Getting ready to build a new machine, need comments other than "use AMD"

[uglygun]

I'm not going AMD, that's that.

I'm gonna build a reasonable system using an Intel P4 based 800mhz chip, the other components are what I'm interested in getting comments on. Chip that I am going to use is likely going to be a PIV 630 Prescott

I'm up in the air between two motherboards, first one is an Intel with 955x chipset and a single PCIE x16 slot http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16813121307
The other mother board I'm considering is a Gigabite Nforce board with two PCIE x16 slots allowing me to go with SLI if I want to at some date
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16813128290

What I'm wondering is if there are any Intel fans here who have run the Gigabyte boards and have run in SLI and if it is worth the bother.

From what I've read on some sites the additional benefit is minimal with most games where if you were using something like a single 6800GT, running even 2 6800GTs in SLI may not yield much of an improvement unless you really kick the graphics through the roof and the game is partial to the SLI effects.

Long story short, if I were to go SLI it would probably be something like two 6800s and the Gigabyte board but if it's benefits aren't going to be fully realized then it is likely I will just go with a single 6800GT and the Intel board for it's support. I'm tempted to go with the gigabyte board for future ability to expand the system should I ever need to, god forbid two 6800s in SLI don't get the job done for atleast another 3-4 years of whatever the gaming market manages to throw at us. Seems like my gaming rigs seem to live about 3-4 years before coming obsolete.

I also am looking at what should be the best value and performance RAM for the boards, DDR 667 is called out as being supported but I'm not looking to buy the fastest lowest latency RAM out there. Newegg has some Crucial 1gig sticks that seem like they are a decent value, http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16820146550 anything out there that is comparable value that I should get instead?

[DunNa]

Uhm... use AMD.

As for the SLI stuff, well its more or less the "I win" "oh yeah well I WIN MORE!!!" kind of thing. You shouldn't run into many/any issues with running a single card, but if your heart really desires to run games at 128 fps instead o 120 then go for it (if you have the money).

[Psyche]

get a lot of ram and dont put win xp on an 800mhz box b/c it'll run like ass

[Moe_Rahn]

get a lot of ram and dont put win xp on an 800mhz box b/c it'll run like ass
Unless there is some kind of magic 800Mhz Prescott core P4 that I am heretofore unaware of, the "800Mhz" that he is referring to is the FSB speed, not the processor clock speed.

[Psyche]

Unless there is some kind of magic 800Mhz Prescott core P4 that I am heretofore unaware of, the "800Mhz" that he is referring to is the FSB speed, not the processor clock speed.


yea. true duh..sorry my brain doesn't handle mondays well

[uglygun]

Uhm... use AMD.

How about I fill a tube sock with around 100 lead 230grn 45ACP bullets and smack you over the head with it?




As for the SLI stuff, well its more or less the "I win" "oh yeah well I WIN MORE!!!" kind of thing. You shouldn't run into many/any issues with running a single card, but if your heart really desires to run games at 128 fps instead o 120 then go for it (if you have the money).

That's kinda what I'm feeling with the whole SLI thing, it doesn't seem like there are a lot of instances where the SLI thing really pulls ahead and two cards in SLI mode can manage to crush what a single card of the same type can manage.

Thanks for that input though, it was actually worth something.

I have the ability to install either Windows XP or Windows 2000, I have a preference for 2000 and that is what is on both of my machines now. However I may wind up going to XP on a small partition with my new harddrive to see if I can get Nvidia drivers to work better. Have had some strange fits getting BF2 to run on my current machine with recent Nvidia drivers and Win2000, as opposed to my old harddrive using Win2000 and some older drivers and managing to perform pretty reasonably. The frustrations basically lead to me deciding to build a new machine and use the new harddrive in the new build.


Part of the reason for this new build is so that I can crank the ever loving shit out of BF2, not neccesarily all high settings in every respect but atleast all medium with the dynamic effects and anti-aliasing turned to medium levels where as right now I have to run with them completely turned off.

