New Rig Advice

[robuk23]

Any suggestions on a Case? Cheaper the better!

[robuk23]

The 'Asus A8V Deluxe' is £67 (scan) and the 'DFI Lanparty Ultra-D' is £108.68 (dabs) Is it worth the extra £40?! Or will that ££ be better spent on a better PSU, GPU or RAM?

[Allen]

Any suggestions on a Case? Cheaper the better!

I would say the case was all down to persoan choice, after all, it will be YOU looking at it, not us. Go for a reputable make, aluminium if possible, and with enough bays etc to hold what you want.

[directhex]

the a8v is a via k8t800 board, with agp

the dfi is an nforce4 board, with pci express.

agp is dead technology, depends on whether you want to be able to upgrade in the future

[Firelord]

Antec cases are good, I personally like the Akasa Eclipse chassis. Check my sig for some pics of a Eclipse

[cah]

Yeah - the PCIe platform is the future and really there is no point going AGP at this stage unless you have tons of PCI-32bit cards. Plus the nf4s overclock a lot better for some free performance as long as you use the right ram+psu.
As far as i see it, the most you need is one PCI slot for sound card, one for PVR card, and one for RAID at the most. Or substitute in something else for the raid. Most PCIe boards do come with enough of the old slots. Plus you can get the x800xl (although i think there is an agp variant now).

As for cases - the antecs are really nice inside, but i hate the plastic facias. urgh. they are a tad harder to neaten up inside too. Maybe consider a lian-li PC7a plus???

[robuk23]

The Asus Vento case looks fancy
I like the blue one!

[robuk23]

Specs so far...

CPU - Athlon 3500 - £170 - ebay
PSU - 480W Enermax - £70 - scan
GPU - 256 XFX pci-e 6800gt - £265 - scan
MB - DFI LAN Ultra - £114 - Dabs
Case - Asus Vento - £94
RAM - 1GB (2 x 512) Corsair TwinX pc 3200 cas 2 - £92 - scan
HD -
DVD/CD - NEC ND- £37 - scan
Floppy -

[cah]

yuk, talk about kiddie taste. you sure you really want to be looking at that thing when you aren't staring at your monitor?

GPU - very nice, PSU - nice. How about a modular Hiper? nice and neat.
Case - yuk eye of the beholder i guess.
RAM - good.
3540 drive right?

HD - how much do you have to spend? you could get a 74GB raptor and a large slower dump drive. Or just get a nippy 400GB one.

[robuk23]

ouch! You dont like my taste in cases... im hurt I just read a review about it, the paint chips off! I'll go for a Antec P160 instead.

3540 is correct.

What is a modular hiper?

[cah]

urgh. i have a p160 - plastic facia though nice inside though. It is smarter though.

PSU: http://www.casetech.co.uk/product.ph...cat=512&page=1

[robuk23]

looks good. Not in stock though
any other sites sell it?

[RDL]

Antec cases are good, I personally like the Akasa Eclipse chassis. Check my sig for some pics of a Eclipse

I'l back you up on that one. I love my Akasa Eclipse, it's very spacious, comes with wheels (which is good when setting up etc.) and looks nice too. Check it out.

[BenW]

If you can afford to spend that on a case then i just got a silverstone TJ-04 last week, £80 from Overclockers UK and worth every penny of it! It has aliminium facia which looks good and steel body that doesnt have the hum that aluminium has.

So i would suggest getting that and then get a Nexus 120mm fan from Kustom PCs to replace the slightly noisy case fan.

[robuk23]

Just bought all the parts.
Final specs:

CPU - Athlon 3500 - £170 - ebay
MB - DFI LAN Ultra - £114 - Dabs
PSU - 480W Enermax - £70 - scan
GPU - 256 XFX pci-e 6800gt - £265 - scan
Case - Antec P160 - £67 - Dabs
RAM - 1GB (2 x 512) Corsair TwinX pc 3200 cas 2 - £92 - scan
HD - 200Gb Seagate Barracuda (7200.7rpm, 8Mb) - SATA NCQ - £72 - scan
DVD/CD - NEC ND 3540 - £37 - scan

Thanks for the help

[robtotheb]

Well its built......

Guess what
After MANY MANY hours of trying to work out what was wrong it turns out that
the DFI LAN Ultra and Corsair RAM don't like each other very much. I can only use 1 of the 512 Sticks. If I try both windows and Ubuntu crash on boot.

Any one had similar problems? I have searched other forums and found 1000s of threads but no solutions. I have tried updating the bios had no effect and If I run memory tests no errors come up! I am at a total loss of what to do

Details on the RAM (not sure what they mean!) are...
CM512 - 3200C2PT
XMS3200 512MB 400MHz CL2
XMS3203v1.5