My ultimate system! please help/critic!!

[gagaliya]

Hello after much research, I have ordered all the parts for my system. The goal of this system (in order of importance is):

1) Stability: ( I could care less about a few extra performance gains from overclocking/tweaking etc).
2) Noise: (seems unimportant, until you sat next to an AMD vacuum for a year..)
3) Performance.

My system setup is:

Antec Sonata case with 370W truepower powersupply (the 1 fan version)
Intel P4 3 GHz at 800 FSB
Zalman something7000 quiet fan
Intel D875PBZ motherboard (I ordered gigabyte 8kxnp + corsair xms LL memories, but had to cancel the order after all the horror stories I heard about them)
Kingston HyperX KHX3200K2 1GB PC3200 DDR memory Kit
MSI geforcefx 5900 128 MB DDR
Audigy2 Plat sound
Maxtor 160 GB 8MB 7200 RPM HDD ( http://www.maxtor.com/en/products/ata/desktop/diamondmax_plus_9/index.htm )
/with ultra ATA/133 PCI card (http://www.maxtor.com/en/products/accessories/ultra_ata/ultra_ata_133_pci_adapter_card/index.htm)
Toshiba DVD

Please give feedback ( good or bad ).

I also have a few technical questions if anyone know it for SURE:

1)I noticed on the intel d875pbz mobo it only goes up to ata100 support, does this mean I have to use that maxtor ata133 pci card to run the hdd at ata133 mode:/ this really sucks, reminds me of the old vesa controller days. Is there an updated bios or anythign that can let me plug it to the onboard IDEs instead that runs at ata133?

2)Whcih slots should the 2 stick of 512mb ddr memory go to achieve optimal performance in dual ddr mode?

3)Does any of the other 875 chipset mobo has onboard ata133 ide?

4) Do i have to use the ata133 pci card?

5) Do i ?

Thank you.

gaga

 

[Aenslead]

Well, first of all... its quite likely that you will find your new 3.0Ghz system just as noisy as your old AMD "vacuum"... but if you are interested in silence, try Antec's Sonata line of cases... which is as silent as... err... silence.

Anywho:

critics.-
Bad choice of motherboard. Should've bought an Abit IS7: much more feature packed, cheaper, faster, less picky about memory modules. Everything else is quite peachy.

Answers.-

1.- No. Your Maxtor drive will work just fine. It will NOT work @ ATA133, but it doesnt matter, since the gains from going ATA100 to ATA133 are non-existant. That's the reason why no-one else makes ATA133 drives- your drive will be detected @ ATA100 and will work perfectly.

2.- 1 & 2

3.- no.

4.- no.

5.- no.

 

[gagaliya]

1.- No. Your Maxtor drive will work just fine. It will NOT work @ ATA133, but it doesnt matter, since the gains from going ATA100 to ATA133 are non-existant. That's the reason why no-one else makes ATA133 drives- your drive will be detected @ ATA100 and will work perfectly.

Not that I dont trust you, but does anyone have a site where they did some hardcore testing comparing ata100 to ata133 performance?

About the noise, yeah i ordered the antec sonata (first line of my spec;P). Also got the quietest video card / cpu fan etc, i hope it runs silent or i am gonna throw it out the window *(#&@(*#!!. Really cant stand the sound my amd makes anymore.

 

[egale]

The difference of Ata100 to Ata133 is non existant. I have the Asus P4C800-E which also has ATA100. If you really want improvement, get yourself an SATA drive.

The Asus board has four slots, two brown and two blue. For dual channel, you populate the like colors.

As far as video card, the 5900 is fast but it is very noisy and I believe it takes up 2 slots because of its size. I would pick the ATI 9800 pro.

 

[Sunny129]

Aenslead is right about the ATA issue. its not so much that you wouldn't see a difference, but moresoe due to the fact that ATA133 hard drives are not yet capable of even transferring data at 133MB/s due to low spin rates. most IDE hard drives these days spin at 7200 rpm, which isn't fast enough to move 133MB of data across the IDE bus in a single second. in fact the only drives that are capable of moving data at more than 100MB/s 10,000 rpm drives. but i'm pretty sure that the fastest IDE are 7200 rpm...10,000 rpm drives are usually SCSI or SATA, in which case you wouldn't have to worry since the SATA bus is capable of transferring data at 150MB/s, and the SCSI bus also allows higher transfer rates. but until IDE drives spin faster than 7200 rpm, you'll never have to worry about your IDE hard drive being held back by a bus lacking the required bandwidth to move data as fast the drive itself can.

the rest of the system looks nice. obviously you don't plan on OCing if you're using an intel mobo, but the fact is you can't go wrong with one if you are looking for stability and reliability. like Aenslead said, Abit is less picky about memory in dual channel mode, but i suppose as long as you have two identical sticks in the right banks, you shouldn't havea problem.

 

[gagaliya]

thanks guys that's some very helpful info! i have 1 more question:

On the hdd manual it said ata100 only support up to 137(?) gb hdd without xp service pack1. And i have an old xp pro cd(no sp1), the intel d875pbz mobo is ata100, and my hdd is 160gb. Does that mean I will have problems?


cheers,

gaga

 

[Aenslead]

Sorry about the Sonata case comment... I didn't see it on your first post.

As for your last question: no, not a single problem. Normally, instruction booklets are a bit out-of-date, and may publish according to what was the highest density at the time.

Current IDE controllers, be them on southbridge or on an external controller, support ANY density... and I beleive that UNLESS a serious change in HDD structure is made for the up-coming higher densities, we should find no problems in upgrading 200Gb+ HDD.

As for the performance differences you may check them at Anandtech HDD section... if not, there are a ton of websites out there... even Tom's HW-