Building a machine

[ceolstan]

I'm at the point where I'm thinking seriously of building over buying. I've done the research, starting at arstechnica.com, and then reading reviews at tomshardware.com. Part of my issue is domestic. My wonderful husband is an IT guy who hates working on computers at home. I mean, for him it is "work." He wants me to get a Dell deal and be done with it. He likes the whole Celeron package for about $400. I think that this system would be bad for gaming, even though I spend most of my time wordprocessing. In fact, even when I purchased my current system, it was a bit on the older technology side. I hate getting saddled with another dinosaur, so I don't want to have a celeron system. However, the hubby is very much unwilling to have a do-it-yourself project. I'd like to do it myself, perhaps with the assistance of some of the local undergrads who'd help out for the price of a home-cooked meal. :)

Currently, I'm looking at the budget box on the arstechnica website. I might want to make the following modifications:

• Motherboard: Asus A7N8X Deluxe
  Processor: AMD Athlon XP2600+
  Harddrive: 120 gig Western Digital (I have one now that is brand new and in the box)
  Mouse: MS Explorer Optical trackball (I love it. It saved me from carpal tunnel, and you will pry it from my cold, dead hands).<>
  [st]
  If I have any extra money, I'd like to put in a better video card than the 9100. However, I think that video might be something to add later, perhaps when I can afford a nicer monitor with a larger screen. Of course, if anyone has any wisdom to add, I'd appreciate it. I know I'm very much a newbie at this.
  
  But I'm excited by the prospect of owning a box where when I get tired of it or want the newer/faster mobo/chipset, all I have to do is swap out the parts instead of buy a whole new box!
  
  --ceolstan

[Wim-sama]

you still didn't build it? :D
Well, it should be enough for WoW, and take a peek at the new 17' screens. prices are getting more reasonable, and if you're gonna do a lot of typing/WP'ing/reading fora it'll be better for your eyes (not to mention that it looks damn sexy on your desk IMO)

[ceolstan]

you still didn't build it? :D
Well, it should be enough for WoW, and take a peek at the new 17' screens. prices are getting more reasonable, and if you're gonna do a lot of typing/WP'ing/reading fora it'll be better for your eyes (not to mention that it looks damn sexy on your desk IMO)

Having a system that's powerful enough to play the new MMORPGs is important to me. That's one reason I'll not go Celeron. I'm afraid that I'd not be able to go play with my Basin buddies (and these nice folks here at the Lounge). I'd love to look at WoW, even though my only online gaming experience has been D2. Prior to D2, my games were text-based single player like, well, Zork. ;)

I do want a decent monitor. Most of my day is spent in front of a monitor doing some serious writing. However, I'm willing to forego a monitor at this time to have a better motherboard/chipset.

But gosh! I would love to make my desk look sexier! :lol:

--ceolstan

P.S. And no, I still haven't built it. I think it'll be build Real Soon Now™. Once it is, I'll post pics!

[Logic_X]

There was a comment above (sorry for taking so long to reply to it) about Athlon64's being more expensive, when in reality the actual "AMD Athlon64" isn't expensive when compared to it's pentium counterparts - the expensive athlon64 is called an "AMD Athlon64FX" and is very NOT recommended :P (it's faster, but there are several reasons besides the fact it costs nearly 2x as much as the regular Athlon64 as to why not to get it <_< )


Bulding your own computer can be cheaper or more expensive depending on how you do it - one thing you definitely need to take note of is how much your chosen OS is going to cost you, and factor that into your comparisons (see too many people say "yea, I spent $500 to build this great computer" - then you ask them about the OS and it's either pirated, or cost them $200 on top of the cost of the parts - and I'm anti-pirating heh).

[kandrathe]

Anandtech article on Athlon 64 vs FX51 The Athlon 64 is such a great deal right now.

I've been finding XP Pro for <$200 lately. NewEgg has the OEM version for $138, which requires that you add a piece of hardware to your order (which is then discounted). Which is not bad considering that SuSE is $79. I don't know that you can build a "great" computer for $500, but you can build a pretty good one for around that. My comparison is the bargain basement bundles you see from Dell or Hewlett Packard (or what I would call the "why bother PC").

For comparison -- a cheapo on the HP site is $345 (after $50 rebate). It has
2.5Ghz Intel Celeron processor (which will perform like ~2 Ghz maybe),
XP Home,
256 MB Ram (with free ram upgrade),
40GB 5400 rpm HD,
16X CD/DVD-ROM Drive drive,
3.5 Floppy,
1 USB 2.0, 1 Firewire.

