First self made system, feedback please

Trebor

i've decided i want to build my own pc. this is the first time i've done this so i'm a bit worried i'll miss something. anywho heres what i'm thinking of getting, any feedback or suggestions would be great:

AMD Athlon 64 3700 Retail / Asus A8N-SLi Premium / 2GB Corsair XMS PC3200 Dual Channel Kit - Bundle (BU-026-OK)
Corsair 2GB DDR XMS3200C2PT TwinX (2x1GB) CAS2 (MY-079-CS) 1
AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego 90nm (Socket 939) - Retail (ADA3700BNBOX) (CP-121-AM) 1
Asus A8N-SLi Premium nForce4 SLi (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-111-AS) 1
£387.85 £453.79

Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 NCQ 300GB ST3300831AS SATA 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-021-SE)
£83.75 £97.99

Sony DWQ30AB 16x16 DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter (Beige) - OEM (CD-045-SO)
£24.50 £28.67

Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music - Retail (SC-034-CL)
£77.50 £90.68

OcUK Value Estar Benz Case Silver With 350W PSU (CA-001-ES)
£24.95 £29.19

either

BFG GeForce 7800 GT OC 256MB GDDR3 VIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-010-BG)
£199.95 £233.95

or this

HIS Excalibur ATI Radeon X1800 XL 256MB GDDR3 AVIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-042-HT)
£194.95 £228.09

G L193ST 19" LCD TV Monitor (MO-040-LG)
£340.95 £398.95

i've left the prices in sterling as i'm living in scotland and am having it sent there.

so what do you think? is it a decent system or should i be spending more on some things and less on others?

astec123

"Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 NCQ 300GB ST3300831AS SATA 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-021-SE)
£83.75 £97.99 "

By the looks of the system you want a lot of power, you would get even better proformance by having a RAID setup of 2 smaller drives!

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html

There are loads of guides on the web to setting RAID arrays up. Well worth it as you get even faster boots and games like half life etc get much faster accesses especially on RAID0. The down side to RAID0 is that both drives hold the same data, aka one drive is the same as the other and you miss out on the extra space. But then 2 200gb drives are fairly cheap these days. However if you really want the full load of space get a 120/160gb and 2 80gbs for the raid setup, then the OS and apps go on the raid drives and media and what not that doesnt need to be on the main drive on the large storage one, also placing the page file on the media drive will mean even faster speeds when bottlenecks do occur.

A

Spear

Trebor wrote:

OcUK Value Estar Benz Case Silver With 350W PSU (CA-001-ES)
£24.95 £29.19

£30 quid for a 350W PSU and case is looking for trouble. Get a decent 450W or so from a reputable producer.

Personally I'd go for the BFG 7800GT OC, as I have one myself.

Domster

Since it's your first build, you might not want to go for a RAID ARRAY yet. But I what I would go for is one of these.
They're highly rated and you mobo supports SATAll.

Now, your're buying an SLI mobo so I take it you'll want to add a secong 7800GT to the mix later on when their prices have gone down a bit. Well, 350W just won't cut it. I'd go for at least a 450W PSU.

Also, buying a case and PSU together is not something I'd recommend. You should be looking to buy them seperately and look to spend at least €60 or €70 on the PSU alone. When PSUs and cases are sold together, they usually stick in a cheap old PSU and for the system you're looking to build, that's askin' for trouble.

Or you could get this.

It's quality made and it's from Antec which I'd call a reputable company.

Trebor

Spear wrote:

£30 quid for a 350W PSU and case is looking for trouble. Get a decent 450W or so from a reputable producer.

any reccomendations on a case and PSU? or how much i should be looking to spend. some of the 450 ones are about £100 on overclockers

Domster

Oh....and one other thing.

Why the sound card? Are you big into your music? If so, then that card will do just great but if you're not, then why not save yourself £90 and stick with the onboard sound that's already built into your mobo.

