New PC for my brother-best MB/processor combo?

[jtr1962]

My brother has been stuck using an aging AMD K6-2 450 MHz machine. It's come to the point where the thing is both slow as molasses and very unstable, especially in hot weather. Me and my mom want to surprise him with a new machine for Christmas. I want to "future-proof" him as much as possible, meaning getting him a machine which will be good for a number of years. Our budget minus monitor is around $400. Naturally, we would like to spend less if possible, but $400 is more or less an upper limit. Once the other stuff is budgeted, that probably leaves $125-$150 for the motherboard/processor. First, I want something which uses whatever the current sweet spot pricewise in RAM is so I can take advantage of the current historically low RAM prices. This looks to be DDR2 667 or 800 based on my research. I want to put 4 GB in the machine, using preferably a pair of 2 GB sticks. However, I'd also like some free slots for possible future expansion. That means 4 memory slots, and a maximum RAM capacity of at least 8 GB. I know he doesn't need 4 GB right now, but he may in the future, and better to just buy it now while it's stupidly cheap. I'll also need at least one IDE port (two would be better), and integrated networking/sound (most M/Bs have this nowadays anyway).

Other than the requirements just mentioned I'm wide open as to brand and whether to use Intel or AMD. I just haven't been keeping up on which processors are current. Integrated video is probably OK if it's halfway decent since my brother really isn't a gamer. I'd still like the ability to upgrade to a separate vid card later on should that change. If I can think of anything else I'll add it later, but for now I think this is it as far as requirements go.

 

[Mercutio]

I am lazy and these tabs are already open.

AMD
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128045
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103774


Intel
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121046
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115031

For both:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148097
http://www.provantage.com/antec-nsk3480~7ANT9002.htm
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827152079
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148262


That's pretty much my standard build at the moment. I'm evaluating an AMD690 board from Biostar right now - it has HDMI and DVI connections on it, and a legacy-free Intel G35 as well. I might report in later about that.

 

[ddrueding]

All of Merc's recommendations here (and pretty much anywhere else) are excellent.

*except nVidia

 

[Clocker]

I thought 3GB RAM is all that will be recognized in Windows unless you go 64-bit? Will he be using Ubuntu or something?

 

[jtr1962]

I thought 3GB RAM is all that will be recognized in Windows unless you go 64-bit? Will he be using Ubuntu or something?

He'll be using XP instead of '98. XP can handle up to 4 GB natively as far as I know. There is a registry tweak or something similar to allow it to handle even more, IIRC.

 

[ddrueding]

32-bit XP will only handle ~3GB of RAM. If you put in more, it will be co-opted by the OS, and not available for your use. I'd stick to 2GB for now.

 

[Mercutio]

Uh, no.
XP 32bit is limited to 4GB of RAM. XP64 (which you'd have to buy as well) can support more, but then you're stuck in a magical land where no one has written device drivers. Unfortunately, there's another limitation that you'll hit before that, at the 3GB (AMD) or 3.5GB (Intel) mark; memory above that is reserved for hardware addressing.

 

[Mercutio]

Anyway, if I'm looking for longer-term hardware support, there's several things I'd like to say.

1. AMD sticks with sockets a lot longer than Intel does. Phenom (next-gen AMD) will happily sit on an AM2 board and just work, just as socket 939 and socket A were wonderful investments in the time before AM2.
2. AMD-based motherboards are a lot more feature rich and rather cheaper than Intel-based boards.
3. AMD parts absolutely vanish when AMD drops a new pin configuration. I believe vastly fewer AMD boards are manufactured. I can still get new Socket 478 motherboards, but hunting down socket 754 boards only only a year or so after the last 754-based Sempron shipped is a royal PITA.
4. Intel is releasing Peryn very soon, which most current boards will supposedly be able to handle with a BIOS flash. However, long term, Intel makes a habit of obsoleting old chipsets VERY quickly (makes sense, since they make boards, chipsets AND CPUs). That's why there's an alphabet soup of Intel chipsets.
5. DDR3 support has been available for a while; there's pretty much no benefit or consumer interest in it for the time being.
6. Don't bother with anything IDE. It's dead.
7. If Vista support is even a glimmer in your eye, look to GMA3000 or GMA3100, ATI or nVidia motherboard chipsets for decent-ish(1) onboard video and 3D support.
8. You can't re-use your old PSU. A lot of my students are learning this the hard way right now. You need a 28 pin ATX power connector at the very least for modern motherboards.
9. A quality case and PSU is probably the single best investment you can make. Those Antec NSK cases are really, and even if their power supplies aren't the bestest in the world, they're still better than anything else that's likely to come with a case.
10. From a human factor standpoint, I actually like AMD chips a little better. The stock cooling is less noisy (I am not sure how well the stock fans hold up long term, though). Performance-wise, Intel and AMD CPUs are neck and neck at any given price point (x2/6000 = E6550 @ $160).