To build one similiar;
Mobo -- BIOSTAR SiS 740 Chipset Motherboard for AMD Socket A CPU, Model "M7VKQ PRO" -RETAIL - $45
CPU -- AMD Duron 1.6GHz Socket A Processor - OEM - $43
Case w/PS -- CODEGEN Black/Silver ATX Mini Tower Case, Model "CAT-3308-CA" -RETAIL --$23
CPU Fan -- Dynatron Copper CPU Cooler for Socket A,Model:BH-610,Retail -- $8
RAM -- Kingston ValueRAM 184 Pin 128MB DDR PC-2100 - OEM -- $25 x 2
HD -- Seagate 40GB 7200RPM IDE Hard Drive, Model ST340014A, OEM Drive Only -- $62
FDD -- SAMSUNG SFD321B/LBL1 Black 1.44MB 3.5inch Floppy Disk Drive, OEM Driver Only -- $9
CD/DVD -- Aopen BLACK 16X DVD-ROM Drive, MODEL DVD-1648/BKH, RETAIL -- $29
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition with Service Pack SP1a - OEM --$93
Miscellaneous cables and a dab of arctic silver -- $3

$365 (and your labor of course with your own warranty). But, still this DIY PC is probably better than the HP in many ways. Any component failure on this system would be inexpensive to replace, and this system is very upgradable. Replace the Dimms with 2x512 for $140, a bigger HD, and move up to AMD Athlon XP 2400+ "Thorton" for $80, and certainly better video (no AGP though).

[Occhidiangela]

It looks as though my recent problems with the power supply have reared their ugly head, and the moboard with my AMD 900 has pretty much eaten itself. At present, trying to recover the HD data. When I bought the new power supply and DVD Rom, I thought "Hmm, get a new HD and copy the old one to it, just in case."
Budgetary limitations told me to wait a month or two, and so, of course, what I have backed up on floppies is all that remains, which I have not done for about 5 months. Good thing I am not running a home business, I'd be dead. :P

Penny wise and pound foolish. *slams head into desk*

So, with the same case, I intend to replace the MoBoard, and buy a 400Watt Power Supply fir $49.00. I am in a bit of a quandry, as there is an ASUS MoBoard that catches my eye, as well as a couple of Gigabyte MoBoards that are quite appealing. Tom's Hardware like them both.

I am probably going to go P4 2.8 Meg and either 400 or 800 MHz front side bus. Still pondering the balance between cost and what I want.

Question: how bad to I need RAID? At present, I am using machines as PC's and do not see turning my gaming machine into a serious server. Any side benefits of RAID that I am missing?

Question: What's the big deal abouty Gigabyte Lan ports? Leaning into the future, like Quadraphonic sound? Useless gold plating? Or, is it the next step in Broad band in the next few years?

Do I really nead an additional internal "surge protector" when I have a UPS, Surge protector, and the Power Supply already in between Mo Board and the wall socket?

What CFM rating is best for an 0mm case fan? I see 34 CFM (Cubic Feet Per Minute) on most of the fans at my local store, is that pretty much an industry standard for an 80mm mounting?

So, is there anythin

[kandrathe]

Question: how bad to I need RAID? At present, I am using machines as PC's and do not see turning my gaming machine into a serious server. Any side benefits of RAID that I am missing?

Gamers use Raid 0 because it allows you to stripe the data onto the drives such that both drives contribute to each block of data retrieved, or in other words it doubles your IO rate.

At work on the servers we use Raid 50 which is a combination of Raid 5 and Raid 0. We get the speed advantage of striping across the number of disks used (we use 5 hot swappable 80 GB 15000 rpm drives typically) and also the advantage of 2 bit error correction redundancy on each data word stored. The down side of Raid 5 is that you consume quite alot of space to provide for the error correction.

Do I really nead an additional internal "surge protector" when I have a UPS, Surge protector, and the Power Supply already in between Mo Board and the wall socket?

No. UPS should clean up the power fine. What kills electronic components, and especially transformers is when they are under, or over powered. The transformer either needs to draw more amps to compensate for under power which results in more resistance (heat), or offload the over power as heat. So if your PS is rated for 110v then that is the optimum volatage for the transformer. I've seen my home power vary to as low as 90v and as high as 130v.

Question: What's the big deal abouty Gigabyte Lan ports? Leaning into the future, like Quadraphonic sound? Useless gold plating? Or, is it the next step in Broad band in the next few years?

Not unless you plan on some massive home network, or VOIP at home. 1000 Megabits/second is faster than your broadband, and so your cable or DSL will still be the slowest link in the chain.

What CFM rating is best for an 80mm case fan? I see 34 CFM (Cubic Feet Per Minute) on most of the fans at my local store, is that pretty much an industry standard for an 80mm mounting?

Higher CFM than 34 on an 80mm fan means they are faster and louder. I look at CFM(airflow), RPM (speed), MTBF (durability), and DB (noise).

[Occhidiangela]

To use RAID, I use two (or more) Hard Drives of similar if not equal I/O rate. The info from outside or inside gets to my RAM faster since it travels in parallel not series, so my data throughput and processing rate increases, at the cost of a bit more heat (two (or more) HD's churning away.

