Help completeing my first rig...

[ArvinC]

Hello...first post in the Forum.

Anyway, putting together my first rig all by myself...and decided to go BIG! Currently have an AMD XP 2000+ mounted to a Soyo SY-K7V DRAGON Plus motherboard. Have 512 DDR Nanya regestered RAM. Thermaltake Volcano 6 Cu+ handles the cooling. All housed in a Lian Li PC-65 aluminum/plexiglass tower with 2 8" front intake fans and one 9" rear exhaust fan. A Raidmax 400 watt aluminum P/S with dual fans provides the juice. And that's it...for now.

Planning on going with 2 IBM 40G Deskstars in a RAID 1 configuration; getting floppy and DVD drives; 19" - 21" monitor of some sort and going to run Windows XP Professional.

I need any opinions on a great video card and CD-R/CD-RW burner to fill my machine out.

Was really looking into the ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder 8500 because would love the video/multi-media features it provides, but really want to have a great gaming machine first. So, is the ATI too much of a compromise in this respect?

Also, how fast is good and when is too fast overkill for Burners? And is it wothr spending bucks to get names like Plexstor, Yamaha and TDK?

Thanks for any opinions or suggestions!

ArvinC

 

[Yossarian]

Welcome to the forums.

That's one heck of a system. If you can wait a couple more weeks, cards based on Nvidia's GeForce 4 Ti4600 chip will be out, that will be cutting edge.

Since price is no object when looking at the rest of your system, get the fastest burner available from any of the manufacturers you mentioned. Going with a lesser brand and/or speed will save you maybe $50, not too much compared to the rest of your stuff.

 

[Ausm]

Those burner you listed are all good but I prefer plextor myself


Ausm

 

[Bagheera]

As far as video cards go, if you can wait for a while, I would say get a GeForce 4. But if you really want to get something NOW, then go with ATI Radeon 8500. GeForce3 Ti500 may be faster on certain games than the Radeon but if you plan on keeping the video card in your rig for a while, I believe Radeon will eventually prevail (check the Anandtech article about future GPU testing. Radeon outperformed GeForce3 Ti500 in the Unreal Engine test in most resolutions except the highest one) since hardware wise it offers more bandwidth.

As for the CD-Burner I would go with a Yamaha. There's one I saw (forgot the model) that rips digital audio at 40X. That's totally sweet.

 

[Bagheera]

As far as video cards go, if you can wait for a while, I would say get a GeForce 4. But if you really want to get something NOW, then go with ATI Radeon 8500. GeForce3 Ti500 may be faster on certain games than the Radeon but if you plan on keeping the video card in your rig for a while, I believe Radeon will eventually prevail (check the Anandtech article about future GPU testing. Radeon outperformed GeForce3 Ti500 in the Unreal Engine test in most resolutions except the highest one) since hardware wise it offers more bandwidth.

As for the CD-Burner I would go with a Yamaha. There's one I saw (forgot the model) that rips digital audio at 40X. That's totally sweet.