Thoughts on system to buy in 1 week

[TazmanianBubblegum]

Hello, I am putting together a computer next week, and was wondering what everyone's opinion/comments/etc was on the parts chosen. Thank you,

-Antec SX1030
-Asus A7V333 (w/o RAID)
-AMD XP 2000+
-Samsung DDR PC2700 512MB
-Enermax EG365P-VE (FCA) 350 Watt ATX Power Supply
-Alpha PAL6035MFC heatsink with Sanyo Denki fan -- (20 CFM - SocketA)
-Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 60GB ATA133 7200rpm
-Leadtek GeForce4 128MB TI-4400
-Creative Labs SoundBlaster LIVE! Value
-Plextor 40x12x40 CDRW IDE Int.
-3COM 3C905C-TX
-ViewSonic E70 17 inch Digital .27dp Monitor

That is the specs I am looking forward to get as of now - any suggestions would be very helpful. Now the things I am considering/questioning though are :

A) Will the GF4 Ti-4400 fit correctly into the ASUS A7V333 AGP slot?
B) Upgrade to Corsair 2700 DDR 512MB or stay with Samsung?

Thanks for any help, it is greatly appreciated.

 

[SHoddyCOmp]

THough i dont have any real experience with corsair/samsung, i changed my list of parts actually from Corsair TO samsung because what people have said about samsung and its ability to OC very nicely .

 

[acejj26]

my thoughts:

heatsink - Thermalright AX-7 with a Panaflo 80 mm fan. should cool your proc better
sound card - 1998 called...they want their sound card back....get an Audigy if you want to stick with a CL card...else, i'd look at a Santa Cruz card
cdrw - true, plextor makes some nice drives, but you're overspending...get a lite-on or teac CD-RW drive and save yourself a few bucks...put em toward the aforementioned sound card upgrade

samsung pc2700 memory is good stuff...no need to change it....in fact, i think i've heard of corsair using samsung memory chips on their boards
also, i haven't heard any conflicts between the asus board and the ti4400/ti4600's. as far as i know, it's within AGP spec

 

[busmaster11]

I agree with acejj about the sound card and the cd-rw. You might alsoi want to get a Pioneer 106s slot driven DVD drive - for DVD and cd-cd copying...

My biggest issue - PLEASE save yourself the trouble of getting the VIA KT333 - I know its only from personal experience but VIA chips are so buggy - I've had every chip from the KX133a slotA to the 266A - and the boards were all Asus, Abit and Microstar, and they are all unstable. I've since gone to the SIS735 and the nForce 415 - and they work beautifully...

If you get a Creative card with a VIA chip you're asking for even more trouble.

Furthermore, the 333 chip is more expensive, and requires more expensive ram. Now AMD just announced there will not be a 166(333)mhz FSB based Athlon, so you will ALWAYS be running the memory clock asynchronously with the cpu clock, and that creates latency issues. Trust me - VIA boards, especially the KT333 - is trouble. Any performance increase you think you'll get from the extra memory speed is negligible. Benchmarks will back me up on this.

I HIGHLY recommend the nForce 415d boards from Asus and Abit...


Lastly, consider an AL case, those are pretty.

 

[gunf1ghter]

I agree... I had a few stability problems with my VIA KT133A chipset. I would personally go with an AMD or SIS chipset if you want to stay AMD.

 

[reicherb]

All looks good to me except the NIC. In my environment (650 PCs) we've had considerable troubles with 3Com NICs. They used to be the bug name in NICs but not anymore. I suggest the Intel PRO/100 S (Intel PRO/1000 T for gigabit) or any Intel NIC for that matter.

 

[majewski9]

Okay whats with the VIA bashing? I think that most people would agree when all things considered that the VIA KT333 is the best Athlon chipset! I am waiting for someone to mention the Creative/VIA problem since that minor bug was fixed almost 2 years ago! I had a VIA chipset and a SBlive running just fine even before the fix. If someone here can count the KT333 is the second revision of the KT266 and generally a chipset is a lot better and more stable after a couple revisions. OKay I wish AMD would continue to prduce Athlon chipsets and make a revised AMD 761, but that will never happen saince AMD seems to be ignoring the Athlon K7. Which I think is a very bad descision on their part!

