Official - Critique my (potential) Rig Thread

[BeakerChem]

Yep, I will dedicate my time to analyzing your specific build. I am sure others will too.

Here are a couple of rules:

For POSTERS of systems:

1) Give complete specs on your proposed system, NOT a couple of parts at a time.
2) Don't link to parts. Give the specs/name for each part directly in the thread.
3) Don't pose questions here about comparisons. I.e., don't ask "Is X better than Y". There are specific forums to ask that sort of thing. This is complete system advice.
4) Make it easy to read. We are doing you a favor by looking this over, don't just cut and past all of your part numbers over from your Newegg wishlist. Put some time into it please.
5) Try to post your anticipated budget. If you are trying to build cheap, say so. If you are willing to pay whatever it takes to have Borg technology, say that too. It will make a difference in the advice you receive.
6) Explain the proposed purpose of the system. (Exp: Gaming machine, office desktop, warez server, etc...)



For REVIEWERS of systems:

1) Please try to be polite. Remember that this is your opinion you are giving, not God?s own truth.
2) Respond only to the Poster?s system information. In other words, no REVIEWER to REVIEWER discussions. Don?t get drawn into a debate about your advice. Everyone knows that each person will have favorite components that they suggest and everyone has a bias toward a certain type of setup. (ATI vs nVidia, AMD vs Intel, etc.) Again, there are forums for debating that. This thread is for getting and giving system specific advice only.
3) Try, whenever possible, to link to something explaining your reasoning for your advice. You believe that the memory timings aren?t important in a particular build, link to that discussion group on Anandtech to back it up, etc?


And every, have fun and enjoy. No Flaming!

 

[ProviaFan]

I've already ordered some of this, but what the heck...

Core:
AMD Athlon X2 4400+
ASUS A8N-E
Transcend 1GB PC3200 DDR (x2)

Power:
Seasonic S12-500W PSU
Belkin F6C1100-UNIV (1100VA UPS)

Graphics:
Gigabyte Geforce 6600 128MB (wanted something cheap, to be replaced when Longhorn comes around)
Samsung 213T-Silver (already have it and love it)

Storage (fixed):
Western Digital Raptor 36GB (from old system)
Western Digital Caviar 80GB (from old system)
Seagate 300GB 7200.8 SATA NCQ

Storage (removable):
LG 16X DVD+/-RW (and -RAM) burner
Plextor 52x/24x/52x CDRW (from old system)
Zip 100 (from old system)
floppy (from old system)

Case and Cooling:
Lian Li PC-60 (from old system)
Zalman 7000 CNPS HSF
Zalman chipset cooler (will replace ASUS default cooler immediately)

Usage / summary:
I'm heavily into digital photography (thus Photoshop), and I'm going to be an engineering student this fall, so I need something that can multitask and offer good performance in "work" applications (with practically zero gaming) without the big bucks for a SMP system. Dual core seemed like a good compromise, so the X2 is already preordered (and hopefully on its way soon) from Monarch. Go ahead and tell me what I did wrong, anyway.

 

[Tostada]

A separate forum for "rate my system" and "before I pull the trigger and buy this POS" threads might be a good idea, but critiquing several systems in the same thread won't work.

If you don't quote the entire system you're critiquing, it will be too confusing.

If you do quote the entire system you're critiquing in every post, it'll be too messy (and still disjointed and confusing).

 

[fatty4ksu]

This is an awful idea.

 

[BeakerChem]

--System Review--
System 1 from ProviaFan
Post date: 06/07/2005

Comments:

Are you planning on doing heavy media creation with this system? The 4400+ gives a performance boost with programs like the following when using more than one at a time

Adobe® Photoshop® 7.0.1
Adobe® Premiere® 6.50
Macromedia® Director MX 9.0
Macromedia® Dreamweaver MX 6.1
Microsoft® Windows MediaTM Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980
NewTek's LightWave® 3D 7.5b
SteinbergTM WaveLabTM 4.0f

Link to above benchmarks

If you are mainly interested in photography editing, i.e. photoshop only, a cheaper alternative processor would be something like a AMD 3800+ for ~$375 vs the ~$540 for the AMD 4400+

Link to Photoshop alone benchmark


With the hard drives, you have picked a cheaper 300GB drive, the Seagate. It can be slower than something like a Maxor Maxline or Diamond max with 16 MB cache, but since you have the Raptor drive you are most likely only using this for backup-storage anyway? If not, consider the Maxor drives for a faster large HD.

The Storage Review - Comprehensive HD benchmarks

I'll add more comments when I look more into the system. By the way, which LG DVD drive is that? There are a couple of different models out.

Hope this helps!

 

[Sqube]

People have optical filters for ignoring these kinds of threads. Nothing personal to you, but that's just how it goes.

ProviaFan, I've never heard of Transcend before. Why did you go with them?

 

[ProviaFan]

The Transcend RAM was on the list for the A8N-SLI (the A8N-E is not listed in that section on ASUS's site), and it was one of the more affordable modules.

When I'm working on photography or design, I often have Photoshop, Indesign, and possibly Illustrator going at the same time. When programming, I might use a programming environment, Dreamweaver, and an instance of VMWare. Some tasks combine a bit of both worlds. No matter what I'm doing, I always have Firefox, Outlook, and other misc. stuff as well as antivirus and antispyware software in the background.

You know, I also use optical filters for ignoring threads I don't want to read. They require no special software, they can handle a full page of threads extremely quickly, and I have two of them for increased performance.

 

[Maluno]

Yeah, we should get another forum for this purpose. I bet about GH will lose about 1/8 of its daily added topics.