computer questions....

[hardr0ck68]

ok, first off what is dual channel ram? Is it a mother board thing or a ram thing, combonation there of? As i understand its a bit quicker (or at least believed to be) but yeah... Im making decisions on what to but for my first PC build, and i dont know if dual channel is worth having or really anything about it. (i want a gig of something....but before i decide on a brand or type i wanna understand this dual channel)

Second, what is RAID, i understand its 2 HD's workin togeather some how and theres like a Raid 1 and Raid 0. I am thinkin about a segate HD (8 mg buffer 7200RPM 9.5 seek time) now the differance between a 160 and 2 80's is like $20 so i was thinkin go with the 2 80's and do a RAID set up, again if its worth it

Third, how do you know what "speed" of ram is best for you, ir "faster" always better, or would getting something like DDR500 be pointless for me?

Everyone tells me to go Asus for a MoBo, but reading the newegg reviews of the Asus a7n8x-e deluxe are fairly mixed, and i wounder if is worth the extra money over other boards by Biostar (m7ncg 400) , Chaintech(7njl4) , DFI (nfII Ultra-al), and Abit (NF7)?

for a hard drive IDE or SATA conection, i read SATA was better, but yeah is that something i should read for on the MoBo a SATA port or should i expect it to come with one?

And fianlly, should i go XP 2800 (im heavly leaing twords) or should i shell out the extra cash for the XP 3200, to me the preformance differance doesnt seem worth the payout espacally because many many people claim to OC the 2800 very stably up to 3200. i know the bus speed is still lower, but yeah.... $90.00 VS $200.00 is 333fsb VS 400fsb really over 2x as good

so yeah thats it for now....after i get it all and some help puttin humpty dumpty togeather (girlfriends father builds them in his friggin sleep) then i will be back askin for infor about OCing

[cletus]

So i guess your going to be overclocking this system then by your last statement? If so let me make a few recommendations.

1st off, go with a mobile CPU such as the xp 2400+ or the 2500+. Why you may ask? Well its because they come factory unlocked because of the special AMD technology (cant think of the name) built into the notebooks. You should beable to overclock the stock speed of 1.8 up to 2.2 (3200+) very easily from what ive seen.

For the memory i would recommend DDR433 so that you can run the CPU and RAM synchronously making the system faster. Mushkin offers a nice 512 dual channel setup for a little under $160. Dual channel means that the ram can transmit and recieve on the same clock cycle making it much faster.

I say go ahead with the SATA RAID array because of the performance increase. This would probably the biggest noticeable increase in performance because of the faster access time.

RAID 0 will combine the two HDD into one 160 GB partition and a RAID 1 array will create one 80 GB partition. RAID 0 is faster, RAID 1 is fault tolerant making it a good choice if you need to make sure your data is safe.

The motherboard I would recommend would be the NF7-S. Built in SATA RAID controller, nVIDIA SoundStorm, onboard LAN, AGP, just about everything you need.

Make sure you get a good heatsink such as the Thermalright SP-97 or SLK900A and a good fan such as the Sunon 92mm or the Vantec Tornado fan to go along with it.

If you need any help send me a PM and I can prolly help.