 

[gunf1ghter]

Originally posted by: majewski9
Okay whats with the VIA bashing? I think that most people would agree when all things considered that the VIA KT333 is the best Athlon chipset! I am waiting for someone to mention the Creative/VIA problem since that minor bug was fixed almost 2 years ago! I had a VIA chipset and a SBlive running just fine even before the fix. If someone here can count the KT333 is the second revision of the KT266 and generally a chipset is a lot better and more stable after a couple revisions. OKay I wish AMD would continue to prduce Athlon chipsets and make a revised AMD 761, but that will never happen saince AMD seems to be ignoring the Athlon K7. Which I think is a very bad descision on their part!

Actually I am thinking specifically of the problems that many people had with their Nvidia graphics boards that were in many cases traced back to their VIA chipset motherboards (I realize other chipsets had these problems, but the occurrence on VIA chipsets was much higher, and VIA admitted that something in their chipset made the problem more noticeable).

I always had occassional lockup problems with my KT133A VIA chipset motherboard (Asus). I always figured that it was an ACPI or sound card interrupt problem. I built my new Intel rig and the problem was not there. Overclocked my P4 and the problem was there again. The AMD chip on the VIA chipset motherboard was never overclocked and always ran with good temperatures. This led me to suspect that the VIA chipset was in fact not stable enough to run without the occassional (admittedly rare) lockup.

Sorry, I'm no longer a VIA fan.

 

[majewski9]

OKay I would lose the TI4400 and get the Gainward TI4200 with another 60 gig HD and get the A7V333 + raid. I believe that is almost as much as what you got there + 60 gig and only a slight drop in graphics power which can be made up by alittle oc ing.

 

[majewski9]

That was probaly a problem with your Asus board! I had the superior KT133A board with my IWILL KK266. A geforce2 GTS ran smoothly in that board. Not only did I never even have a lockup with that board I was able to OC my board, but also the GF2 and my Radeon. So some of us had success with our KT133A boards.

 

[busmaster11]

Okay. Show me I'm wrong.

Show me that there isn't a latency issue if you run an asynchronous bus, and tha the required PC2700 ram isn't more expensive and there's performance justifications for it.

Show me that the KT333 isn't just an evolutionary dead end designed to squeeze nothing but a few extra pennies out of people by promising 25% extra memory performance while making no changes whatsoever to motherboard layouts.

Show me that VIA doesn't have more documented/fixed/bypassed bugs than any other AMD chipset.

Show me that the "high performance" KT266A chipset isn't just the righted version of the underwhelming KT266, which was based on technology from the Pentium Pro days...

Show me some justification for putting up with buggy, crappy drivers that install phantom scsi devices onto your machine.

You say the SB live! problem was fixed two years ago? Show me what revision fixed it, and when it was released... LOL

 

[gunf1ghter]

BURN

LOL!!!

 

[busmaster11]

This isn't the first time VIA pulled this asynch bus thing on us, promising performance that doesn't exist. After PC133 came out and before VIA and AMd figured out how to get to 133 FSB their first Athlon chipset - the KA133 or something, forgot the name but it was slotA - promised the same thing but never delivered. It was a POS that you were lucky to run even at spec, which was a disappointing 100fsb/133 memory...

Months later they came out with the second revision that supported 133fsb officially, and in both slot and socket ff's... They won't do that this time because AMD won't support it...

VIA is suck, pure, unadulterated, 100% genuine suck...

 

[gunf1ghter]

Tell us how you really feel.

J/K. I'm no longer a fan of VIA either. I wish more online publications had delved further into the true issues going on with VIA's chipsets at the time I opted to buy one.

 

[TazmanianBubblegum]

sound card - 1998 called...they want their sound card back....

rofl, yeh i forgot to change that, oops.