(1) for very small values of decent only.

 

[jtr1962]

Anybody try either of these?

GIGABYTE GA-MA69VM-S2

GIGABYTE GA-M68SM-S2

Both are a little more pricey than the AMD board Merc linked to but they're more or less what I'm looking for (i.e. four RAM slots).

 

[ddrueding]

With 2GB DIMMs selling as cheap as they are, I wouldn't consider 4 slots to be that significant.

 

[jtr1962]

Don't bother with anything IDE. It's dead.

Agreed. Since this is a new build, and we won't be reusing anything from his old machine, we'll stick with SATA.

If Vista support is even a glimmer in your eye, look to GMA3000 or GMA3100, ATI or nVidia motherboard chipsets for decent-ish(1) onboard video and 3D support.

That's a very remote possibility. Seeing that '98 is only at this point finally becoming pretty much obsolete even for casual users, by the time XP or XP64 is a burden we may well be on a new system.

You can't re-use your old PSU. A lot of my students are learning this the hard way right now. You need a 28 pin ATX power connector at the very least for modern motherboards.

The original PSU in that machine was already swapped for a spare I had. The spare has issues of its own, so there's no way I'd consider using it in a new machine even if it were possible.

A quality case and PSU is probably the single best investment you can make. Those Antec NSK cases are really, and even if their power supplies aren't the bestest in the world, they're still better than anything else that's likely to come with a case.

Agreed 100%. A system is only as good as its PSU. I used a Lian-Li PC-60 case and Seasonic 330W PSU for my last build. Probably not possible to do that with the budget here, but those Antec cases don't sound bad.

With 2GB DIMMs selling as cheap as they are, I wouldn't consider 4 slots to be that significant.

We're using 2 GB DIMMs regardless. It's just that with 2 slots we'll be forced to remove DIMMs if we ever need to expand past 4 GB (and that's assuming the M/B even supports more than 4 GB to begin with). I'll agree that for now 2 GB would be more than adequate. It's just that with RAM prices so low, I might as well just go with 4 GB. Just my luck, if 4 GB was needed perhaps two years down the road, the 2 GB DIMMs would be selling for $200 instead of $55 to $70.

Regarding RAM capacity and my desire to have expandability potential past 4 GB, am I being rational, or will this new system be long obsolete before there's a serious need for over 4 GB? Does anyone foresee software in the next few years which might reasonably require, say, 8 GB or more? Maybe video editing perhaps? I'm asking because 3 years ago I would have looked funny at anyone who thought I needed much more than the 128 MB of the system I was using back then. However, soon after that I started using a system with 512 MB which was great. 768 MB and then 1 GB made it even better. My current system is maxed out at 3 GB. In all honestly I couldn't imagine using a system with less than that even though the benefits were marginal going from 2 GB to 3 GB. I guess RAM is like horsepower. Better to have more than you need even if you only use it a few times than to not have it when you need it.

 

[Bozo]

I would think the GA-P35-DS3L would be a great board. With a Celeron now and upgrade to a Core-2 Duo later.

Bozo :joker:

 

[Mercutio]

It's not worth the outlay of cash to spend that much on a motherboard. And it's worth the money to have a proper CPU instead of a Celeron. I wouldn't look at anything from Intel that's not an E or Q series. The E2200s don't offer that much compared to the E4500s, so that's pretty much my floor on the Intel side.

AMD has a lot of nice options under $100. They aren't as fast as a C2D but they sure as hell beat a Celeron.

jtr, RAM is cheap but most people aren't capable of using 2GB of RAM on XP (MMO gamers, photoshop addicts and people who use firefox and open lots of tabs and never close the program are exceptions to this). Honestly, to me it's like having 512MB on Win98; you can have more but it's probably not going to do you any good.

