New PC, tweaks.

Lydesia

With great help from people here on boards.ie im building a PC.
I just have a few quick q's i would like to get some advice on.

PC spec:

Thermaltake Xaser Tsunami Aluminium
Thermaltake Purepower Butterfly 480W
Abit AV8-3rd Eye Mainboard for S939
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ 2.2 GHz Socket 939
TwinMOS PC3200 DDR-DIMM 1024MB
Western Digital Caviar 200GB S-ATA 8MB cache 7200RPM x2
NEC DVD recorder IDE Silver, DVD+R/+RW/DVD-R/-RW (Dual layer)
Sapphire Radeon 9800 Atlantis PRO 128MB AGP,256bit bus,DVI-I,TV-Out
IIyama 17" ProLite E435S-S TCO-99 Monitor, Silver, 10ms
3Com OC Wireless Gateway kit 54 Mbps
Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2 English
Creative Inspire P5800 (Sub,5 monitors,amplifiers (havent ordered yet)


Right, firstly will i need to get a store-bought heatsink or will the supplied AMD one work well? Im not going to overclock for now, but ive heard a lot of diffirent opinions about the supplied heatsinks.

EDIT
(right, stock one for now)

Im need to transfer my data from my old PC to my new one.
I bought a crossover cable, but does anyone know how to set this this data transfer link up?

EDIT
(Right i know that now)

I was thinking about setting up a striped RAID drive from my 2 identical 200 GB's caviars. Is anyone using an arrangment similar to this one? How does it run?

The graphics card! How sweet will it run HL2/doom3?

EDIT
(k!)

to anyone with a AMD 64.. Im going to use the supplied heatsink and fan. there is a patch of 'thermal interface material' under the heatsink. I was wondering, is this all thats needed for heat transfer? Or do i need to apply thermal compound solution (the syringe stuff) onto the processor aswell? AMD dont seem to have clear instructions on this.

Any Help would be very welcome
Cheers guys and gals

P.

Lydesia

Ahhhh someone help

cry

Nukem

Hey hey - quick reply. Would go for a 6600gt or th x700pr 256mb - simple reason PCI-e is here.And AGP are slowly slowly goin to be fazed out. 9800 solid card but for the same cash would go PCI-e.
OC with Twinmos can have its restrictions i have heard - dunno why myself.
Heatsink - Good thermalpaste and a stock heatsink ok but for 20euro get a good one if you wanna overclock.MMmmmmmm........love that case.

Chad ghostal

I have a socket 754 3400 and tbh i got sick of the noise of the stock fan+heatsink after a while..
the whole system got really hot when i was playing hl2/doom3,
and while 60C is supposedly fine for this type of processor, it also made the whole room hot, so i just got a new silent zalman which is extremely nice.

i have a 9800pro aswell, it handles hl2 very well imo (but naturally could be a bit better, but for the money i have absolutly no complaints), but doom3 (while looking great) does experience some lagging in places..

The NEC dvd burner is excellent, not one coaster, nice speed, very quiet for dvds, generally very good.

anyway this is just my experience take it as you will...if you have the money get a slightly better graphics card and silent heatsink/fan.

Lydesia

cheers guys that was some cool advice, i think im gonna get a new heatsink but stick with the agp board. Cos' im very poor and my budget is restricted.

zil

U can use a crossover cable to transfer data fomr pc to pc. Howevere i warn u it is slow with a capital S. It will take several hours. imo the fastest way to transfer data is to plug your old hard drive into ur new pc. Then u can just copy the data over to your new hard drive. The only reason i can think of for not doing this is that ur to afraid to mess with ur pc. But if ur building ur new one urself then this shouldnt be a problem.

Raid has no noticable real world benefits for pcs. For servers it makes a differance but for pcs it doesnt. Ur just increasing the cost and doubling ur chance of data failure. Try searching on anandtech for their comparison.

I have a 9800pro atm. U need to really back of the settings in doom3, in hl2 it plays fine at medium/low settings.

SickBoy

zil wrote:

U can use a crossover cable to transfer data fomr pc to pc. Howevere i warn u it is slow with a capital S. It will take several hours. imo the fastest way to transfer data is to plug your old hard drive into ur new pc. Then u can just copy the data over to your new hard drive. The only reason i can think of for not doing this is that ur to afraid to mess with ur pc. But if ur building ur new one urself then this shouldnt be a problem.

Raid has no noticable real world benefits for pcs. For servers it makes a differance but for pcs it doesnt. Ur just increasing the cost and doubling ur chance of data failure. Try searching on anandtech for their comparison.

I have a 9800pro atm. U need to really back of the settings in doom3, in hl2 it plays fine at medium/low settings.

Crossover cable works very well once setup correctly. The problem people normally face is collisions. If the cards are using different duplex settings then you will have a slow, painful connection which will take a year and a day to transfer large amounts of data. Once one card is set to say 100Meg Full Duplex and the other is either setup exactly the same or is set to Auto Negotiate then the connection will be fine and large amounts of data can be transmitted without issue.
To change the speed & duplex settings right click the adapter in device manager and select properties and then click on advanced, then(depending on the driver) look for something like "Link Speed and Duplex" and set the speed to 100 and the duplex to full.
Hope this helps...

Lydesia

SickBoy wrote:

Crossover cable works very well once setup correctly. The problem people normally face is collisions. If the cards are using different duplex settings then you will have a slow, painful connection which will take a year and a day to transfer large amounts of data. Once one card is set to say 100Meg Full Duplex and the other is either setup exactly the same or is set to Auto Negotiate then the connection will be fine and large amounts of data can be transmitted without issue.
To change the speed & duplex settings right click the adapter in device manager and select properties and then click on advanced, then(depending on the driver) look for something like "Link Speed and Duplex" and set the speed to 100 and the duplex to full.
Hope this helps...

Thanks for that man, that defo helped.
For the actual crossover do you set up a LAN? For XP-Pro?
Im not too sure how to set up the actual connection

Mutant_Fruit

I assume by "cross over cable" you mean an ethernet cross over cable, and not something really slow that i've never heard of before.

An ethernet cross over cable cannot be described as slow. Its (about) 200 times faster than broadband :P i.e. you should be able to get a real world performance of about 8megabytes a second easily enough, and if you're lucky as high as 10 megabytes a second. Below 7mB/sec is unlikely.

To set it up, just connect the cable to both ethernet cards. Open up their settings, and set your main PC's IP address to "195.168.0.1" and the second pc's ip to "195.168.0.2" and set both subnet masks to "255.255.0.0" or some such combination.

Then run XP's network config wizard (its in start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Communications), and you'll be set for accessing your computers via "My network places".