Finally I respond. :)hotfixFebruary 23 2007, 22:42:54 UTC
BTW - I added you as a friend, not sure why I didn't do it before. I are blondez sometimes.
Anyway the case - You trying to take on Joel for bling factor? I am not sure why you need liquid cooling unless you are planning to overlock. I have almost never done this just because I have seen too many people have problems with it, but I might try it some day.
I would recommend you do some research on the power supply manufacturer. There are a LOT of crap ones out there. Google is your friend. :) Otherwise 700 watts should carry you for quite a while. I just hope you have enough power in your apartment circuits.
AMD dual core processors are definately good chips. Intel Core 2 Duo is the current king of dual core though as far as performance. Either one should work though.
Hard drives - the Seagate 7200.10 series drives (particularly the 750gb model) are the best bang for buck according to Maximum PC. I am not sure how the 320AS compares to the 7200.10 series (or if it even is a member of their family). I bought a while ago a pair of Maxtor 300GB SATA disks because at the time they were the fastet things around. Seagate jumped Maxtor in this arena since then though.
As for the sound card - I would steer you to getting a motherboard with a good sound card built on it. Sure Soundblaster is going to be better than anything built on, but I honestly can't tell the difference.
The current king for motherboards is the Asus Striker Extreme. It has just about everything. However it is stupid expensive and it is an Intel Core 2 Duo board. If you want to stick with AMD processors, Maximum PC says the Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5 board is king. As for brands of mother boards, I have always used Abit, but they ran into some problems a while ago. It looks like they are back on their feet though. Asus is undoubtedly consistenty good quality. Gigabyte is usually up there as well.
Video cards - the goal here is to eventually get a Direct X 10 card, but only the brand new (and every expensive) NVidia boards have it and there are no real benchmarks. Maximum PC defers to the Sapphire Radeon X1900XT (ATI chip) as the best midrange card. I would look at the card you buy tomorrow as replaceable in 6-12 months once you go Vista.
Stay away from Vista for now. Too much stuff breaking with it, and generally you want to see best recommendations on a new OS first.
If I were to go buy a new computer tomorrow, This is what I would do: Processor: I would sit down and compare the AMD AM2 to the Intel Core 2 Duo processor and try to figure out which was the best bang for my buck.
Motherboard: I would then back up and find the best board for my processor which had every feature I wanted, but wasn't retardedly expensive like the new Asus board I mentioned above. The important thing to make sure is that the slots have maximum flexiblilty. You want 2 PCI x16 slots that don't step down to x8 when you run two video cards in SLI. You also want room to add another PCI card down the road even if you are in SLI (this becomes tricky/impossible for some boards. It's all about making sure you have future expandability.
Memory: I would probably get 2 - 1 gig sticks of RAM (you really want to install them in pairs) and make sure the board I was using could support 2 more GB. I would also make sure that I wasn't using the most extreme RAM, but that I wasn't using generic no-name crap unless the person I bought it from was willing to back it up. You want to buy the fastest bus RAM you can for your board.
Hard drives: Then I would move on to hard drives and buy 2 identical drives. I would mirror them so that if one ever failed, I wasn't screwed. I would get probably the fastest 7200 RPM SATA drives I could find as game loading is VERY hard drive dependant.
Optical: Decent DVD/CD reader as I don't need a burner (thanks to H having one).
Video: I would probably get the ATI card mentioned above as I would be holding out for the longer term solution of a Direct X 10 card. Why Direct X 10 is REALLY important is a whole other discussion.
I hope that helps. If you ever want to kick ideas by me, just send me an email.
Re: Finally I respond. :)bryanlFebruary 24 2007, 07:47:48 UTC
Thanks for adding me :)
I don't care about the bling, the thing could be a black box and that would be fine with me but I want a liquid cooled case because of the heat issues I have due to where the case has to be in this wretched apartment. (Right in front of the electric heat baseboards)
I'll do some more comparisons on TD using the info you gave me tomorrow. Thanks for taking the time to give me you're feedback, I will email you when I run into trouble :)
Re: Finally I respond. :)hotfixFebruary 24 2007, 12:15:19 UTC
Ah - I remember the heat issues now.