Now, I can't tell you what software is going to be like in two years. The next version of MS Word might need 500MB to even load and run, but even then, I don't think web browsers or Email programs are going to be that different.

 

[ddrueding]

If you are going to stick to XP (not a bad choice for casual use), than 32-bit is probably the place to be. As Merc said, 64-bit XP is "a magical land where no one has written device drivers", and will continue to be so as power users move on to Vista. That being the case, planning for >3-3.5GB is not worth any budget allocation.

 

[Will Rickards]

I'm enjoying life in magical land.
Practically all my devices are onboard and have drivers.

 

[Tannin]

I've almost stopped caring.

In general, I just buy whatever Gigabyte boards my supplier feels like shipping to me this week, except for when I buy from a different supplier who has (shock! horror!) ASUS. I've actually come to regard the current crop of ASUS boards as solid and reliable .... something I'd have struggled to believe a few years ago. And last week, just because I felt really, really brave, and possibly just a little bored, I bought a pair of MSI mainboards.

ASUS are a bit like WD: just fine when they are in one stage of their bipolar condition, pretty much as good as Gigabyte except that ASUS absolutely insist on having at least one absolutely, criminally stupid design mistake per product - and as horribly bad as mainboards ever get when they are in a bad phase. Right now, they are in a good phase.

But ASUS just cannot help themselves: every motherboard they make, despite being (at this particular moment) solid and reliable with drivers that come in the box and are actually for the motherboard that's in the box, and function just fine, has two things that tell you right away it's an ASUS product:

1: It has as "ASUS" label on it.
2: It has one criminally stupid design mistake that you'd fail a high-school student for.

Recent examples:

* The model with the two IDE controllers fitted back to front - i.e., pin 1 to the left for the primary, to the right for the secondary. Huh? Needless to say, they aren't labelled properly either.

* The other model with the two IDE controllers fitted back to front - only the other way around. The idea seems to be to let you get used to Stupid Model #1, and then throw the exact opposite at you (one again without proper labels - how much does a single dot of white paint cost for fark's sake?).

* The numerous models that have the nonsensical traditional ASUS switch and LED pinout, and the numerous other models that don't. There is no rhyme or reason to this, they just do it different ways whenever they feel like it, apparently.

The practically universal ASUS-special driver CD farkuyp where you set the PC to boot off CD first so you can install Windows, then put the driver CD in and at the next reboot it refuses to start and gets stuck in a dumb-arse, nobody-needs-it make boot disk routine because they didn't have the brains to have a "press any key" timeout on the CD boot sector - you have to go back into the BIOS and re-program the boot sequence.

* The model with USB headers exactly where you expect to find them (near the front left of the board) with exactly the pin-out you would expect to find (two headers, each having 9 pins in two rows). One problem: they aren't USB headers, they are freaking RS-232 serial port headers for the love of mike, and the actual USB headers are hidden away out of sight between the PCI slots at the back of the board. I mean, who uses serial ports these days? It's not even as if ASUS give you an RS-232 cable to plug into the thing.

But apart from all that, they are just fine.

(Mind you, even ASUS would be proud of the delightfully wicked designer's tweak on those two MSI boards I got the other day. You know how internal USB cables are pretty much always colour-coded there days? There is a standard, that pretty much everyone uses: red (power), white (data-), green (data+), and black (earth). Simple.

Well, MSI have colour coded the plastic around the USB header pins. Stock standard situation normal USB pinout (power, data-, data+, ground, 2nd ground in one row, power, data-, data+, ground in the other), with the following colour coding:

Power BLACK (supposed to be RED)
Data- GREEN (supposed to be WHITE)
Data+ WHITE (supposed to be GREEN)
Ground RED (supposed to be BLACK)

You know what happens if you plug a USB cable in the wrong way? Yup: fried cables, fried USB device, fried motherboard, or all three if you are feeling lucky.

Now I know the USB pinout off by heart (not just the standard one, quite a few of the older weird ones too from back before there was a standard - Kristi and the Soup Nazi didn't call me the USB Meister for nothing), and I can read a manual when the meathead design department does something weird and stupid, so I cheerfully plugged all the front USB cables into their proper places ignoring the way the colour-codes were shouting at me to match up the red wire to the red pin and the green wire to the green pin. In consequence, the system worked first time.