For gaming PC purposes, part of my limitation is RAM and Video RAM, but if the choke point is the HD processing rate, then those two pieces of the data pipe can run up to their max capacity better.

What marginal added performance does RAID really give me? Is this best found in the "real time" and "near real time" FPS-type games, which are not part of my current suite of entertainment on line?

If my Video Card is not uber, for example, what is the point of the higher data rate?

[kandrathe]

Yes. In fact, in order to use RAID for data redundancy you must have 3 or more equal drives. Most games are not IO bound, but if your application of choice is say burning CD's or DVD's from HD then IO speed might be important. To use RAID 0 you need only two equal drives.

I think for most gamers their money is better spent on a good quality graphics card, and extra RAM. If HD space becomes a problem, then you might have too much on it and then I would council a CD Burner to archive some of the things you are not using. I archive entire game directories to CD(s) if I set them aside for any length of time. If my HD gets too full (after I have archived anything unused or hardly used) then I consider my HD too small. I would think that 80-120GB of HD should be enough for most home PC's.

[LochnarITB]

Yes.&nbsp; In fact, in order to use RAID for data redundancy you must have 3 or more equal drives.&nbsp; Most games are not IO bound, but if your application of choice is say burning CD's or DVD's from HD then IO speed might be important.&nbsp; To use RAID 0 you need only two equal drives.

Aren't we talking RAID 0 versus RAID 1? Both require 2 drives of equal size. The first provides storage equal to twice the drive size split between the 2 drives for IO speed. The second provides storage equal to the single drive but provides data redundancy by having an exact duplicate on the second drive. As you said, most games should not be IO bound with sufficient memory for caching so I just don't understand why anyone even considers RAID 0. It just seems to add one more physical system that can go wrong and errors on one drive essentially negate both drives. I also question whether burning optical disks is a valid reason for the extra speed. Burning an optical disk is much more akin to a mechanical process than electronic so it will never keep up to the electronic process of reading the magnetic signal from the hard drive. If I were building a box, especially given my recent experiences, I would seriously consider RAID 1 but not 0. In effect, I am doing almost the same with my laptop by using an external USB/Firewire hard drive and doing frequent backups to it.

[edit] Oops, forgot to add this link for Occhi. It seems like a good overview of RAID and I am sure there are many others out there to be found.

RAID Explained

[kandrathe]

Sorry, I just ignored Raid 1. My mistake. I just had doubts that any home user would want to devote an entire HD to mirror a drive. I guess it's easy administration then, but too expensive for me.

If you want to quickly be back up to speed after a HD crash, I would use a tool like Ghost to store the base configuration which enables you to be able to restore your OS, and Apps. And, then periodically use a backup to CDRW's to keep images of just the data directories that change.

[Occhidiangela]

Thanks for the link, it expanded on the original RAID info I plucked from a few IT dictionary sites.

Don’t expect a lot of help here--the sIDE RAID66 and DPTA-372050s were only able to pull off a 19% increase in framerate over a single drive. The fact of the matter is, once a game is loaded it does not make heavy use of the hard disk, and when it does, it’s usually in short, random reads and writes rather than in the large sequential transfers where RAID excels.

On the other hand, the actual loading of the game will benefit greatly. Unfortunately there’s no real benchmark to illustrate it, but you will notice that Quake 3 maps and levels, and even the game itself, load much more quickly when using the RAID 0 array. If you’re looking to shave a couple seconds off of your load times, this is a way to do it.

I had figured as much, but since I don't mess with that kind of optimization as a matter of course, I was not sure what small detail I might be missing via simple lack of familiarity.

RAID: Nice to have feature if I decide to get into other aspects of the PC Hobby, and one that will necessitate identical HD's to get the most bang out of that buck. 4 HD's? Hmmm, if my kids want to make that much video, I think they will need to buy the drives themselves, and we will all need to buy a rather huge tower! Certainly bigger than what holds the current gaming machine.

[channel1]

Just some quickie notes.

Back when I still asked customers about the 'puters they were going to buy, I told them that it came down to three questions:
-What do you NEED it to do
-What do you WANT it to do
-How much are you going to spend

Most noobie buyers weren't sure about the first two questions, so it often came down to working with the question of how much they would budget for the system. That still applies today.

It's pretty easy today to build something for around $500. If you make it a "has everything" box, that looks good on paper, it will be crap, because you'll need to use cheapo components to hit that price point. If you stick with quality components, $500 won't let you build anything more than a VERY basic box.

On the other end of the scale, $4,000 will let you go pretty darned deluxe, without going totally stupid. Of course, there is really no limit to how much you COULD dump into a box, but you hit a point where large chunks of money won't give you huge gains in capability.

