Building A Future proof System, Please help

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dguy6789

Diamond Member
Dec 9, 2002
8,558
3
76
Alright, I got a couple thousand bucks to make a system, I want it to last as long as It can.
So far, this is what im thinking of putting together, your opinions and suggestions are welcome.
I wont be building it for a couple of months. This will be a sytem for extreme everything, gaming, media encoding, CD/DVD burning, acting as a server, doing 3D workstaton stuff, all this stuff, So here it is.

Mainboard: ASUS A7N8X
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3000+ 333FSB
RAM: I will have 3 1GB PC2700 sticks of ram, adding up to 3GB of ram.
Video: Either a AIW Radeon 9800 PRO 256MB, or a Geforce FX 5900 Ultra,
harddrive: 2 250GB harddrives, dont know which company yet.
CD drives: fastest dvd burner available at the time, 52X24X52 cd burner
floppy: regular 1.44MB
Zip: regular zip drive
Case: probably a thermaltake xaser II A6000A + with 550W power supply

I think thats all of it, please state your opinions on how it will do all these tasks, and how long you think it will last, and some hardware changes i should make, dont wanna spend 5 grand and have it go out of date in 6 months.
 
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RaymondY

Golden Member
Nov 23, 2000
1,627
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Forget the floppy drive and the zip drive. U will have a dvd and cd burner.

Wait till the Nforce 2 Ultra motherboards come out with support for the 400fsb AMD Processer. Get new 400fsb processer. Forge the PC2700 and get PC3200 instead.
 
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bob332

Banned
Jan 25, 2002
597
0
0
Originally posted by: dguy6789
Alright, I got a couple thousand bucks to make a system, I want it to last as long as It can.
So far, this is what im thinking of putting together, your opinions and suggestions are welcome.
I wont be building it for a couple of months. This will be a sytem for extreme everything, gaming, media encoding, CD/DVD burning, acting as a server, doing 3D workstaton stuff, all this stuff, So here it is.

Mainboard: ASUS A7N8X
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3000+ 333FSB
RAM: I will have 3 1GB PC2700 sticks of ram, adding up to 3GB of ram.
Video: Either a AIW Radeon 9800 PRO 256MB, or a Geforce FX 5900 Ultra,
harddrive: 2 250GB harddrives, dont know which company yet.
CD drives: fastest dvd burner available at the time, 52X24X52 cd burner
floppy: regular 1.44MB
Zip: regular zip drive
Case: probably a thermaltake xaser II A6000A + with 550W power supply

I think thats all of it, please state your opinions on how it will do all these tasks, and how long you think it will last, and some hardware changes i should make, dont wanna spend 5 grand and have it go out of date in 6 months.
Click to expand...

get the a7n8x deluxe motherboard
get PC3200 ram

 
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bgeh

Platinum Member
Nov 16, 2001
2,946
0
0
since you will be getting it in a few months time, i recommend you to get an Athlon 64
 
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ProviaFan

Lifer
Mar 17, 2001
14,993
1
0
The ATI Radeon 9800 Pro may be a waste of money because video cards get outdated so quickly anyway. I'd save a little money by getting a 9700 Pro and put it toward a 15kRPM SCSI drive (a 36GB model would be fine) for your boot drive. Then you can use either one or both of your 250GB drives (I recommend the Western Digital Special Edition series) for data storage. Put them in RAID 1 if you'd like plain redundancy, or keep them separate (I'd advise against RAID 0, as that is too risky unless you back up religiously) if you need more space. As a third option, you could get a 3ware IDE RAID controller plus three 250GB drives, and run them in RAID 5. That way, you'd have 500GB of redundant storage with faster transfer rates than you'd get from a single drive. In that case, you could forgo the SCSI if the cost were too high, or keep it if you also want a boot drive with access times (and of course the accompanying "smoothness" that comes with very low access times) second only to SSDs.
 
