Would this be a good rig?

[trryan5]

Hi all,

The hard drive on my old machine kicked the bucket, and now I'm looking to build a new system, maybe bringing some of the old parts over. Here's what I'm considering; I'd love suggestions on anything I should or should not change.

ASUS K8V SE Deluxe
Athlon 64 3200+
Western Digital SATA Raptor 36 gb
Corsair Value Select 3200 2x512 (VS1GBKIT400)
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256

I have a cd burner, dvd-rom, and floppy I plan to move over. I also have a Hercules Gametheater XP 5.1. I guess that would beat ASUS's built-in 5.1 sound, but I'm not sure. I have a 300 watt power supply (Antec PP-303XP), but I suspect I'll need something stronger.

Some other general thoughts. I'm aiming to build something that will go a couple of years without being obsolete, but I'd still like to be able to pay next month's rent. This will be a gaming/work computer, but that work will be easy stuff like word processing and online research. I don't plan to overclock.

I never felt very pressed for space with my old 12 gb hard drive, so I'd rather spend money on a small, fast drive than a big, slow drive. But maybe I should just save money and get a small, slow drive?

I have some doubts about the Corsair Value Select ram. I've heard it's a waste of money to buy dual channel memory for an AMD 64, but I've heard other people say you should still pay premium because the AMD 64 is happiest with a really low latency.

So, what do you think?

 

[cjdomer04]

Just get 128 on the 9800 Pro. It doesnt make much of a difference, if any, other than in cost.
I would get a bigger, slower hdd, like the hitachi 80GB for $72 at newegg. Again, most time I dont think youll notice the difference.
I would also up the quality of the RAM a little. With the money you save dropping those other two, you should more than make up the difference. Anything by Mushkin or OCZ is usually good. Look at the reviews anandtech just put up today. That should give you some idea on performance differences.

Do you plan on overclocking at all? If so, definitely up the RAM. If not, then it might be ok.

Hope this helps.

 

[trryan5]

Thanks, that is helpful. I'm not going to overclock. Thanks for pointing out the memory review, I'm going to check out OCZ and Mushkin.

 

[mechBgon]

The benchmarks I saw at Ace's Hardware showed that going from CL3 to CL2 resulted in a maximum performance improvement of about... 4% if I recall correctly, and I think that was in something like Halo. Most other results were even closer. If you really want, I can try to dredge up those benchmarks for you.

Regarding the rest of the system, I'd look at an Enermax or Antec unit in the 400W+ range, or people keep saying how nice the single-fan Fortrons are, too with the 120mm fans being nice and quiet. If you have ever contemplated switching to a SCSI drive (5 year 24/7/365 warranty sound good? sub-4ms seeks?) then I know Hypermicro has brand-new Seagate Cheetah 15k.3's at $145 for the 18GB capacity. I have one, very attached to it Factor in about another $75 for a terminated LVD SCSI cable and a basic LSI Logic Ultra160 controller card, if you're thinking about it. I see they also have refurbished/recertified 15k.3's for $140 for a 36GB one, but I would prefer a new one with the full 5-year warranty myself.

 

[Markfw]

Well, for stability, and mild overclocking, I like PC3500 CAS2. Kingston Hyperx is good, and also Mushkin level1. And the Athlon64 does NOT use dual channel, but the 1 gig dimms are spendy. Also, if you don;t go SCSI, at least get the 74 gig raptor, as it is more advanced than the 36 gig one.

 

[trryan5]

Wow, I didn't think I'd find many SCSI fans. I've thought about the idea, but they seem rather pricey for a home pc. I take it you find a noticeable performance difference? I didn't realize the 74 gb Raptor was anything more than just a bigger one, I'll have to read up on that, too. mechBgon, thanks, I'll take your word about those benchmarks. Glad to get some advice on the power supply, too.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: trryan5
Wow, I didn't think I'd find many SCSI fans. I've thought about the idea, but they seem rather pricey for a home pc. I take it you find a noticeable performance difference? I didn't realize the 74 gb Raptor was anything more than just a bigger one, I'll have to read up on that, too. mechBgon, thanks, I'll take your word about those benchmarks. Glad to get some advice on the power supply, too.