[Modest Genius]

use AMD

make sure you have more RAM slots on the mainboard that youll actually be using, provides a cheap upgrade path

other than that, its fairly straightforward stuff and you seem to know what youre doing, so i dont have much to add

[Rob_F]

What's wrong with AMD? Every AMD processor I've owned from the Am386 and up has beaten the stuffing out of anything Intel could offer for the same price...

[uglygun]

honestly my only reason for Intel was the ability to go with Intel CPU, intel mobo, and intel chipset with integrated Intel NIC. Support is usually rock solid with little hassle, yeah they run hot and cost more but it used to be worth it to me to not have to worry about the hassle.


But if I am going to break with tradition and go with something like the Gigabyte motherboard, I might break with tradition on the CPU as well. I know the socket 939 chips are the ones to look at but I don't know the AMD line well enough to know which of those chips is the better of the bunch.

I'm not gonna spend more than 250 on a processor though, preferably around 175.

Looking at the Tomshardware great CPU comparison, the difference between the PIV I was considering and the AMD I looked up is around 10-20fps for similarly based systems. I'd save a bit of money on motherboards and a tad on the chip though by going with AMD which likely would allow me to upgrade on the graphics card.

But I so hate frustrations with installs and support, if AMD gave me a headache above and beyond the typical Intel trifflings then I would likely give into my wookie rage and reach for a firearm from the armory.

[Evil Superstar]

I've found nothing special installing an AMD processor as opposed to an Intel, I think the AMD one was even a bit easier. Anyway both are well documented and decent choices if you ask me.

(and yeaI have an AMD atm )

[uglygun]

Here's the question of the day, the AMD 64s support using 64 bit software like Windows 64 but you can boot up ordinary 32bit Windows ops like Win 2000 right?

[Modest Genius]

yep

[uglygun]

yep

To booting 32bit Win2000/xp?

[Moe_Rahn]

To booting 32bit Win2000/xp?
yep

[Modest Genius]

yep indeedy. take a look at the 'to 64bit or not to 64bit' thread in this forum

[Glock23]

175 for the processor? Look at buying something in the neighbor hood of the AMD Athlon64 3200+.

[uglygun]

I actually stepped it up to the 3700 Sandiego core when I saw the 1mb cache.

[siddy]

I actually stepped it up to the 3700 Sandiego core when I saw the 1mb cache.

very good choice.

With s939 mobos, a nforce 4 chipset, or ULI chipset is the best way to go.

mobos you want to look at are: DFI, and Asus, but Gigabyte, and MSI put in solid contenders.

If you have the money to drop on a SLI board, do it. Just make sure you get yourself a good PSU to go with it.

Also, one thing I suggest with SLI, however, is just go with one card right now, maybe a 7800GT if you don't want to pay for the GTX. The reason why I say this, is because with 1 card, you have a clear upgrade path (get another GFX card) with two 6800's you have to start all over again to get SLI. Make sense?

Other than that, happy gaming!

[uglygun]

Card I went with was the 6800GS which is only a touch more expensive than some of the plain 6800s, but the 6800GS has 256megs of RAM and clock speeds very close to that of a 6800GT. Only downside appears to be the 6800GS has 12 pipelines instead of 16pipelines, no idea if you can unlock them like you can with a 6800 AGP.

They have several 6800s out there that are SLI capable, both bone stock variety as well as the GS and GTX variety. I specifically checked to make certain of that.

Some rumors floating around out there that 2 6800GS cards in SLI can beat out a 7800GT in certain situations. Probably because the 7800GT is waiting around on the CPU in some instances.

This thing should smoke and if for any reason I have money to burn in the future, I can grab a 2nd 6800GS and likely haul some major ass. 2 gigs of PC3200 RAM should help a fair bit I'd say, I didn't go with something uber like OCZ, just couldn't pass up 2 gigs of crucial RAM for 200 bucks. I've used Crucial RAM in going on 3 machines now without a single problem, knock on wood.

I got a gigabyte SLI capable motherboard. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813128301


We're gonna do a partition on my harddrive to run both XP and Win2000 to see which nets me better FPS. I highly suspect that I'm having driver issues that is currently slowing me down.

