Viewing Thread:
"Specs for next machine hopefully..."

Processor
AMD Athlon XP 2400 (2.0GHz)

Case
ATX 400W Alum Midi Tower (AMD/P4)

Motherboard
Asus A7V333 RAID Motherboard

RAM
512MB 333MHz DDR RAM

Hard Drive 1
Seagate 80GB Hard Drive 7,200RPM

CDRom 1
DVD-ROM Drive 16x Speed

CDRom 2
CD Re-Writer 48/12/40 BURN PROOF

Floppy Drive
1.44MB Floppy Disk Drive

Graphic Card
128MB DDR GeForce4 Ti4400 AGP

PCI Card 1
Creative SndBlaster Audigy 2 Player

Operating System
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition

Monitor
17 inch monitor VL700/17 FST .27 70kHz MPR2

£1,088.54 inc VAT
Wihtout monitor is about £980 :o I could pay loads more for a less powerful dell..

I've decided a 400W one would make it more stable...

EPOX ARAARARARARAGGHGHGHH!GHGG!!!!!!!!

I have a choice of a ABIT.. or ASUS now i know.

Miserableman wrote:
> VIA make one of the chips on my ABIT motherboard.

That probably gave it away, eh rob?

Miserableman, let me guess, you have an ABIT?

Turbonutter wrote:
> VIA is so yesterday, today it's all about nForce 2.

if ur mad about what mobo u get yes....

Asides from the processor, the two main chips on any motherboard are the north and south bridge. My north bridge is made by AMD, and my south bridge by VIA. This south bridge has a history of problems, and there's an article on some German website somewhere which specifically covers the problems with VIA southbridges (which they've probably fixed by now).

On top of this, the SB Live has a known design flaw in that it spams tonnes more traffic onto the PCI bus than is necessary (something to do with bus-mastering, which I know little/nothing about). The chip on my motherboard which talks directly to the PCI devices is my VIA southbridge :O/

So I've got a badly designed southbridge being drowned in traffic by a badly designed soundcard. There is a patch available - but only for VIA northbridges (i.e. full VIA chipsets, like the KT266A). Unfortunately, I have an AMD northbridge, and no patch exists. And the drivers I have been told to install have made matters worse.

So now I've reinstalled Windows and taken the soundcard out, in the hope that a fresh press of drivers and a new soundcard will make this thing go. SB Live going ch33p, anyone?

VIA is so yesterday, today it's all about nForce 2.

Turbonutter wrote:
> My EPoX 8KHA+ is a Via KT266A chipset and the only problem I've ever
> had is recently an unresponsive USB in CS. Even then I haven't
> isolated it to the VIA chipset, and I think I've fixed it now
> anyway.
>
> TBH I think it's your ABIT.

My mobo is actually VIA for the new one.

They aren't boobs, i want boobs..

ftp://gloria2-f.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/stockli


They are very hi-res images of the Earths surface (they are probably in TIFF format rather than JPG, thinking about it). You need two of them to form a complete whole, then you could stream them into Celestia as a single 800MB texture |o/


Assuming you've gone to the future and brought back some demon graphics card with 1GB video RAM. (how we'll laugh at this in a couple of years)