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LXI - Get rid of what title??? WTF are you talking about?

kregger - What you are posting for specs look to be a pretty high end system...Have you thought of going SCSI?

As for ATI Radeon, its what I have and I really like it. I cant argue though, there drivers are sometimes kinda weird though. If you use at least version 3056 it shouldnt be a problem. but I would definitely get an Athlon over a PIII
 
What's DDR and what's SCSI?

I've spent all day trying to learn as much as I can about the new components that are out there. My wife is really really mad at me! hehe She hates when the computer gets more attention than her!
 
DDR (double data rate) is another type of RAM, basically that can transfer twice the data that normal RAM can. It's a very new innovation and is currently only available to the AMD-760 chipset, but this is set to change with a DDR platform for the P3 on the horizon.

As for SCSI, I'll let another person dig into the definition, but basically it's another platform on which you can put hard disks, CD-ROMS, cd burners, etc, on. It is a bit faster than IDE and gets rid of some of the problems to do with the channel configuration of their IDE counterparts (normal hdds and CD-ROMS).

Personally, I wouldn't go for a SCSI setup, as it really doesn't offer too much for the money you'd be spending. For that money, you could afford to up the size of your monitor a few inches, get a better CPU, better video card, etc, etc. DDR on the other hand (IMHO) comes at a price premium over normal SD-RAM, but offers basically a 10% performance increase across the board, something that cannot be said for SCSI, although disk intensive tasks would benefit more from SCSI than DDR.

Concerning availability, DDR motherboards aren't available yet, but are expected to be here around christmas time in quantity. If you don't plan to actually order the system for a little while, I'd wait until you could get a DDR solution.

Just my $0.02 (damn cr@ppy Australian currency 🙂 )
 
Definately stay away from Radio Shack (or any of those other stores, Circuit City, Best Buy etc) if your buying a computer. I liked the Neo computers machine. It was the only one I saw that had a current graphics card. I would also go with a 19 inch monitor. Although there is only a 2 inch difference, side by side the 19 is much bigger than the 17. Go to a place like Best Buy and compare them, I repeat don't buy from Best Buy. 🙂 SCSI I don't think would give you much aditional performance. Where the some of the performance of SCSI comes in is when your multitasking, no offence, but you don't seem like your going to be a huge Poweruser. SCSI is also quite expensive compared to IDE. DDR motherboards I would stay away from for now. They haven't been thoroughly tested yet, and may have some issues. These are just my thoughts.
 
<<Get rid of what title??? WTF are you talking about?>>

Get rid of &quot;oh this is for you, so and so&quot;. Its very annoying.

 
I think SCSI stands for Small Computer System Interface. It's a lot more expensive, and you probably don't want to spring for it. I really don't think it's worth it. I consider myself a heavy user, but I'd probably never go for a SCSI system. My roommate has one, and I really don't notice any speed improvement. Probably the only thing that makes it better than a normal IDE system is in burning. I think with SCSI, most of your system components can communicate with each other without going through the CPU, so you get less coasters with SCSI systems (unless you have some of the newer IDE burners with the burn-proof technology). Anyway, bottom line: save yourself the money and stick with IDE... and damn, you are going to have one nice system to play around with. I'm currently building my own computer... if you want to take a look at the components, here's a link http://members.nbci.com/_XMCM/dcdomain/r4/comp/dc1.htm
 
Wow! Alot of good advice has built up here. But, seems no one has asked the fundamental question when building a computer....What is going to be your #1 reason for having it? It appears as if your not on what I would consider a limited budget.
Example: One of my friends does game design. I recommended he get a dual processor setup to help with rendering times...Another friend just wanted pure FPS, i told him he might wanna get a little slower processor and invest in a good video card over high cpu speed. Pretty much depends on what you will use it for, but from what you've posted, your looking at a very nice well rounded system!

Anyways, I do agree, SCSi is probably considered a bit of a luxury, I was just suggesting it as you had alot of money tied up. SCSI performance IS better then IDE, but for a home user probably isnt worth the extra cost.
 
Yes, SCSI is great depending on what you do and the type of applications you run. Similar to Dual Processors. Currently I'm running a dual P3 500 system. 256 Megs of memory and an ALL SCSI system. No IDE devices period. Figured that should make my system pretty fast when it came to disk i/o. Also, I had tons of stuff in my system. Plenty of PCI cards and things taking up IRQs and I ran out so when I went SCSI I had plenty of IRQs.

But I didn't see much in the way of a speed difference because I'm not running a server. So I spent all that money really for nothing. That's why this time around I'm not going SCSI at all. My HDs will be the new ATA100 and I'm going to be setting up a RAID-5 setup. Hopefully THAT will see some performance boosts.

Also not going dual this time because while it was nice for a few applications and nice to be able to make an application run on one or the other CPU it probably wasn't worth the cost. Not for me anyway.

My friend will be getting Dual P3 900s or is it 933? well around there but he'll be using his machine for alot of graphics type work and the major apps he'll be running benefit HUGELY from dual processors.
 
I guess its kinda silly for me to blow so much money on a system considering I don't really do anything with my computer but goof off on the 'net and listen to internet radio.

But if I would have went ahead and sprung for a bigger system when I got this one a couple of years ago, I'd be much better off at this point. And my blood pressure wouldn't go spiking everytime I go to a site with huge graphics and all my computer does is rattle and hum.

I realize that even if I get the biggest baddest system on the market, its still going to have to be upgraded in a few years. But it'll be a while.

And I think I have what Frued called PC envy. Or was that....well it was something like that.

I've gotten some great advice on here and have dodged a few bullets by posting my question. I'm definately going to be using the Anandtech Forums from now on.

BTW, how is that pronounced? An-and-tech or A-nand-tech or what?
 
The big idea I would recommend to you is to save your money. Spend $1300 now, then 18 months from now (when according to More's law, it WILL be 2x as fast) spend another $1000 then (you'll have made some money off of interest instead of blowing $2500 now, plus total cost will be less), or just upgrade piecewise. Espically if your not doing real heavy duty stuff, there's little need to spend that much $ on a computer.

Also, spring for a nice 19&quot;, you will thank yourself later, as it doesn't have to be upgraded in 18 months (monitors don't get outdated as fast).
 
Go with the Micron they make great PCs, and they are alot less bloated with useless crap than stuff like Dell or Compaq. The DDR is really nice too. The ONLY prebuilt companies I would buy are Alienware, Micron, Falcon.
 
Micron does have some pretty good options. Most all of the systems I'm looking at are between $2200 and $2600 it seems.
 
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