General Help with building my new "dream machine"...
Hi,
I have recently started building my so called "dream machine". Ive heard alot of good things about overclockers.co.uk so naturally i came to have a look around...and ended up buying the following:
1 x Coolermaster Stacker in blue (ooh shes lovely)
1 x Western Digital Raptor 36.7GB 10,000RPM SATA 8MB Cache
1 x Tagan TG480-U01 480W ATX2.0 Silent PSU :rockon:
1 x Plextor PlexWriter 52x/24x/52x CD-ReWriter (Black)
1 x OcUK Value Floppy Drive - Black
1 x Genius Comfy KB-06X Black PS2 Keyboard
And have already got:
1 x 19" Iiyama CRT (i love it)
1 x Microsoft Optical Intellimouse thing. Its cool.
So anyway, what i would like to ask you guys is:
I am planning on buying:
1 x Asus A8N-SLi Deluxe nForce4 SLi (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard
1 x Corsair 1GB DDR XMS4400 TwinX (2x512MB) CAS2.5
...is this a reliable, high performance, generally decent RAM manufacturer and model?
1 x AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Winchester 90nm (Socket 939) :inquisiti
..anyone recommend a higher clock speed or do they think the 3200+ mode would suffice? Not sure about this one.
- Quick question on the CPU...which is better, the Winchester or Newcastle codename? And why? I notice a different "nm" number? Different socket type aswell?
And i havent really gone into huge detail with my graphic solution yet, but am thinking of a Nvidia 6800 256mb SLI Ultra card initially and then getting another one when money permits me to...
My main question is - will this be an efficient rig? Will these parts work at full capacity together? Will there be any hardware conflicts? Will these parts give me the dream machine i am willing for? Will it be farly straight forward to setup my WD Raptor HDD with SATA on the ASUS board i mentioned earlier? Considering im used to IDE...IDE...and well, IDE, and have never touched an SATA drive, i have no idea what the physical hardware differences are...
Basically i would love for all you lovely people on these forums to take a look at the parts i am thinking of ordering and giving me a smile or a punch in the face...
BTW im also thinking of getting a secondary WD Raptor HDD in the near future to setup a RAID array...will this be harder to do if i already have data on the initial disk? Should i setup this RAID array BEFORE i install an OS etc etc etc? Will it be easier to do now or later?
Thankyou for any help you can give me, i really appreciate your thoughts and comments.
Oh and is there any advantage to DDR2 over DDR? Whats the difference between the two? Should i be looking at DDR2 rather than DDR if i want an insanely high performance machine?
Cheers!