Trebor

Domster wrote:

Since it's your first build, you might not want to go for a RAID ARRAY yet. But I what I would go for is one of these.
They're highly rated and you mobo supports SATAll.

Now, your're buying an SLI mobo so I take it you'll want to add a secong 7800GT to the mix later on when their prices have gone down a bit. Well, 350W just won't cut it. I'd go for at least a 450W PSU.

Or you could get this.

It's quality made and it's from Antec which I'd call a reputable company.

is there much of a differance between the sata and sataII? the prices are similar and i would be losing 50 gigs.

the tower looks good bit pricy but i supose it has to be done if i want everything to work

why would i want to stick another 7800GT into my system? i'm not up to date with this PCIe stuff yet so if you could explain the basics that'd be great

Trebor

Domster wrote:

Oh....and one other thing.

Why the sound card? Are you big into your music? If so, then that card will do just great but if you're not, then why not save yourself £90 and stick with the onboard sound that's already built into your mobo.

i very rarly listen to music but i plan on watching lots of dvds through this system onto the lcd tv monitor so i thought i might need a sound card for decent sound. will the onboard sound be good enough?

astec123

why would i want to stick another 7800GT into my system? i'm not up to date with this PCIe stuff yet so if you could explain the basics that'd be great
-having a second GFX card is useful as it means the work load is shared, on the 7800 having two at the moment is pointless really as the advantages are too small. But having the option to go SLI is useful for futureproofing.

As for the soundcard, well its a nice one but needless if you are only going to be using low end speakers. You wont notice the difference between the sound card and on board unless you are a real audio perfectionist.

As for SataI and SataII the hard drive choice here isnt as important in my opinion as the other parts, however I still advise a RAID config as not matter what anyone tries to tell you it isnt that hard to do.

Spear

Trebor wrote:

any reccomendations on a case and PSU? or how much i should be looking to spend. some of the 450 ones are about £100 on overclockers

For a decent 450W power supply you'll probably be looking at €100 or so. I personally stick with Antec, but other will have their preferences.

I'd suggest trying the onboard sound before ordering the Audigy X-Fi.

You could stick in another 7800GT to run them in SLI which can heavily boost speed.

Trebor

ok i can lose the sound card then. i could then buy 2 of these for raid:

Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10 NCQ 80GB 6L080M0 SATA 8MB Cache £39.89

and keep the Seagate for storage. afaik raid is easy to set up. you just plug both hard drives onto the raid ports and i think you then just have to change a setting in the bios and then it does everything automatically from there?

conzy

Those Hdds are only SATA and only have 8mb cache and if you use raid0 you only get half the total capacity 80gb+80gb / 2 = 80gb
Thats not a lot of storage and those hdds will bottleneck that system

Try and get 2 Sata2 Hdds with 16mb of cache..................

Oh you have a 300gb hdd for storage, well why not get a single raptor for your Os and the 300gb for storage

Spear

conzymaher wrote:

Those Hdds are only SATA and only have 8mb cache and if you use raid0 you only get half the total capacity 80gb+80gb / 2 = 80gb

RAID 0 is striping and will give a single 160GB drive. Sounds like you're thinking of RAID 1.

I personally wouldn't bother with RAID, as I saw no difference using a 400GB striped set of 8MB cache drives, compared to a single 300GB with a 16MB cache.

Trebor

Spear wrote:

RAID 0 is striping and will give a single 160GB drive. Sounds like you're thinking of RAID 1.

I personally wouldn't bother with RAID, as I saw no difference using a 400GB striped set of 8MB cache drives, compared to a single 300GB with a 16MB cache.

what do you mean by striped?

Trebor

ok changed my mind again :P

will not bother with raid will put in a
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 NCQ 80GB ST3808110AS SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-051-SE)

for the os and programs and will use the other one for storage.

anyone got any comments on the monitor? is it a good one or could you reccomend a better one for similar price?

Spear

Trebor wrote:

what do you mean by striped?