As others have said NewEgg is a really good website, but honestly google searches are your friend such as this one: amd am2 vs core 2 duo
Once you know what you want, go through www.pricegrabber.com to find who has the cheapest and buy from there. I have some vendor recommendations there for people I have done business with over the years w/o problems (ZipZoomFly is good, NewEgg is good, Page Computers is good, etc...).
Anyway the case - You trying to take on Joel for bling factor?
I am not sure why you need liquid cooling unless you are planning to overlock. I have almost never done this just because I have seen too many people have problems with it, but I might try it some day.
I would recommend you do some research on the power supply manufacturer. There are a LOT of crap ones out there. Google is your friend. :) Otherwise 700 watts should carry you for quite a while. I just hope you have enough power in your apartment circuits.
AMD dual core processors are definately good chips. Intel Core 2 Duo is the current king of dual core though as far as performance. Either one should work though.
Hard drives - the Seagate 7200.10 series drives (particularly the 750gb model) are the best bang for buck according to Maximum PC. I am not sure how the 320AS compares to the 7200.10 series (or if it even is a member of their family).
I bought a while ago a pair of Maxtor 300GB SATA disks because at the time they were the fastet things around. Seagate jumped Maxtor in this arena since then though.
As for the sound card - I would steer you to getting a motherboard with a good sound card built on it. Sure Soundblaster is going to be better than anything built on, but I honestly can't tell the difference.
The current king for motherboards is the Asus Striker Extreme. It has just about everything. However it is stupid expensive and it is an Intel Core 2 Duo board.
If you want to stick with AMD processors, Maximum PC says the Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5 board is king.
As for brands of mother boards, I have always used Abit, but they ran into some problems a while ago. It looks like they are back on their feet though.
Asus is undoubtedly consistenty good quality. Gigabyte is usually up there as well.
Video cards - the goal here is to eventually get a Direct X 10 card, but only the brand new (and every expensive) NVidia boards have it and there are no real benchmarks. Maximum PC defers to the Sapphire Radeon X1900XT (ATI chip) as the best midrange card. I would look at the card you buy tomorrow as replaceable in 6-12 months once you go Vista.
Stay away from Vista for now. Too much stuff breaking with it, and generally you want to see best recommendations on a new OS first.
If I were to go buy a new computer tomorrow, This is what I would do:
Processor: I would sit down and compare the AMD AM2 to the Intel Core 2 Duo processor and try to figure out which was the best bang for my buck.
Motherboard: I would then back up and find the best board for my processor which had every feature I wanted, but wasn't retardedly expensive like the new Asus board I mentioned above. The important thing to make sure is that the slots have maximum flexiblilty. You want 2 PCI x16 slots that don't step down to x8 when you run two video cards in SLI. You also want room to add another PCI card down the road even if you are in SLI (this becomes tricky/impossible for some boards. It's all about making sure you have future expandability.
Memory: I would probably get 2 - 1 gig sticks of RAM (you really want to install them in pairs) and make sure the board I was using could support 2 more GB. I would also make sure that I wasn't using the most extreme RAM, but that I wasn't using generic no-name crap unless the person I bought it from was willing to back it up. You want to buy the fastest bus RAM you can for your board.
Hard drives: Then I would move on to hard drives and buy 2 identical drives. I would mirror them so that if one ever failed, I wasn't screwed. I would get probably the fastest 7200 RPM SATA drives I could find as game loading is VERY hard drive dependant.
Optical: Decent DVD/CD reader as I don't need a burner (thanks to H having one).
Video: I would probably get the ATI card mentioned above as I would be holding out for the longer term solution of a Direct X 10 card. Why Direct X 10 is REALLY important is a whole other discussion.
I hope that helps. If you ever want to kick ideas by me, just send me an email.
Reply
I don't care about the bling, the thing could be a black box and that would be fine with me but I want a liquid cooled case because of the heat issues I have due to where the case has to be in this wretched apartment. (Right in front of the electric heat baseboards)
I'll do some more comparisons on TD using the info you gave me tomorrow. Thanks for taking the time to give me you're feedback, I will email you when I run into trouble :)
Reply
As others have said NewEgg is a really good website, but honestly google searches are your friend such as this one:
amd am2 vs core 2 duo
Once you know what you want, go through www.pricegrabber.com to find who has the cheapest and buy from there. I have some vendor recommendations there for people I have done business with over the years w/o problems (ZipZoomFly is good, NewEgg is good, Page Computers is good, etc...).
Happy hunting.
Reply
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