Building a PC...Need help

[FooTemps]

Er... ignore everyone's suggestions on motherboards!

MSI mobos were rated highest, then the Asus second.

[sps16]

Originally posted by DaosBeoulve
so I had a good bit of heat issues. It's been temporarily remedied by leaving the side of the case off,

You know thats actually worse when you leave the side off because their is no circulation of cold air, instead the cold air is just pumped out of the case instead of around the components

[FooTemps]

not in my case(no pun intended)... My computer is in a room that has an average temp of 90 during the summer and it's absolutely infuriating how I have so many overheating issues. I have a volcano 9 cpu fan, 2 blower fans, a graphics card fan with heat sink sleeve, chipset fan, 1 front mount fan, and heatsinks... they dont' do crap since there is no way a computer can create 0 heat... So in idle mode it's at about 110 and when I'm playing in a game my system heat goes up to my emergency shut down I set at like 140. That's with the panels on. When I take them off the heat goes down enough to function decently.

[joeyjoe367]

Just remember, You can have Fast, Cheap, and Reliable. Pick any Two.

[OfficerGoat]

Foo, you may want to consider a water cooler. It will move more heat outside the case rather than having the syncs right in the middle of the case. The other consideration is that you may have too many fans. What can happen is you get vorticies inside the case and air continuously circulates inside rather than ventilating out. Try tweaking which way the fans blow and see what happens.

So far as mainboard prefs... I am an ASUS fan.... i have had pretty good luck with them, not quite as good luck with the MSIs. Just try and stay away from ECS and FIC if you can.

If this is a game box go P4 ... elswise you can save some cash and get an eqivolent AMD. The big dif is that the Float is better on the P4 for 3d rendering but the amds tend to process a little better so for normal computing are proboly the better choice. And of course if you are going to run an ..IX OS use a sparq ... oh wait there is a budget involved here

Good luck on your new box. Have fun!

[beam]

Here's an ok case with PS...

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduc...156-114&DEPA=1


It's the one I have

[Jaasper]

Heres a nice system for under a grand.
http://secure.newegg.com/app/WishR.asp?ID=449042

Assuming you already have an OS.

[painball]

heres what i got firugred out last night so far:
http://secure.newegg.com/app/WishHis...VIEW&ID=448718

People keep on telling me to go AMD processor and mobo and get a 9800 with that extra money saved, but I dont know. Which would work best?

[beam]

If I was you, I would go AMD and use the saved money for the 9800. I built a newegg system earlier this year and went pentium 4 and I kinda regret it.

A few other things...

HD - Get the 80 Gig drive with 8MB cache. It's only 23 dollars more, and worth it.

Monitor - You can get a cheaper 19" CRT from Newegg, but the one you have selected is nice.

CDRW? - Didn't see one on the list.

[lopxtc]

Here is my around a grand system ... although I already had a case so I didnt count that;

Motherboard -- Gigabyte 7NNXP
--dual BIOS,
--On board 10/100 and 1000 Ethernet.
--On board digital sound with daughter card.
--Nvidia nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset.
--8x Pro AGP.
--Dual Power System support, allows for a 6-phase power circuit.
--Raid support though IDE, or SATA, or both.

CPU -- AMD Athalon XP2600+ Barton Core.

Hard Disk -- 2x120GB Segate SATA drives.

RAM -- 2x512MB PC2700 DDR333.

Video -- XFX GeForce FX 5200 256MB Video.

Multimedia -- NEX ND1300 DVD+/-RW(CD-RW).

Power Supplu -- Powmax 500 Watt Aluminum w/ Dual Fan and LED.

CPU Fan -- Aero Cool Deep Impact.

Total price going through Tigerdirect is ~$1050 ... knock off about $100-$200 if you shop around or get parts from eBay. You can take the saved money and get a case and still come in around $1050.00-$1100.00

I didnt include negliable parts like a floppy which would only run you about $10 anyway from PC resale places.

Also assuming you will just be using the OS from your old computer ...

Aaron

[e mag]

Originally posted by gibby

If you can find a ATI Radeon 9500 Pro...get it. That's essentially a 9700 with a few pipes locked...but you can unlock it with a program so your 9500 Pro performs like a 9700(no overclocking involved). You should be able to build yourself a really nice computer if your budget is $1k. Good luck!

Not true, the 9500 to 9700 mod does not work with every card, from what i've heard it works best with the Sapphire red board non pro models with the memory in an "L" shape configuration. You can softmod it with the RivaTuner to enable the 8 pipelines (like a 9700 non pro) and it will have the stock core and memory speeds of the 9700. Supposedly this only works for about 30-40% of the cards that were made before february though, so it may be very hard to find one that is capable of doing it.

http://reviews.designtechnica.com/guide12.html

http://reviews.designtechnica.com/guide13.html

[painball]

So umm.. what are the pros and cons of having a AMD based mobo and processor VS. a P4?

[sps16]

amd's are cheaper but imo the p4's a faster, unless you buy a amd64 cpu but that is pretty expensive, i think its around 400 bucks

[Jaasper]

You get more bang for you buck out of a AMD. The P4 are faster than the Athlon XPs when you get into the higher clock ratings but they are also usually almost twice as much and no where near twice as fast. If you do go with an AMD chip. Go with a NVIDIA2 chipset MB. The only way to fly on the AMD side. You also don't need the fastest RAM out there just get ram the same speed as your Frontside bus and run it in sync and it will run much better that way.

[painball]

about chipset. Is that just the mobo? err...part of the mobo?