Yes, how does almost 3x faster sound, in some tasks. There are situations where ATA is all right, but if you have heavy I/O to do, you will see SCSI put the hammer down HARD on ATA. Kind of like this. :evil:

Generating an Office2000 Administrative Installation Point with pre-integrated service packs & patches; installing from an AIP that's resident on the system; trying to get work done while the scheduled daily antivirus scan is checking every single file on the hard drive for viruses at warp 9.6 during my supposed lunch hour... AGAIN. :roll: SCSI's good for that stuff, or actual server/database stuff of course. I would put the 74GB Raptor next in line for its combination of low seek times, high STR and fluid bearings (plus a 5-year warranty). I might get one to try out, except I'm saving up for a new motherboard right now.

Speaking of motherboards, if you want nice onboard audio then you might check out the Albatron K8X800 Pro 2, which has hardware-accelerated VIA Envy24 8-channel audio onboard. I haven't tried it but I haven't heard any bad stuff beyond that it was evidently not a good overclocker board.

Welcome to the Forums by the way Good luck with your new build!

 

[trryan5]

Nice graphic. Hmm, some of those slowdowns do sound awfully familiar. I'll keep SCSI in mind, and shop around a bit; maybe I'll find a good price. I'll look at the Albatron board, but I recently bought some new 5.1 speakers, and I wonder if I'd have to just let the other two channels go to waste. Thanks for all your help.

 

[T8000]

You may want to reconsider about using a Athlon 64, because it only comes with single channel memory and lacks support for Hyperthreading.

For common tasks, like browsing the Internet, using Office or switching between a game and a forum/walktrough for that game, an equally priced Pentium 4 will feel much faster, because it has more bandwith to spare and will run more tasks together without slowing down.

And for video, I would rather wait another week and buy a Geforce 6800, because that will support all the features of this summer's games and should be faster then a Radeon 9800 pro for only a small premium.

So I would suggest to change the CPU, the mainboard and the video into:

A Pentium 4 "Northwood" 3,2 Ghz
An Abit IS7 (dual channel) mainboard
A Geforce 6800 (plain version)


If you want so save some money, the harddisk is the right place to do this, because the difference between a 7200 and a 15000 rpm drive is not likely to be noticed during normal use, like games, encoding movies or browsing Internet, because most of these tasks will use main memory instead of the harddisk. And dropping the CPU a notch, to 3,0 Ghz will also be very hard to notice during normal use.

 

[mechBgon]

I recently benchmarked a Hyperthreading Xeon 2.4B with dual-channel DDR against my Athlon64 3000+ in antivirus scanning. Both systems were SCSI-equipped and had 1GB of RAM. The Xeon took nearly twice as long to complete the scan of the same set of files, which I found quite interesting. The A64 is evidently well-suited to that work, since the performance difference is even greater than I expected. Perhaps it relies strongly on the FPU. At any rate, that should shed some light on the Pentium4, since a Xeon is essentially a SMP-capable Pentium4.

 

[batmanuel]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
I recently benchmarked a Hyperthreading Xeon 2.4B with dual-channel DDR against my Athlon64 3000+ in antivirus scanning. Both systems were SCSI-equipped and had 1GB of RAM. The Xeon took nearly twice as long to complete the scan of the same set of files, which I found quite interesting. The A64 is evidently well-suited to that work, since the performance difference is even greater than I expected. Perhaps it relies strongly on the FPU. At any rate, that should shed some light on the Pentium4, since a Xeon is essentially a SMP-capable Pentium4.

Just to be fair, isn't a 2.4GHz Xeon equivalent to something like a AXP 2000+ in real-world performance? That A64 outclasses it by a pretty wide margin to start with.

 

[Markfw]

Originally posted by: T8000
You may want to reconsider about using a Athlon 64, because it only comes with single channel memory and lacks support for Hyperthreading.

For common tasks, like browsing the Internet, using Office or switching between a game and a forum/walktrough for that game, an equally priced Pentium 4 will feel much faster, because it has more bandwith to spare and will run more tasks together without slowing down.

