Building a new machine

[bratwurst]

Here are the parts I have picked out. Let me know what you guys think.

Intel p4c 2.4 Ghz, 800 Mhz sys bus. The "C" p4's support hyperthreading, which is great. $175 at newegg.com

Asus p4p800 deluxe motherboard. Great review here. $142 at newegg.com

512 Mb of DDR 400. $90 from crucial.com

120 Gig Hard drive. $110 from newegg.com

Haven't decided on a case yet. I was going to buy a Plextor CD-RW drive. Then for video I was going to just reuse my GeForce4 Ti4200 for a while and then get something new later down the road.

Here's the hangup though - I think I might be able to get basically the same machine from www.ibuypower.com for only about a hundred bucks more than I was going to spend on parts, including an nVidia Geforce FX 5200 128 meg card instead of reusing my Ti4200. I can get the Asus p4p800 motherboard from ibuypower.com, but I was going to get the deluxe version with more features if I bought it myself.

Should I just buy the prebuilt machine? The motherboard isn't as good. I kind of want to put a raid array in the machine down the road when I can afford a second hard drive, and the lower level motherboard doesn't have the feature. How good is that FX video card?

 

[Ryanwb]

Wow, you are choosing the same Mobo and processesor I had my eye on....but I think I am going to go with the 533 FSB because it is cheaper since the 800 came out.....I am not running cutting edge stuff you know.

I say go with the prebuilt system....have you ever wasted an entire weekend night trying to get the BIOS to recognize the system...it sucks, plus I am sure you get some sort of warranty.

 

[bratwurst]

I have built about six machines completely from scratch, the first one for myself and since then a bunch for other people. Except for the first one just because I was doing it for the first time, I haven't run into many problems.

In fact, the big problem I ran into the first time was because I was so nervous I was going to break something and lose the money I had invested. So while I was installing a pentium 3, which was a slot 1 processor, I was too gentle and I didn't push it all the way in. So when I could never get the thing to boot, I couldn't figure it out. It would beep when you hit the power button, but nothing would show on the screen. A friend at the time showed me what I did wrong. I felt like a *******.

How much cheaper would it be if you stuck with the 533 bus? I think the same processor but running 533 was only $10 cheaper. You might save $50 on the motherboard I guess?

 

[Chaz]

IMO Motherboard is the most important part.

Get the MB you want. You will not be sorry later.

 

[Dan H]

512 Mb of DDR 400. $90 from crucial.com

Get a pair of 256MB RAM chips. This will allow you to run dual-channel for more performance. Crucial is good memory, I prefer Corsair XMS3200 (LL or C2) as it has integrated heat spreaders and more agressive CAS timings.

I also wouldn't step down to a 533MHz bus, the 800s are noticeably faster.

Rule of thumb is, buy enough computer that you won't want to fiddle with it for at least a year.

Consider a Serial ATA hard drive.

Consider a Lite-On CD-RW, they're a great value. Any CD-RW you're going to get is going to be dirt cheap anyway, the DVD-Rs are blowing them away.

How good is that FX video card?

It sucks. If you want to buy a GeForce, go with a 5900 or 5900 Ultra, avoid the FX (5800) like the plague. It sounds like a vacuum cleaner and runs hotter than hell. I personally like ATI cards - Radeon 9700 Pro is a great value; the 9800 and 9800 Pro are fairly new and still highly priced, and they don't offer much value over the 9700 Pro. The Ti4200 is a great value card, though, and I'd lean away from using a 5200 even over it, because it's a stripped down version of the higher level cards that is only about as fast as a 4200 in most games.

Buying prebuilt or building your own is a question of semantics . . . if you've got the software, by all means, build it yourself. If you don't want to mess with installing drivers and the OS, etc., by all means buy a prebuilt model. Ibuypower is very good.

 

[bratwurst]

I was thinking of getting a serial ATA drive so I could run a raid 1 config with two drives down the road, and I couldn't find a mobo that would do IDE raid that I liked. I didn't want to use an add on raid card. But the Asus p4p800 deluxe board will do IDE raid. I have heard that the serial ata drives are nice, but in actuallity just aren't fast enough yet in their evolution to be worth the added cost. Maybe that isn't so true anymore because I see they are starting to come down in price and are also at 150 Megs/sec now.

I think I am going to just build it myself. I am not going to part out some of my old machine so I can reuse that OS license. There is no need to pay the money for the software again. I am going to reuse my old video card still as well too.