Get a mug of coffee and start reading.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks

astec123

you wont see any real advantage using that drive teamed with the other one.

conzy

wooops, Raid 0 gives you the full capacity of both drives, but Raid 1 you only get the capacity of one as the second is used for backup

Raid0 = performance

Raid1= backup and fault toleronce

raid 0+1 = the best of both 0 and 1

Striping is when a portion of the file is written to each drive, you can determine the size of stripe you want to use

I say get a single 10000rpm raptor 36gb, they are around €100, its expensive for the amount of storage you get, but very fast

and the monitor is a bit pricey, any LCD with a good resolution and refresh rate will do, 1280*1024 is nice but your 7800gt should do 1600*1200 at reasonable frame rates so go 1600*1200 if you want

And remember you can only use a LCD at its native resolution or it will look very bad around 8ms response time is good and the samsung and acer models are nice

Trebor

Spear wrote:

Get a mug of coffee and start reading.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks

ok read most of that and some of it made sense. made me realise that i won't be doing anything that will need that level of access speed. so i will get one drive for my os and programs and one for data storage that way if the hard drive crashes with the programs i won't lose all my saved stuff. seems like the best solution for the harddrives.

i think i'll have a look for some different lcd monitors, only thing is that i would like one that has a built in scart socket so i can hook up some consoles to it.

now thats most of the system sorted, would i need anything else to get this thing working? i have a feeling that i am forgetting something? will i need to get any extra cables or will everything come with them?

astec123

ok read most of that and some of it made sense. made me realise that i won't be doing anything that will need that level of access speed. so i will get one drive for my os and programs and one for data storage that way if the hard drive crashes with the programs i won't lose all my saved stuff. seems like the best solution for the harddrives.

Why bother with the high end GFX chip and load of ram? If you dont plan on doing anything where a high speed drive access is required then there is no point to pretty much all the system as the hdds would be the bottleneck in your system, a low end 500quid model would do you if all you want is internet and word.

Trebor

astec123 wrote:

Why bother with the high end GFX chip and load of ram? If you dont plan on doing anything where a high speed drive access is required then there is no point to pretty much all the system as the hdds would be the bottleneck in your system, a low end 500quid model would do you if all you want is internet and word.

hmm, this is going to be a gaming system but i didn't think that the hard drive speed would effect it to such an extent that having a raid system would compentsate for. would there be that much of a differance?

Trebor

ok, done more reading and found that it would be better to have the raid set up. so here is hopefully my final spec:

Corsair 2GB DDR XMS3200C2PT TwinX (2x1GB) CAS2 (MY-079-CS)
AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego 90nm (Socket 939) - Retail (ADA3700BNBOX) (CP-121-AM)
Asus A8N-SLi Premium nForce4 SLi (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-111-AS)
Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 NCQ 300GB ST3300831AS SATA 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-021-SE)
Sony DWQ30AB 16x16 DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter (Beige) - OEM (CD-045-SO)
BFG GeForce 7800 GT OC 256MB GDDR3 VIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-010-BG)
LG L193ST 19" LCD TV Monitor (MO-040-LG)
2 Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 NCQ 80GB ST3808110AS SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM
Antec Sonata II Miditower, Black w/450W PSU

so what you think? is this a decent setup or could i improve it without increasing the price?

astec123

I think you probably have the best set up I have seen in some time. Now just to check you have all the SATA cables, and what not to go with your system, do you want to look into a quieter and better heat sink for the CPU as the ones supplied are quite loud compared to some offerings.

BTW what do you happen to be studying? Abertay happened to be my second choice.

Trebor

no need for a quitier system straight away, will see what it sounds like.
thats the thing i don't know what cables i will need and what will be supplied so i think i will order everything and see what i need to get when it arrives and go to a local place for any cables.

i'm studying straight computing, they wouldn't let me into the games tech, didn't have the maths

but i like my course, it's not too bad and i like dundee