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It has been a long time coming but the day is finally near. I'm going to order and build from scratch a new PC. I've decided on most of it so far. but not keeping up with PC hardware like I used to, I wanted a second (in some cases first) opinion.
AMD Athlon 3000XP 400MHz FSB version
Coolermaster Jet 7 fan
Sapphire Radeon 9600XT 128Mb graphics card
Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 160gb Serial ATA150 7200rpm 8mb Cache
512Mb x2 chips of DDR 400 MHz RAM. Any recommendations on brands?
Nforce 2 based motherboard. Struggling to make up my mind on this, last time I checked the two to get were Asus and Abit boards. Do I go for an A7N8X-X or A7N8X Deluxe or A7N8X-VM from Asus, or NF7 Crush or NF7-S Crush from Abit? What about Gigabyte or MSI boards?
I'd like a 19" CRT monitor, been looking at Iiyama's. Anyone got one?
The DVD drive will likely be a Pioneer.
Can't think of much else. Mainly advice on the motherboard I was after. Thanks folks.
AMD Athlon 3000XP 400MHz FSB version
Coolermaster Jet 7 fan
Sapphire Radeon 9600XT 128Mb graphics card
Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 160gb Serial ATA150 7200rpm 8mb Cache
512Mb x2 chips of DDR 400 MHz RAM. Any recommendations on brands?
Nforce 2 based motherboard. Struggling to make up my mind on this, last time I checked the two to get were Asus and Abit boards. Do I go for an A7N8X-X or A7N8X Deluxe or A7N8X-VM from Asus, or NF7 Crush or NF7-S Crush from Abit? What about Gigabyte or MSI boards?
I'd like a 19" CRT monitor, been looking at Iiyama's. Anyone got one?
The DVD drive will likely be a Pioneer.
Can't think of much else. Mainly advice on the motherboard I was after. Thanks folks.
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www.microdirect.co.uk are pretty cheap. You just missed out on a sale weekend. You could have got a 19" Samsung monitor for £158 and now its £170.
I bought alot of my stuff from there when they had a deal weekend. Got the Samsung monitor £15 cheaper as well as a 9800 Pro £30 cheaper. Saved about £70 from ordering it during the sale weekend.
I bought alot of my stuff from there when they had a deal weekend. Got the Samsung monitor £15 cheaper as well as a 9800 Pro £30 cheaper. Saved about £70 from ordering it during the sale weekend.
I think there must be a 3000XP 400MHz FSB chip now as several retailers have them in stock now. I could have got the 2500XP, but I really would just prefer the 3000XP for just now and then work on overclocking it at some point.
Yeah, that fan is a waste of money. But that is one luxury I'm going to afford myself here, I really like it.
Pretty much finished working out the spec, a bit of shopping around and I might start ordering tonight.
Ta very much folks.
Yeah, that fan is a waste of money. But that is one luxury I'm going to afford myself here, I really like it.
Pretty much finished working out the spec, a bit of shopping around and I might start ordering tonight.
Ta very much folks.
Bonus wrote:
> The benchmarks for Half Life 2 run at Shader Day, or on Anadtech, or
> any other website were far from fully implemented version of the
> game, running without AA or AF. Half Life 2 still has to have it's
> high dynamic range lighting implemented in the DX9 shaders. Simply
> put, it will apply dynamic lighting effects to individual pixels on
> the screen, resulting in higher resolutions needing more lighting
> calculations, something which Doom 3 has implemented already.
>
> The current crop of cards aren't going to hold up all the well at
> high resolutions at full detail levels, Doom 3 is due out in
> February, so is the NV4x range of GPUs, you'd do well to wait and
> find out what happens with these :D
Well Halflife 2 is still far from optimized. I have played the beta on my system and can be sure that once the code is optimized it will be playing sweetly on my system at 1600x1200 with full effects. Runs well now at 1600x1200 with detailed environments, 30 fps with a screen full of enemies and DX9 graphics.
> The benchmarks for Half Life 2 run at Shader Day, or on Anadtech, or
> any other website were far from fully implemented version of the
> game, running without AA or AF. Half Life 2 still has to have it's
> high dynamic range lighting implemented in the DX9 shaders. Simply
> put, it will apply dynamic lighting effects to individual pixels on
> the screen, resulting in higher resolutions needing more lighting
> calculations, something which Doom 3 has implemented already.
>
> The current crop of cards aren't going to hold up all the well at
> high resolutions at full detail levels, Doom 3 is due out in
> February, so is the NV4x range of GPUs, you'd do well to wait and
> find out what happens with these :D
Well Halflife 2 is still far from optimized. I have played the beta on my system and can be sure that once the code is optimized it will be playing sweetly on my system at 1600x1200 with full effects. Runs well now at 1600x1200 with detailed environments, 30 fps with a screen full of enemies and DX9 graphics.
The benchmarks for Half Life 2 run at Shader Day, or on Anadtech, or any other website were far from fully implemented version of the game, running without AA or AF. Half Life 2 still has to have it's high dynamic range lighting implemented in the DX9 shaders. Simply put, it will apply dynamic lighting effects to individual pixels on the screen, resulting in higher resolutions needing more lighting calculations, something which Doom 3 has implemented already.
The current crop of cards aren't going to hold up all the well at high resolutions at full detail levels, Doom 3 is due out in February, so is the NV4x range of GPUs, you'd do well to wait and find out what happens with these :D
The current crop of cards aren't going to hold up all the well at high resolutions at full detail levels, Doom 3 is due out in February, so is the NV4x range of GPUs, you'd do well to wait and find out what happens with these :D
Bonus wrote:
> don't buy a new PC now, if you do, don't buy a top graphics card now,
> wait until the middle of next year and find out what it will take to
> run Doom 3 at a decent refresh rate.