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dguy6789

Diamond Member
Dec 9, 2002
8,558
3
76
Alright thanks you guys, do they have 1 Gig PC3200 modules? If i remeber the A7N8X has 400 FSB support, i currently have one and it works quite well, in about 3 -4 months, what do you think will be the fastest Athlon 64, and fastest video card, if the athlon 64 proves well, i may get one of those instead of an athlon xp.
 
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RoninBlackSoul

Senior member
Nov 25, 1999
221
0
71
Well if you haven't got the board yet.. go for that new nforce2 board by GigaByte. From the specs of that thing, puts all the current ones to shame.

to be future proof somewhat on the harddrives.. yeah setup scsi boot drive like a poster said and setup raid or normal drives on the ide/sata.
 
mechBgon

mechBgon

Super Moderator<br>Elite Member
Oct 31, 1999
30,699
1
0
Originally posted by: ScrapSilicon
send it mechBgon's way...he'll "test" it for ya ...:D
Click to expand...
Hehe, make it SCSI if you're going to be using it as a workstation & server simultaneously. I do something like that at work sometimes... I might be working with any five+ of the following at once (Word, Excel, Access, Outlook, PhotoImpact, Acrobat Reader, McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator Console, Windows Computer Management, Network Neighborhood, Internet Exploder, recording a CD-R) while 1-3 PCs are pulling Office2000 Professional installs across the network from my system. Then the daily virus scan kicks in :p If drives could talk...

IDE drive: you have GOT to be kidding me. :p

SCSI drive: haha, gimme some more! :evil:



edit: to be fair, even my X15-36LP can slow down significantly under the worst-case onslaught I described there. I want to pick up another 15000rpm SCSI drive and park my Office2000 administrative installation points and stuff on a separate drive from my apps, probably with a dual-channel U320 card or else a second SCSI card. You might consider SCSI as your primary drive(s) and then get some Maxtor Maxline Plus II's for bulk storage... fluid bearings, three-year warranty/5-year designed lifespan, high capacity.
 
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Redviffer

Senior member
Oct 30, 2002
830
0
0
Your building a future proof computer and your building it with an Athlon??? Your off base on your first step buddy. True future proofing of any computer starts with 2 components: the motherboard and cpu. Your BEST bet for not having to upgrade for a long time is to get an Intel Canterwood chipset that will run everything from 400 MHz FSB cpus up to 800 MHz FSB cpus. In my opinion, you can never achieve true future proofing, but you buy the best motherboard you can, and just upgrade the cpu every couple of months (or years, for some people).

I'd have to agree with Nick, about the only thing that is totally future proof is the floppy drive, and maybe the case. I still have my case that I built my P-233 MMX system in. Now it's running a P4 2.4 GHz! (nice, I finally got the full use of my money out of something) :)
 
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Woodchuck2000

Golden Member
Jan 20, 2002
1,632
1
0
Tomshardware has an article up suggesting that running memory in sync with FSB is the best way to get performance out of the barton chip. Linky. It may be worth buying PC3200 or even PC3700 but bear in mind that you'll probably want to run them at PC2700 speeds to get the best out of your rig (unless you're overclocking.)

As far as memory goes, what are you planning to do with the system that'll use 3 Gigs of ram? Some motherboards have issues running more than two sticks at high frequency and unless you can justify the need of more than 2 Gigs, stick with that.
 
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sharkeeper

Lifer
Jan 13, 2001
10,886
2
0
VIA (everyone knows why)

VIA is like the little engine that could. So much potential, good features but something comes along and fugs everything up BIGTIME!

nForce--too immature to know if it's gonna fly. (for long) I know there are plenty of members that will think that's harsh, but one must remember where I'm coming from. If it's system built around cost for a family member, for example, then sure why not? :)

Funny how so much trust is built into Intel these days. Build the GD thing and fly... (and it works)

AMD has a great chipset too. Hopefully they will continue with this trend with Opteron.

