hurdle at 15:45 and not the workstation stakes at 16:30 . I'm not going forking out for an Intel system for games when the AMD's are generally better for gaming. Any way the AMD64 3000+ is 100yoyo's cheaper than a P4 3.2. So on the ROI front the AMD64 wins by a lenght in my eye's.

The retail version of the Powercolor 9800Pro is 199 on Jes so its only 5 yoyo's in the difference..

@silverside Ya that board is pretty rock solid alright but I'm looking for a bit of an overclock at least so the PCI/AGP lock is something I need. I could wait till Abit sort out their probelms with the KV8Pro but from what I'm reading ppl are having to RMA their boards to get them work and thats just paying more money for something you already paid for imho. You pretty much have the same idea as me on the whole performance side of things going for this set-up will at least let me upgrade to a 3700+ on the Socket 754 board and of course the addition of XP64 and the higher end AGP cards will give this system a bit of life in a couple of years time.

Col_Loki

well the front port onboard audio worked until I installed the standard driver for my soundcard. I would hook up the soundcard to the front ports, but I don't think there are any pin-outs on the card itself.

Ahh, well that makes sence . If you only have 2.1 speakers then you could always get one of those switches which takes one input and two outputs........ some speakers have a headphone jack built into the front of the speaker, nice touch.

The retail version of the Powercolor 9800Pro is 199 on Jes so its only 5 yoyo's in the difference..

The price must have come down in the last couple of days. In that case powercolor / saphire are both good..... makes no difference really !!

You pretty much have the same idea as me on the whole performance side of things going for this set-up will at least let me upgrade to a 3700+ on the Socket 754 board and of course the addition of XP64 and the higher end AGP cards will give this system a bit of life in a couple of years time.

If the AMD64 754 sells pretty well then AMD will have no choice than to produce higher speed chips for the socket. Its quite possible the Socket754 will last longer than 3700+. ..... will just have to wait and see.

No rig is bought today is going to be that upgradable in a year or two's time, with socket changes, PCI-E , DDR2, BTX , SATA2, lol its crazy. but for gaming AMD64 is a good choice, and also seems to me to be more upgradable than a P4 at the min.

kayos

Well all the parts have been ordered so hopefully I should be putting this system together some time this week with the help of Bosco.

I actually went for the MSI 9800Pro video card as it was only 180 when I placed my order last Thursday, I check today and its goen up to 200 . I also dropped the zalmann as seemingly it's a bit of a bugger to fit to the MSI board (you have to go pulling bits of the mainboard).

I'll post up some stats once I have everything up and running and have it burned in with some serious battlefield vietnam playing :P.