New System-About to buy

[Mark Holtz]

Looks like time's up, and I'm going to purchase the parts to the system. Hopefully, I am doing the right thing....

Motherboard - Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra Platnium . Apparently, there are some stability issues with the GigaBite VXRP, so the Soyo board is the next best thing. It comes with a Sigma box which I can use memory cards on. (The Gigabyte board had the connectors, but not the actual box).

Processor - Athlon XP 2200+ . Fastest AMD processor you can get.

Memory - PC2700 512MB

Video Card - MSI GeForce 4400 . It's apparently one of the best at rendering graphics. I didn't want to go for a top of the line 9700 or 4600. Although a little overpowered, it should last me a few years.

Power Supply- Exermax 465.

Hard Drive - Will pick one up locally. Waiting until last minute.

Secondary Master- A 50x CD-ROM drive from an older system.

Secondary Slave - LG Electronics 8320 CD-RW/DVD-ROM Drive

Operating System - XP Home.

This setup will get me back some change, but I tend to build systems that last. I picked up a nice case for $60 (w/o power supply).

What helped in my decision is the company websites. Gigabyte, Soyo, and MSI all have their manuals in PDF format, not to mention the flash files.

[Mark Holtz]

The Soyo has buikt0in sound.

[Bogy]

Zac, sometimes some people have to make compromises. If the MB has built-in sound Z-loth may be willing to let it do the job for the time being until he has recovered from the shock of everything else he is buying at this time. How quickly he buys a different card will probably depend upon just how unacceptable he finds the sound quality for his purposes. As someone who makes lots of compromises between what he would like to have vs. what fits into the budget due to other obligations this is a plan that makes sense to me. Good luck, Z-loth. Have fun. Looking forward to hearing how it all goes, and waiting until my wife gets her Masters and is gainfully employed so I can do the same thing. :D

[gcutler]

Originally posted by Zac
...I that almost everybody finds them unacceptable for all but basic things like system beeps and perhaps the occasional MP3/WMA/OGGVorbis and game....

Not really...Are you taking your circle of friends and expanding it to "Almost everbody"? I know plenty of people who are satisfied. But then again they are not "Audiophiles" or even have an "Ear" for most stuff. If you go onto a gamers or audiophile board of course they are not going to be satisfied, they want the perfect experience. But it does look like the Z'Loth is putting together a powerful machine and would probably want a better sound board (but the reality is in his ear)

[Mark Holtz]

It's reality thats screaming loudly in my ear. :( Hopefully, what i got will last me quite a while. We'll see about the built-in sound, then worry about a sound card later.

Because of the advances in the technology, I'm only able to re-use two components: A florry drive and a CD-ROM drive.

[gcutler]

Z'Loth, this is America, Throw out the old components and "Prime the Economy" with all new purchases :p

[Chris Blount]

Z'Loth,

The systems sounds nice. About my only suggestion is to make sure you have adequate cooling in the case. If you have stability problems at first, try adding an extra fan if the case doesn't have one already.

[Mark Holtz]

The case has two fans already installed in the back of the case, and has holders in place for two more 80mm fans in the front. In addition, the 3-1/2 bays are easily removed with a flick of a lever.

[MarkA]

Gosh, two case fans (even if they're both at the back) should be more than adequate. Remember - overcooling is a bad thing also, as you create a higher background noise level in your room forcing you to turn your speakers up higher to get adequate dynamic range:(

[Mike123abc]

Make sure you get CL2 ram not the CL2.5, CL2 costs about $10 more, but the first access is 25% faster.

[Mark Holtz]

Whoops..... ran into a problem.... they ran out of the MSI 4400 . Will call the vendor tomorrow.

[cnsf]

Z'Loth, I also heard the Soyo sound solution is fine. Check Tom's Hardware and Sharky Extreme for KT333 mobo reviews. I doubt you'd be able to hear a difference between that and the TB Santa Cruz, unless you have ultra-kickin' speakers...not worth the extra cash.

As for video, you may be better off with an ATI AIW 7500 (cheaper) if you're not exclusively gaming (i.e. if you want video editing features).

Also, the Gigabyte dual-BIOS is pretty cool as I've had BIOS crap out on me before....too bad about stability. Are you sure you weren't looking at the PCB v1 mobo and not v2.0?

[Mark Holtz]

This was a 2.0 board on the GigaByte, but I'm still looking.