But how many screwdriver-jocky kids out there building their 1st or their 10th PC are sticking the little red wire on the little red pin? And how many motherboards have MSI had to replace under warranty as a result?

Well, maybe I'm being a little harsh. Perhaps MSI haven't needed to replace any fried-USB motherboards under warranty because they are servicing warranties using the time-honoured ASUS method: send it back twice saying there is nothing wrong with it, then pretend you've lost the paperwork.

 

[Mercutio]

... and THAT is why I stick with Gigabyte.
And to a lesser extent Intel and Biostar.

But it does matter. There is good and there is bad and the problem Tannin is describing are not problems that GOOD products should have.

Gigabyte's nv6100 boards have been tried and true workhorses for me. I've used tons of them and they have been excellent, other than a few that I used in classes for kids which I am positive were the result of poor handling.

 

[Mercutio]

... and THAT is why I stick with Gigabyte.
And to a lesser extent Intel and Biostar.

But it does matter. There is good and there is bad and the problem Tannin is describing are not problems that GOOD products should have.

Gigabyte's nv6100 boards have been tried and true workhorses for me. I've used tons of them and they have been excellent, other than a few that I used in classes for kids which I am positive were the result of poor handling.

 

[Jan Kivar]

AMD or Intel, for the average user it's pretty much the same. Both have dual cores from $60, so it's not wise to try to save by buying a single core. Memory is currently cheap, so at least 2GiB, or as Mercutio pointed out, 4 GiBs using 2GB sticks is certainly an option, should there be the need for 4 GiB. It's currently "too much" for a single user system, but as current CPUs support virtualization (well, all currect AMD and 6000-series from Intel) 4 GiB might be beneficial.

With 32-bit XP (and with all 32-bit operatng systems) the maximum memory seen by the OS ranges from 3-3,5 GiB, depending on motherboard's reserved IO mappings.

Integrated graphics is the way to go, if gaming is not the primary usage. I'd suggest boards that have a DVI or HDMI connection, if the new display has a DVI connection. They are though a bit pricier, but usually have some other extras like FireWire or maybe even e-SATA. There are DVI/HDMI boards for AMD platform from ATi/nVidia. Intel motherboards normally have only VGA connector on the motherboard, even if the motherboard is sold as having a digital connection. The actual connection comes in an add-on card to the PCI-E 16x slot. Maybe the new nVidia-based mATX board for Intel CPUs has an onboard digital connection.

Current sweet spot for hard drives is 500 GB, but halving that saves $20-35. Don't get anything PATA (IDE) anymore. Intel sucks in this department, the PATA controller is not native anymore and in most cases requires own drivers. On the AMD side VIA is the only one that has two PATA connectors. nVidia 6150-based boards have two ports also, but are being replaced by 70xx series, which have only one.

Future-proofing is tricky. While Intel has had the same socket for many years now, the old boards' VRM is not compatible with the newer CPUs. I expect this trend to continue with Intel. Most likely the socket will change when Intel completes their own integrated memory controller. AMD is much of the same. AM2 supports the new native quad-core CPUs, but lacks HT3.0, a feature found on (coming) AM2+ boards. Phenom is AM2+ CPU, but I don't know how much performance will be lost using HT 1.0 It all depends on when AMD goes DDR3, at which point older sockets will die in favor of AM3 (as in the case of S939 to AM2).

Make sure that upgrading to quad-core is possible with the selected motherboard. I think that's the only upgrade you'll be able to do, beyond that I forecast that sockets will change.

Cheers,

Jan

 

[ddrueding]

Excellent rant, Tannin. Made my morning much happier.

 

[paugie]

Future-proofing is tricky. While Intel has had the same socket for many years now, the old boards' VRM is not compatible with the newer CPUs. I expect this trend to continue with Intel. Most likely the socket will change when Intel completes their own integrated memory controller. AMD is much of the same. AM2 supports the new native quad-core CPUs, but lacks HT3.0, a feature found on (coming) AM2+ boards. Phenom is AM2+ CPU, but I don't know how much performance will be lost using HT 1.0 It all depends on when AMD goes DDR3, at which point older sockets will die in favor of AM3 (as in the case of S939 to AM2).

Make sure that upgrading to quad-core is possible with the selected motherboard. I think that's the only upgrade you'll be able to do, beyond that I forecast that sockets will change.

I'd like to ask what HT does and what enhancements HT 3.0 has over 1.0.

