Rolling your own PC

Robbo

Leeroy of the SIN, I see you've found the *other* boards I talk about but never give the location of

Pre-empting Gerry's post on this, I'm buying in an internal IDE Yamaha CD-RW (16-10-40) from Ingerland for ~130 quid. Of course I don't pay VAT.

On a price/performance basis, youre better off with an Athlon at present but I hear Intel are slashing the P4 prices in the near future.

You'll want at least 256 megs of RAM, if not 512. SB Live 5.1's are lovely, but the speaker rigs for them are quite expensive. I use a 4.1 setup at home, the bundle of the Live Value card and 4.1 speakers is somethng like 120 quid, but dont trust me on that.

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Rob.

"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die".

Kegser

I'd recommend go Athlon and DDR, for the simple fact Athlons beat the pants off the P4s in terms of price, performance, and availability.

What I mean by that is there are many high quality Athlon boards available for not too much money, as opposed to the smattering of poor quality boards for the P4. MHz for MHz the Athlon easily outperforms the P4 at pretty much all applications, and you pay less per MHz to boot.

The actual componants that you put into the machine I can't really help you with; there's such a huge range at such different prices it wouldn't be much use.

A few points to note however;

The more RAM the better, 512MB is a nice amount to have; but 256 would easily do.

The GeForce 2 comes in different flavours with different prices, from the MX up to the ULTRA. The Kyro II cards are a nice cheap alternative, cheaper than a GeForce 2 GTS with similar performance.

As regards sound; the Hercules Game Theatre is an alternative to the Creative cards, and a good one at that. Although quite pricey, it's a nice setup.

As far as Hard Drives go; if you get an ATA100 compliant board then go for a 7200RPM ATA100 HDD as your Primary/OS drive. Although not cheap, it'd be nice to have.

Gerry

At the moment the athlon is better value. In a few months if via's p4 ddr chipset gets used by a few motherboard manufacturers, it will offer performance equal to the current rambus setups, using cheap ddr ram. P4's will also have fallen significantly in price by then ( 50%+ ). Right now athlon offers much better value. I will disagree with kegser on the point that p4 boards are poor quality however. Every review I have read of p4 boards has emphasised that they couldn't get the board to crash. They are pricey setups, but they are stable.

There are quite a few decent ddr boards for the athlon now. The abit kg7 is nice, so are the epox 8k7a+ and the epox 8hka+.

256 megs of ram, its worth paying for pc2400 ddr if you think you will be overclocking. You only need more than 256 if you will be using the pc for rendering or video editing or whatever.

I'd go with an ibm 60gxp hard drive, either 40 or 60 gigs. They are the fastest drives around, and www.overclockers.co.uk have decent prices on them now.

The sblive has great sound quality, although I have also heard that the new hercules card is good. Onboard sound is fairly useless.

Get at least a kyro2 graphics card. Do NOT get a geforce2 mx. Geforce2 pro offers pretty good value at the moment. If you can afford a geforce3, go for it. New nvidia drivers out this week will boost it another 10-15%.

I'd say the price robbo mentioned for a cdrw looks pretty good. Have a look around on dabs.com, and overclockers.co.uk anyway.

seamus

amoi - what type of slot does the P4 use? My P2 goes waaaaay too slow

leeroybrown

I'm thinking of building my own PC and am wondering what parts I should chose. I want to keep the budget to a reasonable level but do want fairly good gaming performance and future extensiblity.

Athlon 4 & DDR ram v. P4 & Rambus (At the moment I'm thinking Athlon)

A good motherboard

How much ram? (its still pretty cheap at the moment, isn't it?)

Good Graphics (G force 2 ?)

Sound (on board v. SB LIve 5.1 (preferred))

Hard Drive,

Etc.

And also is there any really good deals on a good Internal IDE CDRW out there at the moment.

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"I'd rather have a bottle infront of me than a frontal lobotamy"

Neil3030

Just saw this little bundle of joy on overclockers

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_This_Week_Only_25.html


this week only though. seems to be pretty good value.

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"Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so."

Gerry

p4 uses socket 423, the new northwood p4 (0.13 micron) will use socket 478.

Gladiator

kg7 raid is a nice board with 4 dimms

i just bought an epox ddr with to is a very nice board, all this p4 ddr stuff could very well happen but its up to you if you want to hold out

Kegser

Just to elaborate on the P4 thing; "poor quality" was probably the wrong phrase to use. I do agree that there are some rock solid P4 platforms out there, but I was trying to get accross the point that the P4 is really not a great option at the moment; especially if you don't have wads of cash.

Athlon is the way to go for the moment in my opinion.

_CreeD_

Summat you probably already know, but just in case. You need a P4 compatible PSU aswell, they use an extra connector.

astrofool

hmm

self built pc right now:

supermicro sc-760a case
thermaltake super orb - both keep things cool

kt7a-raid motherboard

Athlon 1.33

512 SDRAM PC133 cas2

1 x IBM 75 gxp46 gig backup HD
2 x IBM 60 gxp 40gig raided to 80 gigs

gef 2 gts

SB Live gold (first top model that came out ages ago, still same chip)

DXR3 card for DVD's

10/100 network card

Trust ISDN TA (router on the blink, new one in the morning)

Pioneer 16x DVD

Plextor 40/16/10 CD-RW

internal zip 250

19" iiyama visionmaster 451

fps 1000 speakers (old but keep the neighbours banging at the wall to an extent)

all the parts there are relatively cheap nowadays, definitely an athlon for now, until next year sometime maybe, when they get DDR go up in clocks, come down in price, and will be changing packaging.

Will be looking to add an Abit kr7-raid when they come out and 768 of DDR ram, and possibly a new gfx card (maybe an nforce-raid O_o, an athlon 4 (palomino) would also be nice going at 1500mhz.