In the mid-range, $1,500 is comfortable. You won't be on the bleeding edge of anything, which means that the kiddies at school will think it suxxors, but it will have a far better price/performance ratio than the bleeding edge machines.

Where to spend the money? First, figure on a GOOD motherboard. Although there are pretty good boards coming out of the second-string manufacturers, I've never seen a really valid reason to go to anyone but Asus. The few bucks extra that you may pay for an Asus board is worth it, if only that you can save a lot of time in researching boards from other manufacturers. As far as I've seen, everything that Asus makes is pretty darned good.

One place where you can save a few bucks today is on sound. I've always used Sound Blasters, for years, but the on-board sound available on some of the Asus boards is good enough for most people today. Unless you're really going to need the feature on an Audigy 2, I would figure on going with the on-board sound. You could always stick in a high-end sound card later, if you change your mind. The on-board sound doesn't add much to the price of the board.

While we are on the topic of on-board stuff, on-board networking is pretty good. The Asus P4P-800 (+Deluxe) is very good.

Gamers won't want a board with on-board video, although the Intel Extreme 2 video on the Asus P4P-800VM doesn't suck too badly. That board still comes with an AGP slot, so a "real" video card can always be added later.

RAM-wise, if you go with the P4P/P4C boards from Asus, you should figure on getting a matched pair of the 400 MHz stuff. There shouldn't be much price difference between one stick of 512Meg and two sticks of 256Meg, and there is a bit of a performance benefit. A pair of 512Meg sticks is even cooler, of course.

If you think I sound like I'm a bit Intel-centric at this point, you're probably right. I really don't feel that there is enough of a price spread between the mid-range chips from Intel and AMD to warrant going to the AMD. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against AMD. They made the best chips for the 386, and their 486 chips were just as good as the Intel. But, I see some uncomfortable, glitchy stuff going on with the current AMD chips (nothing that most people will likely ever see), and the AMD chips dissipate a lot more heat than the Intel, which is something that WILL become an issue for folks who tend to hang on to their 'puters for 3+ years.

Last point, regarding hard drives. Maxtor sucks. Take my word for that. Seagate, Western Digital, and Fujitsu all have lower failure rates. At this point, you would probably use SATA drives. The performance on SATA is NOT that great right now, but there isn't much of a price premium on SATA. The only problem with SATA is that the selection is not great. Seagate has SATA drives as small as 120 Gig, Western Digital SATA drives start at 250 Gig.

-rcv-

[Occhidiangela]

Is it a Plains Buffalo thing?

Thanks for the advice on ASUS, I am eyeing a couple of Gigabyte boards, and will be puzzling out my want/need balance with the wife's eye on the final price. :)

Intel Extreme 2 Graphics sounds like a good entering opiton, with room to grow, I had not thought of that approach.

Funny you mention Maxtor, my HD that just gave me fits is a Maxtor. Penny wise pound foolish, and yes, my rig is almost exactly 3 years old. And and AMD. Why do I feel as though I am wearing a dunce cap at this moment? :o

[kandrathe]

Now one must consider chipset as well as mobo manufacturer. I have the NVidia2 chipset on mine, but I've read good things about VIA as well.

If you think I sound like I'm a bit Intel-centric at this point, you're probably right. I really don't feel that there is enough of a price spread between the mid-range chips from Intel and AMD to warrant going to the AMD. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against AMD. They made the best chips for the 386, and their 486 chips were just as good as the Intel. But, I see some uncomfortable, glitchy stuff going on with the current AMD chips (nothing that most people will likely ever see), and the AMD chips dissipate a lot more heat than the Intel, which is something that WILL become an issue for folks who tend to hang on to their 'puters for 3+ years.

I consider these peers (2.8Ghz will outperform +3200 in some test, but the 3+ Ghz Intel will consistently outperform.)
AMD Athlon XP 3200+ -- $209
Intel Pentium 4 3.06 w/ Hyper Threading -- $228

But then, why not
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ -- $211

That depends on the core more than the manufacturer, and a good CPU heatsink will cure many ills. Intel has a few core models that are rather hot. My AMD "Barton" runs at 92F at idle (hotter than I do), and climbs to 102F under CPU load test.

[Occhidiangela]

How much cooling to see that temp?

[kandrathe]

I use a Raidmax case with two 80mm intake fans in the side blowing onto the Mobo and HD area, and then it has one 80mm output from the Power supply, and I added a 60mm outtake fan across the CPU.

This one -- Raidmax Black 10-Bay ATX Mid-Tower Case w/ Front USB 2.0, Model 289WBP(Black) - Retail

My CPU heatsink is one recommended for the processor 80mm and I lapped it down to a mirror polish and used arctic silver 3. Something like a Thermaltake ''Volcano 10+'' Copper CPU Cooler for AMD AthlonXP up to 3400+