Also, I've been reading that few software are dual-core ready (I'd really like to know what can make use of 2 cores right now) so is it safe to assume that there are even fewer able to take advantage of 4 cores?

I am on S939 now and hope to be able to purchase a dual-core processor for it before June of 2008. I have seen the difference dual-core makes in video processing when I built a PentiumD-930 system for a friend and did some video on it as part of testing/burn-in. I take pity on this Athlon64-3200+ whenever it undertakes another video-encoding bout.

 

[Jan Kivar]

I'd like to ask what HT does and what enhancements HT 3.0 has over 1.0.

HyperTransport page on wikipedia. Basically it's what AMD uses instead of front side bus (FSB). Except that AMD has the memory controller on the CPU. So, HyperTransport connects the CPU to the chipset. On Intel systems the onboard devices and GFX cards access RAM via FSB, but on AMD systems the path goes from chipset to CPU and then to the memory. Maybe a picture illustrates this better. Couldn't find one from AMD site, so here's a link to the review of the 790FX chipset from TechReport.

HyperTransport is a versatile bus, and scales from chip-to-chip connections to chassis-to-chassis connections, and is used in e.g. blade server backplanes.

The difference between HT1.0 and HT3.0 is the doubling of this connection's bandwidth. The old HT1.0 might become bottleneck with the new PCI-E 2.0 spec which doubles the PCI-E bus bandwidth. But most likely HT3.0 and PCI-E 2.0 will go hand in hand with new chipsets. The 790FX is, AFAIK, the only chipset having HT3.0 now, and it also has PCI-E 2.0.

Also, I've been reading that few software are dual-core ready (I'd really like to know what can make use of 2 cores right now) so is it safe to assume that there are even fewer able to take advantage of 4 cores?

The main benefit is to be able to run more than one process (thread) simultaneously. This way a single CPU intensive process doesn't slow down the entire system. (unless the process does heavy disk I/O on a single disk system...) That being said, most programs are still single-threaded. It is "easy" to get better performance from CPU intensive programs, such as media encoding/decoding with a multi-core (multi-processor) systems. But if you think a "simple" task like e-mail client it gets really hard to improve performance, as the task doesn't really scale at all. As you assumed, the situation gets worse with quad core - designed test programs show improvement, but for a single user desktop the difference of dual/quad core is vague.

Games are one area that could benefit from dual core - imagine a case where the game is running on one core and the graphics card driver runs on the other. Future plans are to run physics modeling and audio on separate cores (=threads) in a quad core system on top of this. More or less a pipe dream at the moment...

I am on S939 now and hope to be able to purchase a dual-core processor for it before June of 2008. I have seen the difference dual-core makes in video processing when I built a PentiumD-930 system for a friend and did some video on it as part of testing/burn-in. I take pity on this Athlon64-3200+ whenever it undertakes another video-encoding bout.

It's getting harder to find new S939 dual core processors. Keep an eye for the inventories and order before they all get sold out. Ebay is one option if they get out of stock. Most motherboards have semi-official support for S939 Opterons, so depending on your motherboard that could be another upgrade option.

Cheers,

Jan

 

[mubs]

You know what happens if you plug a USB cable in the wrong way? Yup: fried cables, fried USB device, fried motherboard, or all three if you are feeling lucky.

Now I know the USB pinout off by heart (not just the standard one, quite a few of the older weird ones too from back before there was a standard - Kristi and the Soup Nazi didn't call me the USB Meister for nothing), and I can read a manual when the meathead design department does something weird and stupid, so I cheerfully plugged all the front USB cables into their proper places ignoring the way the colour-codes were shouting at me to match up the red wire to the red pin and the green wire to the green pin. In consequence, the system worked first time.

But how many screwdriver-jocky kids out there building their 1st or their 10th PC are sticking the little red wire on the little red pin? And how many motherboards have MSI had to replace under warranty as a result?

Been there, done that :-D - almost frying the motherboard, I mean, and not on my first build either. When I built my present system (2006) using a DFI motherboard, I had everything working, then bought a Silverstone front 3.5" bay USB port thingy, checked the motherboard manual for the USB header pinouts, checked the bay manual for the USB cable pinouts, plugged it in, and powered on. There was a mini blast, a whiff of smoke, burnt smell. I quickly powered off and ripped the USB cables out.