Anyways, thanks for all the suggestions, going to take them all into consideration. Say I was not going to get a VIA333 board, and I don't necessarily want a nForce, which board would you recommend?


Thanks in advance.

 

[busmaster11]

Originally posted by: TazmanianBubblegum

sound card - 1998 called...they want their sound card back....

rofl, yeh i forgot to change that, oops.

Anyways, thanks for all the suggestions, going to take them all into consideration. Say I was not going to get a VIA333 board, and I don't necessarily want a nForce, which board would you recommend?


Thanks in advance.

My bias is against VIA first and the KT333 second. If you don't have the same bias against VIA, which I can't expect everyone to have, get the KT333 for what you mentioned its worth - as a second and more optimized iteration of the KT266A - and run it with standard PC2100 DDR... The KT333/266A and the nForce are the top chips... and you should chose between them.

I've had an SIS735, a VIA KT266A and now an nForce415d... I love my nForce board - its put my faith back into Asus, which I had lost momentarily when I thought their board was the cause of my woes...

AMD has discontinued their 760 chips except for SMP, and ALI is also suck, so really you're not left with a whole lot but SIS...
IMO there's nothing to recommend other than an nForce 415d... Even nVidia scrapped plans for a 620/615 board that will support DDR333... To clarify, the ram, the PC2700 DDR tecnology's not a dead end, the support for AMD Athlon is...

 

[TazmanianBubblegum]

Thank you for clarifying it up a bit

Much thanks, wish me luck as next monday i will probably be ordering this new one up.

 

[gunf1ghter]

If I was getting an AMD chipset I would be getting an nforce.

 

[XMan]

If I was getting an AMD chipset I would be getting an nforce.

Agreed! The Abit board is 89 bucks, and the Asus 98. Both have excellent onboard sound (no need to buy an Audigy) and the Asus has an onboard NIC. You can spend the money on more RAM, or a faster processor.

 

[busmaster11]

Originally posted by: gunf1ghter
If I was getting an AMD chipset I would be getting an nforce.

*sigh*

I have a headache now...


*rereads sentence*

OH!!! You mean a chipset for an AMD cpu!

 

[TazmanianBubblegum]

ok, now im confused..


what? lol


was all the other info you specified pertaining to a different chipset, or the amd?



sigh

 

[busmaster11]

Originally posted by: Xerox Man

If I was getting an AMD chipset I would be getting an nforce.

Agreed! The Abit board is 89 bucks, and the Asus 98. Both have excellent onboard sound (no need to buy an Audigy) and the Asus has an onboard NIC. You can spend the money on more RAM, or a faster processor.

Couple notes on these - also my top recommendations - for all the bells and whistles, like USB 2.0 and RAID, go for the Abit. For a super solid super stable board with my favorite feature, the surprisingly still rare CPU overheating protection circuit (C.O.P., LOL) go for the ASUS.

I have one complain with the asus. It's got onboard hardware dolby 6 channel sound, but its on a daughtercard that looks like a reverse PCI card. Mine took EXTREME effort to fit into the slot. Some people including myself have not been able to get the rear channel to work though I haven't spent too much time on it.

A small price to pay compared to all the people here complaining about lockups...

 

[busmaster11]

Originally posted by: TazmanianBubblegum
ok, now im confused..


what? lol


was all the other info you specified pertaining to a different chipset, or the amd?



sigh

Nevermind... Gunfighter meant AMD as in Athlon, I thought he meant AMD as in chipset, as in 760MP/X...

Don't get an AMD chipset.

 

[TazmanianBubblegum]

Is athlon xp considered amd chipset?

 

[busmaster11]

Originally posted by: TazmanianBubblegum
Is athlon xp considered amd chipset?

Athlon XP is the name of the CPU you're looking to get.

I'm not sure how savvy you are so I apologize if I insult your intelligence, but a chipset is considered the "brains" of a computer because it coordinates all intereactions between all subsystems. The CPU is more accurately considered the muscles...

So what we've been discussing all along are the chipsets, unfortunately one just happens to be made by AMD for the Athlon, just to confuse you...