I got a digital camera for my birthday yesterday that handles MMC/SD cards. Definately a factor.

[Mark Holtz]

Originally posted by Zac
Make the CDRW/DVD the master and the CD-ROM the slave. This will generally work better, both for movies and the CDRW. Of course, I believe it doesn't make that much difference (some would have you belive it was a life-or-death thing, but I don't think so - at least on newer IDE controllers) - but it can't hurt.

Hmmmm..... because the plan was to put the faster CD-ROM drive as primary, and the slower CD-RW/DVD as the secondary. Sigh.... so many choices. I don't even plan on overclocking this system even.

[Mark Holtz]

Okay, calling off plan B, going with Plan C.

I'm going to hold off until the beginning of October to purchase the systen. By then, the Athlon 2400+ should be released. I'm also going to get the MSI GeForce 4600 card.

I was at Fry's yesterday, and they had a WD 80GB hard drive with 8 MB buffer for $139 before $40 rebate. I think I will pick it up. They also had a system set up for water cooling and running what was I believe the latest Wolfenstein. Drool.

[Mike123abc]

Last time I was at Frys I picked up a shuttle PC, I am very happy with it. I got the one with one AGP and one PCI card slot. It is very small and quite. While it only has the one PCI slot, it has everything on the motherboard... Firewire, USB 2.0, ethernet, sound, etc. I put a geforce card in it (plus memory, disk, dvd/cd, etc), and it is as fast as my full sized systems. In fact I think it is a bit faster.

[gcutler]

Originally posted by Mike123abc
Last time I was at Frys I picked up a shuttle PC, I am very happy with it. I got the one with one AGP and one PCI card slot. It is very small and quite. While it only has the one PCI slot, it has everything on the motherboard... Firewire, USB 2.0, ethernet, sound, etc. I put a geforce card in it (plus memory, disk, dvd/cd, etc), and it is as fast as my full sized systems. In fact I think it is a bit faster.

A while ago a PC with that small a footprint might be a problem. but with USB and firewire the availabilty for expansion is not a problem. But external Firewire/USB devices which usually require their own case, fan, power supply are more expensive than internal devices. So like adding an ADDITIONAL hard drive, or CD drive would be cheaper if internal.

[Mark Holtz]

MSI GeForce4 TI4600 - $269
ATI 9700 Retail - $334.14

[Mark Holtz]

www.mwave.com . You can also check www.newegg.com .

[Mark Holtz]

Well, picked up a WD hard drive today. I'm going to hold off a week or two to order the rest of the system.

[Mark Holtz]

Okay, placed the re-order last night. With some minor revisions (a $10 price drop on the GeForce 4600, using a Antec TruePower 430 instead of a Enermax), my order came within $5 of my first attempted order. Should be a kick-ass system when assembled, and last me a few years.

[Unthinkable]

Let us know how many frames per second you get out of Doom 3 once its released.

[Mark Holtz]

Well, I got a little surprise Saturday. The system parts arrived Saturday. However, due to a makeup exam, I just assembled part of the ssytem today.

[Mark Holtz]

Well, the system is nice and assembled, and right now, I'm loading up all the essentials, which is taking up a lot of time. The system boots fast, and it is surprisingly quiet. I downloaded the 3DMark from MadOnion..... WOW!

The only oddity....
A - 1.44 Floppy
C - Flash Card Reader
D - Flash Card Reader
E - 50x CD-ROM drive
F - 32x CD-RW/DVD-ROM
G - Hard Drive

Might prove to be a little troublesome, especially since the HD is usually the C drive. Oh well.

[Mark Holtz]

I agree, since normally C is the hard drive. I'm going to see how things work out. Guess that's XP for you.

One utility that I've installed monitors the temperature of the CPU, the RPM of the CPU fan, and the temperature and fan speed of the power supply, not to mention the voltages. Neat!

[gcutler]

The only problem would be apps that assume C: is the system hard drive partition (Of Course from NT days MS calls the partition with the boot files the system partition and the partition with the operating system the boot partition ...:rolleyes: ). But an App so inflexible as to not allow anything other than C: install is definately not Windows/NT/XP compliant.

I wonder if you installed the Hard drive to the Secondary IDE controller and not the Primary IDE controller and perhaps as a SLAVE instead of Master on the Controller to cause that to happen? But I have no experience with flash card readers, so that may cause some things to act weird?

The goal with IDE is to have (for controllers and devices, 0 is the first one and 1 is the next device or controller)

Hard Drive
Controller 0, Device 0

Free Space, for 2nd drive or whatever
Controller 0, Device 1

Bootable CD
Controller 1, Device 0

2nd CD
Controller 1, Device 1

If those card readers are USB or Firewire, might be better to not have them connected while doing initial install and add them later?

But if it works, it works

[James_F]

My flash card reader alwyas wants to do the same thing. It took me about a month to get my hard dive as the c: drive again. :bang:

[James_F]

Mine is a ScanLogic I got for "free" at Fry's Electronics... It works great once I got it to stop wanting to be the C and D drives (its a compact flash and smart media card reader)

[James_F]

USB....

What is funny about this story is that Windows Update of all things fixed this. It wanted to download new drivers and since I was having trouble, I gave it a shot. End result, it stayed as the H and I drives when I set them in Disk Management. Before on rebooting the computer, the card reader would revert back to being the C and D drives.

[Mark Holtz]

Well, if you DON'T have the hard drive as C:, the system will work, just that some applications will not install properly. I think what happened is that I started the first install of XP, then went off to class. But, my BIOS configuration, in order to boot off the CD, had the CD drive first and the HD second. As a result, the XP installation booted off the CD (while I was gone) and my HD went to G:.

After some pulling my hair out, I threw away several hours of work, reformatted, and reinstalled. The C: drive is now the HD, and I have to reinstall everything... again.

I just checked the manual, and if you hold down the ESC key while booting up, it will give you a boot menu as to which device you want to boot from instead of having to change things in the BIOS. But, then again, sometimes you learn from just doing.

I still haven't activated Windows XP yet.

[Mark Holtz]

Well, today makes it official. I am now using the new box as the main system.

[Mark Holtz]

Well, just as an update.... and mind you, I expected to do some tweaking here....

* Two hours. Thats how long I could stand the XP interface before switching to classic mode.
* Went into BIOS and changed some of the settings. The BIOS defaults to instant off if you hit the power button. I switched this to four seconds because, under XP, if you just press the power button, the system will go into shutdown mode. Nice.
* Had to install and update a few drivers in the device manager.
* Sound is EXCELLENT. I'm only hearing the crackling when I play a DVD, and that because I have to turn the volume way up.
* WinMark Score: 11083. First time I ran the demo, my reaction was WOW!
* Now searching for a still capture program to work with my 4600 video card.
* The new CD-RW/DVD ROM drive rips and copies faster than the older 50x drive. CD Duplication *MUST* be done from the CD-RW drive. However, the 50x drive is still better for transferring data.
* My entire CD collection has been ripped.
* One utility allows me to monitor the temperature of both the CPU and the Power supply as well as the fan speed. CPU Temperature goes between 110-119.
* It took some doing, but I just managed to get CDDB functionality running again in J-River's Media Jukebox.
* Still working on getting power-on from keyboard.

Now, I'm working my way through "No One Lives Forever", which was included with my video card. 1024x768 resolution..... WOW! First person shooters have changed since I gave up on them with Duke Nukem 3D.

[Unthinkable]

Originally posted by Z'Loth
Now, I'm working my way through "No One Lives Forever", which was included with my video card. 1024x768 resolution..... WOW! First person shooters have changed since I gave up on them with Duke Nukem 3D.

That was a superb game with great humor and an involving storyline that had me interested in it from beginning to end. Kate Archer has some great 007 innuendo lines in the original. If you enjoy that one you would probably also love Deus Ex as well with JC Denton as the lead character. I wish I had the $$$ to upgrade my system and monitor right now and also afford the sequel to NOLF. Have you gawked at the 19 inch Samsung 191T TFT flat screen yet at Best Buy just for kicks? $900 bucks!!

[Mark Holtz]

Originally posted by Zac
"One utility allows me to monitor the temperature of both the CPU and the Power supply as well as the fan speed. CPU Temperature goes between 110-119. "

Sheesh! And your system hasn't blown up? The CPUs are rated to about 60, max. mine (an Athlon 950 admittedly) is usually under 40.

Those temperatures are in Fahrenheit. If I look at it in Celsius, then it's 46 degrees for the CPU and 34 for the power supply. This is for an Athlon 2200.

[Mark Holtz]

Thread bump.