Minutes later, no luck with booting. I even posted here about it. After unplugging every thing and painstakingly taking everything out (cpu, ram, etc.) and reseating it all, could boot. I still have no idea what happened, and where the problem is, motherboard or the bay thingy. I wasn't going to risk blowing a $180 motherboard, so the bay thingy is still sitting in a box, and I use a USB extension cable plugged into a USB port in the back now.

The guys that make / design these non-standard things ought to be shot.

 

[Tannin]

I agree, Mubs. But they should absolutely not be allowed to have anything to do with the design of the equipment the firing squad uses. Can you imagine it?

READY!

TAKE YOUR AIM!

FI- Yes, what is it, Jenkins?

Yes, Jenkins, it's a new model, that's why the trigger is over by your left thumb. Any more questions? Right!

READY!

TAKE YOUR AIM!

FI-

Now what is it?

What do you mean, "won't fit", Hodgkins? Just use another bullet, you fool, they can't all be triangular.

READY!

TAKE YOUR AIM!

 

[paugie]

On the USB thingy.
I never trust tradition. I always check the manual first. why?
Because I've used Asus and MSI mobos.
Nope, no blown equipment yet. (fingers crossed)

 

[Bozo]

I always bought Intel motherboards. I never had any of the problems I read about on the net.
The last Intel motherboard I bought was a DG965WH. Intel's quality slipped on this one. It's picky about power supplies and RAM. Really stange for Intel.
I like my new Giabyte GA-P35-DS3 and GA-P35C-DS3R motherboards.

Bozo :joker:

 

[paugie]

Yeah, I've been reading about the great quality on Intel mobos. Something about stability, sturdiness, longevity.

And I've always hoped that Intel would make motherboards compatible with AMD processors. Just so the myth about AMD flakiness was due to bad motherboards or some such.

What? You're saying that's impossible? How come? Some people would continue to buy AMD processors no matter what. I think they call those Fan Boyz. And AFAIK, therz a lot of those.

Intel should exploit that market.

 

[ddrueding]

The trick is that there is no way AMD fan boys would buy Intel motherboards. They have already convinced themselves that Intel is inferior for some reason, so going to them for a mobo would be unlikely.

 

[Tannin]

I generally try to avoid using Intel motherboards, but not because I think Intel processors are inferior - right now they are excellent, though I freely grant that I never liked the Pentium 4. Nope, it's the motherboards Intel make that are the main reason we tend to be an AMD shop.

Disgracefully overpriced, lack-lustre on the feature-set, I don't trust the IDE drivers (though that's probably just habit from the days when the so-called Intel Application Accelerator used to break stuff), and often, in their own way, weird. Many is the Intel motherboard I've had to puzzle over or curse as I've been trying to achieve some theoretically trivial task. Mind you, part of that may be because most of the ones I see are OEM specials for the likes of Dell, and maybe it's Dell that specify the crappy bits, I don't know.

 

[paugie]

ok, sorry.
My previous post was intended to be a laugh - the Intel mobos for AMD procs part.

now, seriously, I thought Intel Mobos were good stuff. And Tony's comment was a surprise, although not that part about being expensive and feature-deficient. I was aware of those. I was thinking they just worked, and worked well.

 

[Tannin]

That's one of the things I dislike about them, Paugie - the damn things don't have the decency to expire after a few years so you can throw them away and put something nice in.

 

[Bozo]

That's one of the things I dislike about them, Paugie - the damn things don't have the decency to expire after a few years so you can throw them away and put something nice in.

They are like the Energizer Bunny....they just keep running, and running, and running.

Bozo :joker:

 

[Mercutio]

jtr, did you reach any kind of decision on these matters? I'm interested to hear what you bought.

 

[jtr1962]

jtr, did you reach any kind of decision on these matters? I'm interested to hear what you bought.

I didn't buy anything yet (busy these past few days assembling regulator boards) but here's what I was thinking about:

RAM (I've had good luck with this brand in two other machines, and it's on sale)

Processor (actually the same one you linked to)

Motherboard (one of these three):

GIGABYTE GA-MA69VM-S2

GIGABYTE GA-M68SM-S2

GIGABYTE GA-M61P-S3

Anyone have experience with any of these? The M61P has more PCI slots just in case they're needed at some future date. All support up to 16 GB RAM should it ever be needed (I heard rumors the next Windows OS will need at least 16 GB just to load. ). Since the 4 GB I'm putting in is all XP will support, at least I'll know we're 100% covered in that area permanently unless/until my brother decides to upgrade his OS.

