Suggestions on building a Abit KT7A system

[commemoratives]

I am working on building an Abit KT7A system and need some suggestions on AGP video and sound for the system. I have purchased/have:

Enlight case with Sparkle 350W PS
256 megs of PC133 Crucial CAS2
Westen Digital UDMA66 20gig HDD
Iomega/Plextor 12*10*32

I need suggestions on video and sound that will work well with this MB. Not too concerned about outstanding performance in either area. I play around with MP3's and that is about as good as the sound card needs to be. For video I do some photo editing, but again nothing really too intense beyond basic web publishing.

My plan is to build a multi boot system and perhaps play around with RAID. I am not sure if I will get the RAID MB or just go with a Promise card in the future. I plan on overclocking and for OS' I want to multi-boot '98SE, 2000 with SP1 and some variant of Linux.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. I'll be completing the system in the next few weeks so I have some time to decide.

TIA,
M.C.

 

[TELeast]

well for sound card, it looks like the Sound Blaster Live! Value is good for you. It can be had for as little as $50 (depending which part of the world you are in). It offers great sound and it is the industry standard sound card so there will be much less compatibility issues as you will be running multi-OS. Creative have a fast turn-around time for drivers upgrades.

Again, if you are planning on multi-OS, get the most popular video card to solve your compatibility and drivers issue. And the most popular video chipset out there has to be from nVidia. If you are not too concern about 3D performance (which you'll still get anyway with this chipset), get a GeForce2 MX based video card. It offeres bang-for-your-buck performance. You can also get the TwinView version which lets you use 2 monitors at the same time for your desktop publishing needs. A typical bare GF2MX based card can be had as little as $90.

If all you really want is Windows 2D perforamance, then I suggest you get the Matrox G450 card. The 3D performance is not as good as that of the GeForce2 MX, but Matrox cards are famous for their ultra high quality Windows 2D performance. Also their DualHead function is superior to that of nVidia's TwinView.

That's all I have.

Good luck.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Yea, well Radeon is a good choice for excellent 2D and 3D performance, with good image quality. It may not be as fast as the GeForce 2 GTS, but its good enough. But I guess the Win 2K performance really sucks.

 

[Tranceformers]

I just built that exact same system yesterday. Everything except for the sparkle ps, and the plextor. But those are two things that are coming when I get some money.

 

[commemoratives]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I'll probably end up with the Creative Labs card for audio. Is there any reason to think that the MP3+ 5.1 versions they advertise on the Nomadworld site will provide me with any improvement for my MP3 work?

Will the dual head video cards be supported by all three operating systems?

M.C.

 

[TELeast]

As far as I know, the hardware is the same for the MP3+ version sound card and other varients. The only differences are bundle software. The Gamers version has tons of games, the MP3 version has some MP3 software.

With the Matrox DualHead video cards, I believe they support all the Windows OS's pretty well. Perheps you can visit Matrox's website to see the quantity and frequency of their driver updates for the various OS's to get an idea of the support level.

But with Matrox card, I don't think you can really be wrong...they have been famous since the first Matrox Millennium cards back 4 or 5 years ago. In fact back then when nVidia didn't exist, my choice of video card would have been a Matrox pared with the original 3Dfx Voodoo card (back then you needed a seperate card for normal video and one for 3D)