New system...please critique...

[tomstevens26]

Hey everyone. Friend of mine (the one that had his MSI K72 Pro2A die) called me this morning and wanted me to build him a new PC. He was looking to not spend a lot of money. He needed to order then because he has a school project he has to complete and doesn't have time to wait for the RMA on a new board. Since I was on the spot, and new he wanted to get our for a decent price, here is what we ordered. Please tell me I did OK!

He will be reusing:
Enlight 7237 case w/ Sparkle 350W power supply
SB Live 5.1 sound card
256MB Micron PC133 SDRAM
40GB Maxtor hard drive (don't remember the exact model number)

This is is what we ordered:
ECS K7S5A mobo
Athlon TBird 1.4GHz /266 FSB w AYHJA stepping
Thermaltake Volcano 5 hsf
Sunon 80mm case fan to add to the rear of his existing case
Gainward GeForce3 ti200 Power Pack Golden Sample w/ 64MB 4ns RAM

Since he was looking to get out as cheap as possible we skipped on the DDR RAM for now since. Figure he can always upgrade to DDR when prices drop again. We got out for $400 total, including FedEx overnight shipping from Newegg. Since I really didn't have time to research much of the new stuff (namely the Athlon XP) I'm hoping I picked some pretty decent components. What do you all think?

Tom

 

[sohcrates]

Looks good. Nice stuff and relatively inexpensive

Are you getting the retail or OEM athlon? Don't forget to add some arctic silver II into the basket for 6 bucks

 

[splice]

Looks good to me too. I don't like the Tt Volcano5, but it will do the job.

 

[tomstevens26]

<< Looks good. Nice stuff and relatively inexpensive Are you getting the retail or OEM athlon? Don't forget to add some arctic silver II into the basket for 6 bucks >>



I got the OEM version. I have some antec thermal grease that I've used in the last few systems so I'll probably just use that. Thanks for helping relieve my worry somewhat in my component picks What is the deal with the XP line anyway? As you can tell, I'm not up on the latest processor news.

 

[Buzzman151]

How about a new monitor? Seems like he's gonna be do'in some gaming on this machine, so and upgrade in the monitor should be something to look into..... as long as it doesn't throw you too much off buget.

 

[tomstevens26]

<< How about a new monitor? Seems like he's gonna be do'in some gaming on this machine, so and upgrade in the monitor should be something to look into..... as long as it doesn't throw you too much off buget. >>



He already has a monitor he is really happy with. He does do a lot of gaming but also quite a bit of photoshop work.

 

[Bovinicus]

The XP is a slightly improved TBird core. It has hardware prefetch, which is the main reason for it's slight performance improvement. It is also tweaked so that it requires less power and creates less heat. This will also enable the core to reach higher clockspeeds, which it already has. It also has support for SSE instructions. I would go with the XP actually. The 1500+ (1.33GHz) variant of it. It performs pretty much the same as the 1.4GHz, but a little faster in applications that can really take advantage of the prefetch and SSE instructions. Also, it provides some more room for overclocking since you don't need quite as powerful of a heatsink to keep it running at reasonable temparatures. If you do decide to stick with the 1.4GHz TBird, get the Volcano6. The 5 is only recommended for up to 1.33GHz, the 6 is rated for use with a 1.4GHz. Also, I might go with the Shuttle AK31A instead of the ECS board. It is definitely a good lowcost solution, and would be ideal if he needs the ethernet adapter and such, but the AK31A offers a bit more room for expansion for both memory and PCI cards (2 more memory slots, 1 more PCI slot). The K7S5A seems to be more prone to problems as well. Good luck with the new system. Hope my input was of some use. =)

 

[nortexoid]

aside from last post, everything looks good except the cpu (as mentioned)...

as far as i know, the athlon-c 1.4ghz is the same price (nearly) as the 1.4ghz (1600+) xp counterpart...

otherwise, it might even still be a better investment to buy the slightly chepaer 1500+ and run a faster bus (i.e. 138mhz w/ the o/c bios for the k7s5a)

and according to my preferences, i'd probably grab a radeon8500 vs. the ti200, but let's not make this a vid card debate...

EDIT: the volcano 5 is rated for 1.5ghz, and the perforemance between it and the copper cored 6 (not the plus), in real world performance, is VERY slim...check the reviews. And if uses the shuttle board he CANT use SDRAM

 

[Catchen22]

The volcano works good for me. It keeps my processor at 45c and my processor is overclocked. Athlon 1.4 @ 1.6