I'm not sure of the processor heat sink, case or power supply. I want to go with a Seasonic or something else fairly silent and an aluminum case but that's ~$200 shipped for those two items alone. For the processor heat sink I'd like something fairly silent.

 

[Mercutio]

I've used all three of those boards. The Gigabyte-provided setup is identical, as is overall performance, but I vaguely recall liking the 7025-based board better than the AMD690 because of something annoying about it's layout that I can't remember at the moment. IIRC the AMD690 one wins on features, though.

Both AMD690 and nv7025 are slightly more annoying than nv6100 for having harder to locate drivers and devices that don't work immediately in Vista, but that's not a concern for you, either.

Also, your brother is not going to use that extra PCI slot; it shouldn't even be a consideration at this point.

 

[Jan Kivar]

Yes, my $0,02 on the 7025-based board as well.

Why not go with the case that Mercutio recommended? The same case in Newegg is somewhat more expensive, but the price is nearly the same if shipping fees are included (provided everything else comes from newegg).

The powersupply is 380 W Antec EarthWatts model, which is manufactured by SeaSonic and is 80 PLUS certified.

I have an older version of that case (NSK3300). The only complaint with this case is that there's practical room for only one HD. The other bay (with silicone grommets) is beneath the optical drive. That is not the best possible for a HD, temperature-wise. There's also the floppy bay, but it doesn't have any grommets.

Look for suitable CPU coolers from SilentPCReview (which seems to be down for me ATM). The case Mercutio/I recommended has a side duct, which you may or may not want to utilize.

Cheers,

Jan

 

[Mercutio]

Also, AMD's retail heat sinks are just dandy. The ones on bigger chips (6000s and up) are particularly impressive, with all copper bottoms and actual heat pipes. I'm not as much a fan of Intel's stock cooler because of the retarded lack of fan guard and the fact that that fact that they spin at some particular combination of pitches that I hear easily, even though they are fairly quiet.

Still, there's *no reason* to spend $20 on an aftermarket cooler when the stock models are so nice, particularly without foreknowledge of how your much your brother actually notices the noise level.

And yes, those NSK 3380 cases are really nice. I've bought, uh, probably 100 of them by now (yes, the new ones) and in fact there's a stack of 36 of them outside my office at the moment. I like them *THAT* much.

Unlike its predecessor, it has a full ATX power supply, which was my only complaint about the previous model. They are made from very solid steel and in fact they're a dream to put together.

 

[jtr1962]

I've used all three of those boards. The Gigabyte-provided setup is identical, as is overall performance, but I vaguely recall liking the 7025-based board better than the AMD690 because of something annoying about it's layout that I can't remember at the moment. IIRC the AMD690 one wins on features, though.

The AMD690 has a parallel port and SATA Raid (neither of which my brother is likely to use or need). The 7025 has IEEE1394 (probably won't be needed either) but it does have a DVI output (definitely useful once my brother gets an LCD monitor). For those reasons and others you mentioned then I'm settled on the 7025 board. The 6100-based board has 2 extra PCI slots but you're right, I doubt he will ever use them. Outside of his TV card, and possibly a video card (which would go in the PCI-Express x16 slot anyway) if he ever gets into gaming, I doubt he will ever need any of those slots.

Seeing that you say the stock AMD coolers are fine, I'm going with that. Noise isn't a huge concern here. Truth is anything new will be much quieter than what he's using.

I'll probably go with a 500 GB HDD since that's the sweet spot. I guess at this point either Seagate or Samsung are good bets.

Optical drive:

I thinking about Samsung since I have a pair in my machine and I'm happy with them. It's available in either PATA or SATA. Does XP have any trouble natively recognizing SATA optical drives?

Card Reader (very handy to have-I put internal ones on all my new builds)

Floppy drive-I'll use one of the spares I got off eBay. That is, if I bother to even put one in at all. I might if my brother still happens to have anything saved on floppies.

Outside of a case and PS I think that pretty much rounds it out.

 

[ddrueding]

XP works fine with SATA opticals. The issue seems to be with some chipsets not letting the OS install nicely.

 

[Will Rickards]

the firewire is useful for one purpose... video capture from a dv camera.