The case I find is a part to spend a bit of money on as a good case will last years and years, the supermicro I have has excellent cooling, room to add fans, filters and loads of space, if I wanted to add a p4 just buy a p4 psu, about £30 now.

All of those parts above are top quality and not too dear if you get them at the right place.

DDR and athlon would be best waiting a few weeks for when the KT266 boards really hit, or the nforce comes out, the amd760 is really too limited and uses alot of older technology, fast, but not as future proof, or as much chip development as others, actually the SiS 735 is the fastest DDR chipset you can get right now O_o

astrofool

also the DDR p4 right now performs about 5% worse than the rambus one, sometimes more

p4's if they go to high temps will cut down the clock rate automatically throttling performance severely (not good for overclocking)

they also will also stay very expensive for the top models, an athlon 1.4 costs less than a p4 1.4, yet the athlon out performs it in everything bar q3a which is limited by graphics card anyway (quake 3 loves bandwidth, doesn't careabout latency much, all other games rely on latency alot more)

SSE2 is the p4's strong point for now, thing is by the time chips are actually using it, newer faster chips will be available. like the geforce 1 situation, sold on T & L, yet T & L titles are only appearing now, when the lowly MX outperforms it, how must they feel?

Kyro II good, but flawed, no T & L, and not enough power really, wait till the kyro 3, gef 2 gts and above are the only ones to go for in a self built system

also i've been HEARING nice things about the new soundblaster audigy cards which are soon to be released

_CreeD_

Away with your toy Neil...

The Audigy looks excellent. Real-time dolby digital encoding (If rumours are true) looks to be the best feature. Finally you can hook your PC up to a home cinema kit for more than just ProLogic.

Gerry

Could you describe exactly, astrofool, how the kt266 is better, in real world applications?

astrofool

hmm, kt266, first ones were very flawed, bad circuit layout, and rumours of malfunctioning chips, which VIA have denied, but the newer ones appear to have changed that, being very stable, and fast.

kt266 will be cheaper, will avoid any 686b issues (uses different south bridge), offers the v-link which will help if you have alot of PCI cards and IDE devices, overclocks alot higher than the 760, has alot more tweaking options, alot more driver development going on for it (any enhancement the p4x266 chipset gets the kt266 gets), has deeper buffers for RAM in the north bridge on technical levels, memory interleaving equivelent to super bypass, is performing at the same level as the 760 boards, even at relatively early stage in its life, will support palomino out of the box, Abit still haven't released its board, have released the kg7, but that just left people waiting for the kr7 as the amd760 doesn't seem to be gaining performance as it matures.

An abit kt266 should be excellent, all the options of the kt7 + more, then the one to wait for would be the nForce boards with dual memory bus for 4.2 gb/s bandwidth (more than a p4) the KN7-RAID should be very tasty.

Basically it comes down to that the 760 is basically the 750 + ddr, alot of the technology involved is old, but then again we should really all be using the pIII on the BX at 133, the KT266 offers more of the new features, and now has the performance

(grab an SiS 735 if you want the best performance right now)

Rumours of a forthcoming CE revision of the kt266 will hopefully boost performance even more.

Gerry

Thats not what I asked though, is it. The 760 is actually a more proven platform. You don't see people moaning about amd 760 chipset drivers, or instability. The 760 will support the palomino also. I agree that the kt266 should improve in performance, but right now it is still slower. However, have you any evidence that v-link offers a performance boost, in the real world?

The 760 is a nice stable, fast platform for people who need a board now and don't want to wait. Some 760 boards are clocking to 180 fsb, plenty past 160 as well. (Epox 8k7a)

<edit> Just my humble opinion. Also wanted to add that a lot of the problems with the 686b seem to disappear when you don't have a via northbridge as well.

[This message has been edited by Gerry (edited 19-08-2001).]

astrofool

to answer any direct questions:

the KT266 right now is equalling the performance of the amd760, the difference being negligible between them

the v-link will only be of real use if you have alot of PCI and IDE devices in your system, which are already saturating the 133mb/s already available (the nforce will offer 800mb/s courtesy of hypertransport)

the KT266 due to its long time of not being released is actually very very stable, the a7v266's which were reviewed never crashed once in testing, which is good for a motherboard, as almost all boards crash when under extreme long use

AMD themselves are now pushing the A7V266 as it's motherboard of choice.

AMD will not be developing drivers for too long for it, as it was meant as a proof of concept, DDR + Athlon together, any future incompatibilties will go un fixed most likely.

And more proven in that it's been available longer, you don't see people getting the original pentium chip because it's proven, people buy whats new and has the most features. And if the product can deliver the performance they want.

The 760 chipset all were looking forward to the kg7 was a disappointment, performance was the same as any other 760 board. Performance improvements in the kt266 happen weekly due to new bios, new drivers etc.

KT266 v AMD760 the winner will be the KT266 even AMD have gone for it.

The real good one however, should be the nForce.

Also the ability for the kt266 to run asynchronously with memory allows users of older ships to get the most out of the pc2100 DDR Ram

Gerry

Thats fair enough, all I was saying was right now, the 760 is still a fast stable choice. Also, those holding out for the kg7 were mainly abit zealots. Others wanted the 4 dimm slots. Most boards are coming with 3 at least now though.

Everyone will move to the kt266 ok, apart from the reasons you mentioned, a major one is that amd does not want to and cannot make enough 760 chipsets. They prefer to leave it to via. Via chipsets are cheaper, so its obvious what manufacturers will go for. It isn't all as clear cut as you are describing.

Theres no need to throw in comments about the original pentium, or a p3 on a bx board. Oops, I am running a p3 on a bx board, theres the bias right there.

NeoSlicerZ

Is the AliMagik chipset ne good?

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