>
> The game on full detail will use per-pixel lighting, so the higher
> the resolution the more lighting calculations it will need to do.
> Every after Doom3 and Half Life 2 will have to do this in order to
> look good, so graphics cards are about to take a new hammering in
> terms of performance.
If you get a 9600 XT you will be ok. Tests have been done and Halflife 2 runs very well on a 9600 XT, thats why its packaged with the cards.
On a side note i've played Halflife 2 on my system and at 1600x1200 I can get 80 fps on some levels which do seem to have all of the effects on. In a high graphical level with enemies and allies fighting it runs smoothly at 30 fps.
Doom 3 and Halflife 2 are going to be able to run on the current generation of cards. If you have a 9600 Pro upwards and a decent CPU and RAM you wont have anything to worry about.
> don't buy a new PC now, if you do, don't buy a top graphics card now,
> wait until the middle of next year and find out what it will take to
> run Doom 3 at a decent refresh rate.
>
> The game on full detail will use per-pixel lighting, so the higher
> the resolution the more lighting calculations it will need to do.
> Every after Doom3 and Half Life 2 will have to do this in order to
> look good, so graphics cards are about to take a new hammering in
> terms of performance.
If you get a 9600 XT you will be ok. Tests have been done and Halflife 2 runs very well on a 9600 XT, thats why its packaged with the cards.
On a side note i've played Halflife 2 on my system and at 1600x1200 I can get 80 fps on some levels which do seem to have all of the effects on. In a high graphical level with enemies and allies fighting it runs smoothly at 30 fps.
Doom 3 and Halflife 2 are going to be able to run on the current generation of cards. If you have a 9600 Pro upwards and a decent CPU and RAM you wont have anything to worry about.
If you waited until it was a 'good' time to buy a PC then you would never get one at all. There's always something new around the corner that you must have: that's why PCs are cool.
don't buy a new PC now, if you do, don't buy a top graphics card now, wait until the middle of next year and find out what it will take to run Doom 3 at a decent refresh rate.
The game on full detail will use per-pixel lighting, so the higher the resolution the more lighting calculations it will need to do. Every after Doom3 and Half Life 2 will have to do this in order to look good, so graphics cards are about to take a new hammering in terms of performance. They're going to need to leap to 64bit colour to define all levels of shading and incorporate new systems for rasterizing textures. Current cards at the top level cam apply 8 textures per pass, some objects in Doom 3 have to have 20 textures applied, this game seriously kicks the backside out of anything else ever made :D
The game on full detail will use per-pixel lighting, so the higher the resolution the more lighting calculations it will need to do. Every after Doom3 and Half Life 2 will have to do this in order to look good, so graphics cards are about to take a new hammering in terms of performance. They're going to need to leap to 64bit colour to define all levels of shading and incorporate new systems for rasterizing textures. Current cards at the top level cam apply 8 textures per pass, some objects in Doom 3 have to have 20 textures applied, this game seriously kicks the backside out of anything else ever made :D
Notorious Biggles wrote:
> adrian wrote:
> With the XP3000 are you sure its 400mhz FSB? As I am sure its only
> the 3200 that have 400mhz.
>
> I thought so too, but Ebuyer have a 400 MHz FSB version for a few
> quid more than the 333 MHz version. Figured it was worth a fiver of a
> difference.
I would make sure that it is correct as I can't find anywhere where it says it come in a 400mhz version. If you get the NF7-S motherboard is easy to overclock anyway. Just stick in a fsb say 200mhz then the multiplier. Mine is a XP2800 which runs at a standard 166x12.5, but I had it at 200x10.5 to give the 400mhz FSB and still keep the same sort of mhz with it being only 17mhz faster than the default clock of 2.083ghz.
> adrian wrote:
> With the XP3000 are you sure its 400mhz FSB? As I am sure its only
> the 3200 that have 400mhz.
>
> I thought so too, but Ebuyer have a 400 MHz FSB version for a few
> quid more than the 333 MHz version. Figured it was worth a fiver of a
> difference.
I would make sure that it is correct as I can't find anywhere where it says it come in a 400mhz version. If you get the NF7-S motherboard is easy to overclock anyway. Just stick in a fsb say 200mhz then the multiplier. Mine is a XP2800 which runs at a standard 166x12.5, but I had it at 200x10.5 to give the 400mhz FSB and still keep the same sort of mhz with it being only 17mhz faster than the default clock of 2.083ghz.
Turbonutter wrote:
> TwinMOS is the better RAM.
Correct. Crucial DDR400 apparantly uses Samsung CAS3 modules, which have high latency. I believe all other types of Crucial RAM are CAS2.5 at least. TwinMOS is better anyway, although it is more expensive.
> Maxtor drives are silent.
So is the new 80GB 10,000rpm Raptor, although that's an outstandingly expensive drive :O(
Has the thread creator not thought about getting an XP2500 and overclocking it to XP3000 speeds? The 2500 is supposed to be the sweet spot in the Barton range, and will overclock very nicely.
PS NF7-S 2.0
> TwinMOS is the better RAM.
Correct. Crucial DDR400 apparantly uses Samsung CAS3 modules, which have high latency. I believe all other types of Crucial RAM are CAS2.5 at least. TwinMOS is better anyway, although it is more expensive.
> Maxtor drives are silent.
So is the new 80GB 10,000rpm Raptor, although that's an outstandingly expensive drive :O(
Has the thread creator not thought about getting an XP2500 and overclocking it to XP3000 speeds? The 2500 is supposed to be the sweet spot in the Barton range, and will overclock very nicely.
PS NF7-S 2.0
TwinMOS is the better RAM.
Maxtor drives are silent.
That heatsink is a waste of money.
Maxtor drives are silent.
That heatsink is a waste of money.
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