New fast rig - Tell me what you think

[beca5olo]

I just ordered components for a new rig from three different sites (majority being from Scan ). Been saving for this baby for a while - yes there was indeed a reason why I'm still using a Geforce 3 Ti200. On to the specs:

Asus A8N-SLI Premium
AMD Athlon 64 4000+
2 x 1GB OCZ PC3200 Platinum
Gigabyte Geforce 7800GTX
Coolermaster Praetorian PAC-T01 (Black)
NEC 3540A (Black)
Mitsumi FA404M (Black)
Logitech diNovo Desktop
Elan Vital Greenerger SSM 500W
Zalman CNPS7000B-AlCu

I have money left for a Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro for christmas Can't wait to boot this monster up for the first time.

[madd_garde]

Nice rig!

Could you tell me how much you spent on this? Just out of curiosity as im gonna buy a new system soon as well, and got a budget at around £800-1000 to spend.

[beca5olo]

About £1100 on the main components (including the terribly pricy PSU), and then £110 on the Logitech desktop (expensive, but very very nice and worth it). I already had a nice Eizo LCD to go with this setup.

[kempez]

Never heard of that PSU....gotta link? Is it actually any good?

[Shmee150]

I'm hoping you have a hard drive?

ShMeE

[beca5olo]

I'd never heard of this PSU either - I think they're big in Germany according to the Google results I found. I discovered it on http://www.quietpc.com/uk/psu.php#elanvital Tom's Hardware also discusses it here http://www20.tomshardware.com/howto/...pplies-04.html Apparently, it is very efficient and silent, so I am hoping for the best.

As for the harddrive, I was a little disappointed that I couldn't find a suitable SATA II one, which is why I left it off the list. The only one that seemed ok was the Hitachi Deskstar 500GB one, but that was quite a bit outside my budget. I just decided to get a nice 400GB Western Digital SATA drive with NCQ and 16MB cache.

Also not on the list were a couple of silent 80mm fans to replace the ones in the Coolermaster enclosure. I also bought an Epson RX420 printer/scanner/copier combo, wireless Sennheiser headphones, and a Freecom external harddrive.

[BenW]

The PSU is meant to be about the most efficient around. Over 80% efficient IIRC which means less heat to get rid wof which means less noise

[menthel]

I have heard that the new spinpoint sata II's are very good.

[leachy86]

Freaky shizzle, same spec as mine virtually.

Athlon 4000+, Asus A8N-SLi, 2x512mb Corsair PC3200, Leadtek 7800GTX here.

It plays games. Really well.

[dgr]

you would have had a faster (and much much cheaper) setup if you'd gone down the Pentium-m route.

Oh well...

[tfboy]

you would have had a faster (and much much cheaper) setup if you'd gone down the Pentium-m route.

Oh well...

Is it really that much cheaper? I'm a bit out of date on the P4, but thought the fastest systems were DDR2 which is expensive.

Shoot me down if I'm wrong

[dgr]

have a look here for a comparison between a dothan at 18*133 (easily achievable with a dothan 745 - which costs not much more than £100) with an FX55 and a AMD 64 4000.

It has some weak points, but in the whole is around the same as the 4000 and the (massively overpriced) FX53/55.

That said, very few people seem to be aware of this awesome cpu, and the 4000 isn't a bad buy.

[dgr]

http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q1...f/index.x?pg=1

[krazy_olie]

That review makes me think positive things about the new Intel stuff due which is largely based on Pentium M. If i were to build a system I wouldn't really consider it too much at the moment largely due to the motherboards not being particularly high end. The DFI one is limited by DDR 333 and AGP 4x.
Clearly it's extremely efficient CPU and hopefully when the architecture moves over to Desktop properly we will see that beeing made use of with higher clock speeds and the removal of the Mobo limitations.

[BUFF]

I have money left for a Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro for christmas

If you check the Creative forum you will see that there are quite a few people reporting problems with the X-Fi on nForce4.

have a look here for a comparison between a dothan at 18*133 (easily achievable with a dothan 745 - which costs not much more than £100)

If you are taking overclocking into account then you can say the same about a Venice 3000+ which is £80 & the mobo will be a lot cheaper than for the Pentium M.

[nvening]

The samsung spinpoint is the best SATA 3GB/s . The deskstar is not very good as it has less data density even tho it is 500gb there is just another platter iirc