-DAK-
 
mechBgon

mechBgon

Super Moderator<br>Elite Member
Oct 31, 1999
30,699
1
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Ahh... well, I have (*thinks*) about 26 nForce systems and two nForce2's in my care now, and they are quite stable. I did have one nForce2 board fail, but I think it was a BIOS problem or else a VRM failure. Long story behind that, I won't bore you with it. ;)

dguy6789, you might want to keep your eye open for the nForce3 Professional 150 and 250 boards to be reviewed in about a month.
 
mechBgon

mechBgon

Super Moderator<br>Elite Member
Oct 31, 1999
30,699
1
0
SCSI is like IDE from an alternate universe. The parts sort of resemble an IDE drive/cable/PCI controller, except with strange differences :D

Usual setup: you pick up a SCSI card that plugs into a PCI slot, and a SCSI drive, and a SCSI cable with a terminator at one end.

The drives have jumpers like IDE drives, except that they have more than just master/slave... they can be jumpered for an ID number ranging from 0 to 15. The reason is that each SCSI bus can have as many as fifteen devices on it (one controller, 14 drives). So you could have a huge cable with fifteen connectors on it if you really wanted. It would be best to split up that many drives among several different busses, which is why there are two-channel and four-channel SCSI cards.

You put the SCSI drive as close as possible to the teminated end of the cable, put the card at the other end, throw your Windows CD in the drive, and have your SCSI card's driver on a floppy diskette. When Windows Setup begins, it says "Press F6 now if you have drivers yada yada" and you say "heck yeah I do" and press F6, and when it's got its stuff loaded it will ask for the floppy with the SCSI card drivers. Then you install Windows and that's that.

If you have more than one SCSI drive then you may need to enter the SCSI card's own BIOS and tell it "boot from the drive with ID# 0" or whichever. Easily done.

WindowsXP has some Issues with SCSI, and one thing that helps is to set the drives as Dynamic Disks in Windows Disk Management. They are evidently working on a patch to address the situation better, maybe with WinXP Service Pack 2 or something.

I do use the Asus A7N8X-Deluxe myself, with my SCSI controller in PCI slot #4. Works nice, my rig is like this: specs The SCSI drive is pretty quiet and the new Cheetah 15k.3 is quieter yet. Granted, the cost per Mb is huge compared to a high-capacity IDE drive, so I'm not saying it's perfect for everyone's needs. Hypermicro.com is a good place to buy drives and cards, very good reputation and they pack stuff well.
 
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dguy6789

Diamond Member
Dec 9, 2002
8,558
3
76
Ok thanks, is SCSI faster? is it posssible to use RAID and SCSI for really fast speed?
 
mechBgon

mechBgon

Super Moderator<br>Elite Member
Oct 31, 1999
30,699
1
0
SCSI is very fast. The drives are built primarily for server usage, so they have extremely low seek times, high RPMs and heavy-duty mechanicals, and are built/waranted for 5 years of non-stop use (usually, check the warranty).

For instance, the Cheetah 15k.3 has a seek time of about 3.8 milliseconds, compared to around 9ms for most IDE drives. It can seek track-to-track in 0.2ms, compared to ~1ms for IDE. Obviously its 15000rpm rotation speed is an asset too. The platters are strikingly small, which offsets some of the advantage of the high rotation speed: inside the 73Gb Cheetah 15k.3 edit: they do not actually glow purple ;)

In the multitasking situation I described, SCSI's ability to process commands in the most efficient order, rather than the order of their arrival, is probably the other big reason it handles heavy multitasking adeptly.

You can certainly RAID the SCSI drives. Even two of them in RAID0 are enough to saturate a conventional 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus completely in a straight-line sprint, so it won't pay to get too carried away. If RAID0 is as far as you want to go, Adaptec has the 39320-R controller with basic RAID1 and RAID0 functionality and you would want to put each drive on its own cable. Hardcore RAID cards are out there which can do more RAID flavors such as RAID5, here's an example: LSI Logic 2-channel U320 RAID controller with 64Mb cache
 
0roo0roo

0roo0roo

No Lifer
Sep 21, 2002
64,795
84
91
ur better off getting an affordable overclocked system that leaves money left over so u can continuously budget upgrade it everytime u see a hotdeal. ol hodge podge approach
 
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