[Blutschnetzler]

get AMD. Oh and if you plan to buy a new HDD as well, make a RAID0!!! The HDD speed importance is really underestimated! Many poeple buy the latest extremely fast compontents and then use a single 300GB Sata HDD!

[Moe_Rahn]

get AMD. Oh and if you plan to buy a new HDD as well, make a RAID0!!!
Yes, so that if one of your drives fails, you lose all your data, and you can't ever swap out either of the drives involved.

[Blutschnetzler]

Exactly. That's why you make a nice clean install with all files you need, take a disk image and backup the important files regularly on a dvd or another internal HDD or an external USB HDD! This way you can get your windows system back running in minutes and your important data won't be lost. Most of us don't have the HDD full of extremely important files! If you do, then a backup should be done anyway even with one HDD and no RAID0!

Oh and it's not like HDDs fail every month anyway. My HDDs have NEVER failed since my first PCs!

[Delta]

175 for the processor? Look at buying something in the neighbor hood of the AMD Athlon64 3200+.

I have an Athlon 64 3200 + myself. I have decent but fairly regular cooling, lots of fans and a good heatsink/fan. I suppose it's worth noting that I have the winchester version of the chip, and I've got it overclocked to 2300 mhz. It benchmarks considerably better than a stock 3500 + as it is now. It was perfectly stable at 2400 mhz and running at about 50 C, but I took it down 100 mhz for extra safety and so I just don't have to worry about it.

I have similarily overclocked OCZ memory and a Toxic Radeon x800 pro modded to unlock pipelines and as well overclocked so nicely that it benches better than a stock x800 XT which at the time was another 150 bucks.

That all reflects my decisions from building a computer last January. Anyways, if you're looking for an excellent processor that you can get alot of value out of an Athlon 3200+ can be an awesome deal - great for overclocking and very fast and stable and cool. No problems with it whatsoever. :cool:

[nojmaster]

Some rumors floating around out there that 2 6800GS cards in SLI can beat out a 7800GT in certain situations. Probably because the 7800GT is waiting around on the CPU in some instances.

Would it not be better to just buy one 7800GT instead of two 6800GS's now, so you can later upgrade by adding another 7800GT?

[Mafia Leader]

I'm just going to go ahead and say use AMD. I was an Intel beastling before I discovered the wonders of AMD. I don't think I could ever go back.

As for the system... I'm just gonna go ahead and recommend you a system that's cheap and will run just about anything;
AMD64 3500+ (Get the ClawHammer claw just for the name. Venice may run cooler, but the name is shit.)
GigaByte K8VN Pro
Crucial DDR400 PC3200 512Mb x2
GeForce 6800 Ultra 256Mb GDDR3

As for everything else... eh. Doesn't really matter as much. Just go with that system, you can pick it up relatively cheaply (<$700 I believe) and there's room for upgrade still, if you feel you need it. It'll run any OS your heart could desire, and it'll certainly make you a very happy chappy once you've got it going.

[uglygun]

My newegg order arrived last night.

God I love them fuckers at newegg. I placed the order on Monday and it gets here almost within 24 hours(could have had the package at 6:00am yesterday morning if I waited around at work for the package to come out of the trailer), it was delivered before Newegg even sent the shipment confirmation email. I had all my stuff sitting here last night at 7:30 and it wasn't until today that I got my email saying everything had shipped.


As for the processor? I went with an AMD Athlon 3700+ Sandiego core processor.

As for the 7800s, I'm not buying one of those cards for this machine. It's just not worth another 150-200 dollars to goto a 7800 right now. And I'm not gonna run SLI for a good long time as the 6800GS in combination with the machine's capabilities will likely last me a good year or more of gaming bliss. At which time down the road the cards are gonna be dirt cheap after the next generation of cards come through.

2 gigs of PC3200 ram, AMD 3700+, 150gig SATA300 Seagate 7200.9, Geforce 6800GS, and the ability to go SLI one day if I need to. i have no desire to overclock

This machine should haul some pretty serious ass. I'm gonna borrow a friend's spare case and PSU for awhile until I decide exactly what I want for a nice case and PSU. His spare PSU is 350 watts and I'll probably grab a 400-450watt PSU sometime down the road.

[siddy]

If you ever want to go SLI. 450 is probably nearing the bottom end.

Obviously then names you want to look for would be OCZ, Enermax, Antec etc. One which I seriously suggest you look at is Fortron. Absolutely fantastic PSUs.

[Lee]

i wish newegg shipped to canada :/

[SOCOM-DELTA]

honestly my only reason for Intel was the ability to go with Intel CPU, intel mobo, and intel chipset with integrated Intel NIC. Support is usually rock solid with little hassle, yeah they run hot and cost more but it used to be worth it to me to not have to worry about the hassle.



whoa whoa whoa. you just put several things in one sentence that do not belong:

Intel cpu
intel mobo
intel chipset
INTEGRATED intel nic!!

please smack YOURSELF over the head with that tube sock.

if you're gonna go with any nvidia card, you want nForce 4 chipset ftw. don't bother with intel chipsets. they're great, but there's better equipment out there.
and intel mobo? ffs... even ASUS is better. (don't ask)

intel cpu + nforce 4 chipset + nvidia gfx card = WIN
intel mobo + X = LOSE

[Moe_Rahn]

Someone didn't read the rest of the thread, where he went with an AMD processor and a Gigabyte nForce4 mobo.

[Mafia Leader]

Uglygun, I love you. Thank you for listening to us. You will never feel bad about this.

[siddy]

i wish newegg shipped to canada :/

www.ncix.com
www.canadacomputers.com
www.bigfootcomputers.com

NCIX is in BC, but since you don't have to pay PST, it actually makes it cheaper in the long run.

[Lee]

yeah i know about ncix, but local places are cheaper than it generally, and i dont have to pay shipping. ill check out the other two.

-e-
bigfoot has crappy prices in comparision, and the only good price ive found on ncix isa vid card :/ .. in relation to the other ones that is ... www.cedgec.com/Price.htm

[Delta]

My newegg order arrived last night.

God I love them fuckers at newegg. I placed the order on Monday and it gets here almost within 24 hours(could have had the package at 6:00am yesterday morning if I waited around at work for the package to come out of the trailer), it was delivered before Newegg even sent the shipment confirmation email. I had all my stuff sitting here last night at 7:30 and it wasn't until today that I got my email saying everything had shipped.


As for the processor? I went with an AMD Athlon 3700+ Sandiego core processor.

As for the 7800s, I'm not buying one of those cards for this machine. It's just not worth another 150-200 dollars to goto a 7800 right now. And I'm not gonna run SLI for a good long time as the 6800GS in combination with the machine's capabilities will likely last me a good year or more of gaoming bliss. At which time down the road the cards are gonna be dirt cheap after the next generation of cards come through.

2 gigs of PC3200 ram, AMD 3700+, 150gig SATA300 Seagate 7200.9, Geforce 6800GS, and the ability to go SLI one day if I need to. i have no desire to overclock

This machine should haul some pretty serious ass. I'm gonna borrow a friend's spare case and PSU for awhile until I decide exactly what I want for a nice case and PSU. His spare PSU is 350 watts and I'll probably grab a 400-450watt PSU sometime down the road.

You can get alot of extra value/speed out of your shit if you overclock it, but obviously the trick here is not overdoing it which I figure you're obviously worried about.

You can do it in the bios to be safe, but if you wanna do a quick and dirty and risk free chip away at a very conservative 5-10% overclock of your proc/memory/card which they should all be good for even with lame cooling, then just download 'clockgen' and 'rage3d' and you can do it in windows without even messing with the bios.

I wouldn't do anything more than 10% overclocking of anything while running an OS, though because if somehow you did manage to overclock your cpu too far it'd probably corrupt your HD with errors before you could do anything about it.

[uglygun]

I'm not gonna overclock.

Simply put, in a year's time if I want more performance I'll yank the current chip and drop in something from the same family higher up in the chain. The 939 based chips is a big damn family of chips and it's likely to be around for awhile.

I don't have a desire to oc the memory or the graphics card either.

[siddy]

yeah i know about ncix, but local places are cheaper than it generally, and i dont have to pay shipping. ill check out the other two.

-e-
bigfoot has crappy prices in comparision, and the only good price ive found on ncix isa vid card :/ .. in relation to the other ones that is ... www.cedgec.com/Price.htm

NCIX also pricematches any canadian store, if you can get 'em online.

[spartan]

Sounds like you have the innards of a killer rig thus far. I'm concerned about your PSU though, you say it's rated at 350 watts. AMD chips aren't the power guzzlers that Intel chips are known to be, but you're still running a big graphics card, two gigs of ram, a hard disk, optical disk drive... you get the point. Invest in that PSU.

And cross your fingers when you turn it on.

[siddy]

Sounds like you have the innards of a killer rig thus far. I'm concerned about your PSU though, you say it's rated at 350 watts. AMD chips aren't the power guzzlers that Intel chips are known to be, but you're still running a big graphics card, two gigs of ram, a hard disk, optical disk drive... you get the point. Invest in that PSU.

And cross your fingers when you turn it on.

yep. I've seen some great computers turned into interesting paperweights from generic PSUs.

[uglygun]

Sounds like you have the innards of a killer rig thus far. I'm concerned about your PSU though, you say it's rated at 350 watts. AMD chips aren't the power guzzlers that Intel chips are known to be, but you're still running a big graphics card, two gigs of ram, a hard disk, optical disk drive... you get the point. Invest in that PSU.

And cross your fingers when you turn it on.

I may run by Comp USA today to see what kind of PSU they have down there and pick up a 400-450watt PSU and maybe a case.

My friend used this same PSU to run a 3.4ghz PIV, previous model to my Seagate drive, a Geforce 6600GT, and a gig of Ram. He replaced it because it was noisy and he wanted a better one. I think it was an Antec but I'm not sure.

[spartan]

You're on the safer side if you have a good namebrand PSU. Antec makes some of the best out there. I would be cautious if I used a generic 350 to power that much.

And it's unfortunate that you missed out of the post-thanksgiving sales. My buddy picked up a free 400watt PSU from MicroCenter.

[uglygun]

new machine is built and we did a small partition install to test Windows 2000.

Running at 1286/980 with dynamic lighting/shadows to low, all other settings on high, and 2x anti-aliasing.

Running 45-50fps solid in areas with high polygon counts like the heavy tree areas of Dragon Valley while flying through in a helicopter. Most areas of maps like Gulf of Oman I average 65-70+fps. Getting a bead on vehicles or enemy helicopters is much easier to boot. Played online a bit tonight at Karkand and stomped everyone's asses because it plays so smoothly, and looks absolutely killer to boot.

Load times are INSANELY fast as well, I typically am the first person in the game to grab vehicles. Tonight on Gulf of Oman, I got the Cobra and managed to fly across the map to start laying waste to the enemy runway before they even got the jets off the ground.

[Delta]

new machine is built and we did a small partition install to test Windows 2000.

Running at 1286/980 with dynamic lighting/shadows to low, all other settings on high, and 2x anti-aliasing.

Running 45-50fps solid in areas with high polygon counts like the heavy tree areas of Dragon Valley while flying through in a helicopter. Most areas of maps like Gulf of Oman I average 65-70+fps. Getting a bead on vehicles or enemy helicopters is much easier to boot. Played online a bit tonight at Karkand and stomped everyone's asses because it plays so smoothly, and looks absolutely killer to boot.

Load times are INSANELY fast as well, I typically am the first person in the game to grab vehicles. Tonight on Gulf of Oman, I got the Cobra and managed to fly across the map to start laying waste to the enemy runway before they even got the jets off the ground.

Gotta love it eh? :D The wonders of fast dual channel ram and a surplus of video memory to boot.

[StandingCow]

hehe yea, ususally Im the first in maps too. Its great.