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First time big budget build - any stuff to watch out for?

J

joeld

Senior member
Hey guys and gals,

A friend of mine's looking to get a top of the line gaming computer. Basically, the fastest cpu, mobo, video card setup combined with a 21" crt and the 7.1 megaworks sound system. I was thinking about going with the asetek vapochill XE II and an athlon 64 with geforce sli setup.

I've never messed with water cooling, much less phase change cooling, so I was curious if there were any big things I should look out for, or alternatives to that particular case.

Thanks a lot! --Joel
 
I'm so incensed by your friend's disgustingly large budget that I refuse to give you any advice on what to build.
 
aw, come on - nothing at ALL? 🙂 In that case, give advice on what to do instead and what to do with the money you'd save...
 
3500+ AMD 64 939 Winchester
1 gigabyte OCZ VX RAM OR 1 gigabyte G. Skill or OCZ Platinum TCCD based RAM.
DFI LANParty UT Ultra-D
Thermalright XP-90 heatsink
3*74 GB Raptors in RAID 5 (onboard RAID 5 included with DFI, no need for a controller)
6800GT OR X800XL
OCZ Powerstream 520 Watt OR Fortron Source 530 Watt PSU.

And for the monitor...if your friend wants, he could get those NEC 22" CRT monitors or a nice quality 19 inch LCD or a Dell 2001FP (if they still make them, hopefully they haven't been completely phased out by the 2005FPs).

I didn't include an optical drive, though you can't go wrong with Plextor or Pioneer. Case is pretty subjective, so I left that out too....

Did I forget something else?

In any case, that'll run you about 2000 USD, and it'll still have near top of the line performance, not to mention crazy overclocking ability (which judging by your original choice of a Vapochill cooled system, that your friend wants to use).
 
u have money to spare obviously so get one athlon fx (1 mb cache).as for hdd i would certainly look for a scsi one
 
Just make sure to get him the best....it appears that he is very interested in having top of the line, so i wouldnt cut any corners to save a few bucks. something to consider with that budget is maybe going with a some 15k scsi drives in raid 0 or raid 5 for the boot drive. I'm not to up on the alternative cooling methods but the prommy is nice ive heard 🙂
 
I don't want to mess with scsi -- way too long boot time 🙂

Raid 5 - good idea. I had heard that raptors in raid 0 weren't really worth it, but the additional security might be nice.

This computer will be built in late march at earliest. I'm hoping that the 90nm athlon fx chips will be out by then. I'm a little out of the loop on the athlon 64's - last I heard, the only athlons 64s with unlocked multipliers were the FX? Other than that, is there any advantage? I'm assuming the 1mb cache helps performance (duh) but would it hurt overclocking?

Also, is additional video card cooling worth it? I'm already pushing the budget with the vapochill - going with a standard case, I could probably do water cooling with the entire system cheaper, but it would be more labor and overclocking wouldn't be as nice, at least cpu wise. Also, water cooling an sli setup would be very annoying.

Rapsven - I'm going to offer an alternate system before we decide on what to build, in case he does want to cut his budget in half. Either way, it'll be fun to build 🙂
 
How often do you plan on rebooting the machine? Would you rather have boot-time performance or actual run-time performance? If you're going to spend that much, I would indeed go for SCSI and a 15K RPM drive to maximize performance. After all, the hard drive is the slowest thing in the PC.

That said, just be careful as you build this monster machine. I had a friend who went through hell trying to get his dual Athlon MP system (using a Tyan board with AMD 761 chipset) working correctly. It was cutting edge at the time but it had many compatibilty problems.

 
halfadder, has a great point there.
How often do you plan on rebooting the machine? Would you rather have boot-time performance or actual run-time performance? If you're going to spend that much, I would indeed go for SCSI and a 15K RPM drive to maximize performance. After all, the hard drive is the slowest thing in the PC.
Click to expand...

I would rather have actual run-time performance than boot-time performance. Really who cares how long it takes to boot if you have great performance. If its more than a couple of minutes it can get tidious. It also depends on if you leave the computer on for days and days at a time cause then why would you care about boot time?

just my 2 cents worth

EDIT: Spelling....I suck at it, and still probly missed some.
 
Vapochill and FX55 and 3.0ghz will be in your taillights!!! Dont waste your time with the winnies!!!

Obviously you said SLI so most likley Ultras....

definitely give the Raid 5 a shot with a real controllercard with a huge onboard cache...that will speed things up a shot....

CRap the SLI boards dont have PCI-x slots do they???
 
I wouldn't waste my money on sli it hasn't been proven and isn't widely supported YET. beyond that your budget makes me sick and I need to go vomit. I built mine on $1100 with a 17" LG 1720p LCD god the monster I could have if I had that budget.

I'd go with dual xeon procs or a dektop replacement laptop for that budget and a huge uxga display
 
As of right now, the storage plan is a 74gb raptor and 250gb sata drive. To go to scsi, especially scsi raid, I'd have to drop the 6800 ultras, or drop down to a non-sli setup, or drop the vapochill to fit in the better storage. Hopefully by the next month and a half or so, the 6800 ultras won't have the incredibly high price that they have now - what's with that 800 dollar asus card!?

Any news on ati's sli-capable cards? eta? probably deserving of a different thread, but it'd be nice to keep a lot of high end talk here.
 
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