Rate My Build

[HendrixFan]

Ive been putting off upgrading for quite sometime. I have an Athlon XP 1600+ running at 1.75Ghz, with my trusty Radeon 9700Pro. I was thinking about upgrading when the Barton 2500+ were overclocking well, but I was able to hold off. But not anymore!

I do heavy multitasking and Ive wanted dual CPUs since the Athlon MPs came out. Im set on going with the Athlon X2. I do alot of video editting, and alot of audio editting. A game a little bit, but I havent done too much gaming recently, as my system chokes on current games.

Here is the system Id like to build:

X2 3800+
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
1GB Corsair PC3200
Seagate 7200.8 250GB SATA
Sapphire X800GTO2 w/ATI Silencer 5
FusionHDTV5
NEC ND-3540 DVD-DL Burner
Thermalright XP120 w/120mm Panaflo
Seasonic S-12 600W
Antec P180

From my current system, I plan on keeping my 1GB Corsair 3200, Sony DRU-500A burner, my M-Audio Revolution 7.1, 160GB Maxtor (purely backup purposes) and LSI Elite 1600 with 2 36gb 15,000rpm 15.3 Seagate Cheetahs.

I was waffling between the 4400+ and the 3800+, but I couldn't justify the $200 price difference. I went with the Asus Premium because it tends to have the least problems (versus deluxe and regular) along with two LAN ports and firewire port. I was liking the Sapphire Crossfire board, but it didnt offer the 3 PCI ports I needed (soundcard, SCSI card, HDTV card), in addition to it not being released yet.

I have two 512 sticks of RAM, and was wanting to add a 1GB stick to that for 2GB total. Anything I should worry about running 3 sticks of RAM?

Ill use my two SCSI drives in RAID for my editting. Id like to use my SATA drive for install and storage, and my IDE for mirroring important data.

 

[Soccerman06]

Youll do just fine in games if you mod the GTO.

I would say your system is 9/10 performance wise stock. Ive heard its quite common to OC the 3800+ to 2.4ghz w/o a problem on stock cooling. You will have the same performance as a 4600+ if you OC. Demending on what kind of memory you got, ie value, plat, el, you can OC farther. AT also shows Dual Cores gain up to 8% more performance by OC the ram to 480-500mhz in multitasking. But wow 2 15k hdd :shocked::shocked::shocked: wish I could afford them. If you havent ordered yet, I would say get the Benq DW1640 drive because its the fastest drive available, from what Ive seen, but the NEC almost as good.

 

[mdchesne]

:thumbsup:

 

[HendrixFan]

How much faster is the Benq drive? Right now my DVD burner is a 4X, and Im mostly happy with it. Im getting the newer drive because I want to start burning DL disks now that they have gone below the $3 mark for blanks.

 

[Markfw]

Why a SLI motherboard when you game only a little ?

 

[HendrixFan]

Well, I cant find a good stable board that has a ton of features unless its SLI. Id like to go lower cost, but I need PCI-e for the X800GTO2, the two LAN ports because I use my computer as a router, and the onboard Firewire for my Ipod and for my video camera.

It seems that I either get a cheap board stripped of features, or a nice board decked out. And the nice board then comes with SLI.

If you can point me to a stable, overclockable board that has those features minus SLI, Im certainly willing to choose something else.

 

[Bona Fide]

Look at the Epox 9NPA+ Ultra. Great stable board, minus the SLI.

 

[CraKaJaX]

Looks good the way it is. I have an SLI board with only one card, but there's always the future..... :thumbsup:

 

[Soccerman06]

The board in my sig is probably one of the best OCing boards available, and yes its not SLI. Oh good point, most boards that are SLI have non-SLI boards with pritty much the same features.

This is Anand latest review on all the top end drive. BenQ is easily the best DL drive on the review.

 

[HendrixFan]

The DFI board does have the dual LAN and firewire, but it only has 2 PCI slots. I have to have 3. Ive kinda got myself boxed in because of that.

 

[alimoalem]

Originally posted by: Markfw900
Why a SLI motherboard when you game only a little ?

it's good to leave room for improvement. i think it's a pretty good overall system. 9/10