Viewing Thread:
"Build-your-own"

Motherboard
Processor
Hard drive
RAM
Graphics card
Sound card
Disk drive
CD/DVD drive
Cooling fan
Operating system software
Modem
(All appropriate drivers)

Case
Monitor
Printer
Speakers
Keyboard
Mouse

Book explaining how to put it all together.


Does this sound like a complete description of what you'd need to make yourself a pc?
Worth having a go at (finance permitting, or course)?

Anyone done it here? Problems?

lol..

To be honest, I'm staying with AMD all the way. Their CPUs are often of better quality, are proven to be better for multimedia, and frankly if I had £500 to blow on a mobo+cpu(s), the AMD rig I could afford would blow any Pentium rig out of the water.

Right, i aint going intel now, I aint buying from anyone who calls their cpu prescott..

Wait untill the hammers come out, they will be awsome, eventually going to .09 micron die size (so are intel though with the Pentium 5 prescott i believe), but initially comeing out at .13 they will look like the Pentium 4 socket 478 chips with the heat spreaders on which should meen better cooling (hopefully).

c.b.

To be honest, the battle between the two has closed up much more recently, unless you bring price into the equation. P4s are still very expensive compared to XPs, but then again, P4s are faster in terms of clock speed, and do overclock much better than XPs.

For most people, I'd still say an XP is the way to go, but I was pondering about my next upgrade a day or two ago, and the temptation to go P4 is pretty strong, I'd kill for a nice P4 setup, but cost will probably mean i go for AMD, just not till 2400+ or so..

AMD and intel are both big cahooners in the cpu business both outdoing eachother so if you went AMD or Intel you will have a good bet, but if you want flexability in upgrading then i would say AMD are best at the moment as Intel have a tendency to change Cpu pin outs, thus needing new motherboard, but AMD have stuck to the typical 462 pins even with the new thouroughbread cpu's (although you will need a newish motherboard to accept these cpu's), actually come to think of it AMD are about to change the pins and sockets for the new Clawhammer and sledgehammer K8 chips, so i retract that statement.

AMD are all round cheaper and have better performance clock to clock with Intel at the moment.

There are tons of PRO's and Con's for either cpu's, we can list them if you like, just to help you choose.

c.b.

Of course. At this rate, I'd say Intel are more at risk, although they're both blue chips...

Fog wrote:
> Anyway, Dr Duck, tell us your budget, i'll try and round some lists up
> for you (i'm bored and I like looking at hardware)


Thanks
i'm going for something as cheap as possible that i can gradually upgrade to eventually be a good all-rounder, capable of running games at reasonable performance and generally running along nice and smoothly.
Crucially, i'd like to be able to be using and upgrading it for the forseeable future.

For now, all i need is the tower and interior bits (i'll take the monitor et al from my old thing).
The modem can wait, i can deal with 64mb ram to start with (it can be upgraded soon enough), and for now, the sound card can be put on hold too. I think i'd like to start with a basic cd drive and add a dvd/cd-rw later.

Are AMD here to stay?

Foggeh...266 = 2*133..thanks to DDR, like DDR ram. 133mhz fsb, but effectively working at double the frequency. All athlon/duron cpus are 200/266mhz..

Hm, I can't explain this properly. Go read this.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/cpu/athlon-1200.html

Like P4s run at 400mhz fsb with their "Quad pipe architecture", or whatever the PR department ended up calling it. 4*100mhz...later upgraded to 4*133 (533mhz).

my 1.3Ghz Athlons 266fsb :)
must be thinking about something else.

Erm, time moved on? All the latest XPs use a 133mhz FSB...