And for video, I would rather wait another week and buy a Geforce 6800, because that will support all the features of this summer's games and should be faster then a Radeon 9800 pro for only a small premium.

So I would suggest to change the CPU, the mainboard and the video into:

A Pentium 4 "Northwood" 3,2 Ghz
An Abit IS7 (dual channel) mainboard
A Geforce 6800 (plain version)


If you want so save some money, the harddisk is the right place to do this, because the difference between a 7200 and a 15000 rpm drive is not likely to be noticed during normal use, like games, encoding movies or browsing Internet, because most of these tasks will use main memory instead of the harddisk. And dropping the CPU a notch, to 3,0 Ghz will also be very hard to notice during normal use.

With the on-die memory controller, the Athlon64 doesn;t NEED OR USE dual channel. As far as multi-tasking, it works great and I disagree with your comment about the P4 being faster. The Pentium4 does work better for encoding, but thats it. You didn;t say what you are using this rig for though, that may influence the suggestions made here.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: batmanuel

Originally posted by: mechBgon
I recently benchmarked a Hyperthreading Xeon 2.4B with dual-channel DDR against my Athlon64 3000+ in antivirus scanning. Both systems were SCSI-equipped and had 1GB of RAM. The Xeon took nearly twice as long to complete the scan of the same set of files, which I found quite interesting. The A64 is evidently well-suited to that work, since the performance difference is even greater than I expected. Perhaps it relies strongly on the FPU. At any rate, that should shed some light on the Pentium4, since a Xeon is essentially a SMP-capable Pentium4.

Just to be fair, isn't a 2.4GHz Xeon equivalent to something like a AXP 2000+ in real-world performance? That A64 outclasses it by a pretty wide margin to start with.

I also tested with an AthlonXP 1800+, and it outperformed the 2.4B Xeon by about 20% as well So revise that down a bit, I'd guess the Xeon 2.4B is about an AthlonXP 1500+ in this particular discipline. Granted, there are places where a 2.4B Xeon would do much better, but I found one where it really gets beaten up. And it's a real-world task that the Xeon will be doing every day of its life as a server, so I see some relevance in it.

edit: and since the OP was being recommended a P4 instead of an A64, on the merits of the P4's HT and DC DDR, I do think it was "fair" to contrast them. Incidentally, the AhtlonXP 1800+ rig managed its result with just 256MB of (single-channel) PC2100

 

[batmanuel]

Originally posted by: mechBgon

...I also tested with an AthlonXP 1800+, and it outperformed the 2.4B Xeon by about 20% as well So revise that down a bit, I'd guess the Xeon 2.4B is about an AthlonXP 1500+ in this particular discipline. Granted, there are places where a 2.4B Xeon would do much better, but I found one where it really gets beaten up. And it's a real-world task that the Xeon will be doing every day of its life as a server, so I see some relevance in it.

edit: and since the OP was being recommended a P4 instead of an A64, on the merits of the P4's HT and DC DDR, I do think it was "fair" to contrast them. Incidentally, the AhtlonXP 1800+ rig managed its result with just 256MB of (single-channel) PC2100

Now that's just sad. Especially since AV scanning is almost always brought up as an application that would benefit from HT.

Of course, it makes a lot of sense when you think about it. The data coming in from a virus scan would be fairly random (aside from multimedia files), so you'd figure it would be hell on a chip with long execution pipelines.

 

[Dman877]

Looks like a good rig, IMO, go with a 128m 9800 Pro because 256mb video ram is uselsss. Also, go with an A64 3000 instead of 3200+, the performance is very similar. Use the extra money to get a 74gb raptor. That ram is fine too, that's what I use and it's running fine on stock volts/timings at 220 (I also have 2x512).

 

[trryan5]

Thanks for all your input everybody! I'm not sure yet exactly what I'll end up building, a lot will depend on the prices I see, but I'm glad to get advice on what's worth buying and what's a waste of money, especially from people who have used some of these parts. This has been a tremendous help. My wife said she might let me spend a bit more just so she can tell her friends I built a "scuzzy" computer. :laugh: