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A little system advice

J

JimMc

Platinum Member
I'll be building a system for a friend at work. It will be running RC5 for TA (24/7 😀), so this is not totally OT.

She wants stability and simplicity, her household tends to trash their OS fairly often. AMD is out 🙁, she definately wants to go Intel and no overclocking).

Here's what I'm planning--PIII 700, Asus CUBX-E, 256MB PC133, Toshiba 12X DVD, Iomega 12X4X32 CDR, 2 IBM 75 GXP's (said she never wants to run out of HD space again 🙂), Radeon 32 MB DDR, Netgear 311 NIC and Netgear switch, Diamond MX300 (already have it) and probably a Viewsonic GS790.

My question is on the MB--is there a better choice than the CUBX-E out there? I know it is a BX, but I havem't been overly impressed with the 815's and it seems to meet her needs. Thanks.
 
If you want stability get an Intel SE440BX-2. It can't be o/c but my brother has one and it has never crashed. But it maybe very hard to find tho 🙁 and only second hand
 
Tyan S1854 Trinity 400 is a great board for stability (non-overclocked). You might also want to take a look at the Asus P3V4X.

Why so much RAM? Does she do stuff that's memory intensive? If so, you won't be getting a bunch of work units outta that machine.

Why two hard drives. You're going to have to partition them any way to make the best use of the space. Just get a 45GB, put an 8GB partition up front for the OS, put two 16GB partitions behind that for storage, then finish it off with a 4GB partition for drivers, cabs, and essential programs (just in case you have to nuke and start over).

I'd ditch the Radeon and go with a GeForce 2. Being the Pro & Ultra versions are out, you should be able to pick one up cheap.
 
Too bad AMD is out 🙁 because they do more RC5 per clock cycle. I must say, my Duron + Asus A7V has exceeded my expectations in the stability department. FWIW, it's more stable than my old BX motherboard (Tyan Tiger 100).
 
Any AOpen board, I have heard great things about them, mainly, none of them overclock worth anything, however, no matter the chipset, the things are rock stable.
 
AOpen's don't OC?

I'd probably invest in Norton utilities (namely Ghost and Rescue disk) if that household has a tendency to nuke OS's. It's not totally foolproof depending on how the machine is partitioned and the software loaded, but I'm a believer.

viz
 
They have like 20 gig worth of MP3's, want to eventually put all thier vinyl on disk at HQ--320kbs, and she would prefer that the MP3's are on their own drive so crashes or whatever won't affect them.

It'll be a dual boot, SE and W2K Pro, the RAM is only $55/stick and I find W2K more usable with 256.

I hear ya' on the Intel board, but I don't know if I can find it locally that's why I'm looking at the Asus board. The P3V4X is VIA, that's in the same boat with AMD--not an option. I personally agree that an AMD/KT133 is major league, but I'm not sure I would have said that for some of their other stuff.

I went with the Radeon over Nvidia simply for the DVD playback--suppose to be the best, no Quake III or UT in the household.

Nobody has said anything about the CUBX-E yet--it comes with ATA 100 support, must have used some third party controller for that 'cause I don't think the southbridge on a BX can do it. Any experiences?
 
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