All I have to do now is find a case. I just can't justify spending a ton of money for one of those slick aluminum cases, although I wish I could buy one!

 

[Dan H]

Originally posted by bratwurst
I was thinking of getting a serial ATA drive so I could run a raid 1 config with two drives down the road, and I couldn't find a mobo that would do IDE raid that I liked. I didn't want to use an add on raid card. But the Asus p4p800 deluxe board will do IDE raid. I have heard that the serial ata drives are nice, but in actuallity just aren't fast enough yet in their evolution to be worth the added cost. Maybe that isn't so true anymore because I see they are starting to come down in price and are also at 150 Megs/sec now.

I think I am going to just build it myself. I am not going to part out some of my old machine so I can reuse that OS license. There is no need to pay the money for the software again. I am going to reuse my old video card still as well too.

All I have to do now is find a case. I just can't justify spending a ton of money for one of those slick aluminum cases, although I wish I could buy one!

All 865/875 motherboards will do Serial ATA RAID0 right now with the ICH5R southbridge. RAID1 is coming from a BIOS update soon.

 

[clydemoore]

I do NOT recommend I Buy Power . com!

I had iBuyPower.com put a computer together for me with an Asus p4c800 motherboard, Pentium 4 2.4 GHz processor, and Raid 0 - dual 80 Gigabyte Wester Digital Hard Drives and a few other things amounting for nearly $1900.


It took iBuyPower.com a month to ship the computer, two weeks past the initial estimated date.

After more than a week of supposedly being tested, they ship the computer with defective media reader and speakers.

They charged me $80 for Corsair memory upgrade and install ordinary Kingston "Value Memory" -- insist they did me a favor and say Corsair memory is unreliable. They won't refunded the difference. Reseller Web sites put Corsair memory at nearly $100 more than the memory in my machine.

They charged me for Sony DVD player and install a generic player.


They Poorly installed the Thermo monitor unit, so it reads the back of the unit's temperature on 3 displays instead of CPU, Hard Drive, and top of computer.

For more info check out,

http://burlingtonvt.org/society-and-culture/discussion-boards/messages/232.html
http://cvpcug.addr.com/cvpcug/newsletter/from-the-editor/editor-2003-10.html

 

[bratwurst]

Wow - funny this topic came back, I was going to make some changes to my computer tomorrow!

I ended up building my own, used a P4P800 deluxe mobo from ASUS.

P4C 2.4 ghz, 800 mhz sys bus. which means hyperthreading enabled.

I got an nVidia 5600 ultra last month because my ti 4200 card bit the dust.

Ended up buying a really cheapo case from Newegg with a 350 watt power supply. Its alright, not the greatest. But I didn't want to spend a lot because I want to mod it a bit, and I haven't done that before. I bought a hole saw at home depot and tomorrow I was going to cut two holes in the top of the case for two "blowhole" fans. I have a window with two blue led fans under it, was going to put red fans on top. Blue for the cool incoming air, red for the hot outgoing air. Its almost like the McDLT of computer cases!

 

[Chaz]

Sounds cool.

 

[maddogkf]

Hey Dirk - how much did you spend on the whole thing, if you don't mind me asking....

I am still thinking about building one this winter...

http://www.arizonasportsfans.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=17384

 

[bratwurst]

Originally posted by maddogkf
Hey Dirk - how much did you spend on the whole thing, if you don't mind me asking....

I am still thinking about building one this winter...

http://www.arizonasportsfans.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=17384

Sorry - just now saw this. Let me tally it all up. I skimped really hard on it in the end because I reused an old hard drive to get by until I thought the prices and performance were better on the newer SATA drives. I want to buy two and mirror them so I am waiting. Then I found that case for like $45 including the power supply (which is probably a POS, but oh well). I reused my old windows license too since I parted out my old computer so that saved some cash.

So I think I spent altogether... a little over $700 including the 2 extra fans I bought and the new video card.

I still haven't drilled that fan hole in the top though, it turns out the crap case I bought you can't take the top panel off. Which means I have to completely remove the motherboard and everything else before I do the surgery on it. I haven't had the time to do it until this weekend and then I just wanted to chill out and not touch a computer all weekend.

 

[clydemoore]

Holes in the top of the computer?

Originally posted by bratwurst
I still haven't drilled that fan hole in the top though, it turns out the crap case I bought you can't take the top panel off. Which means I have to completely remove the motherboard and everything else before I do the surgery on it. [/B]

Fan holes in the top? Most fan holes I've seen are in the side of the computer near the bottom, across from the motherboard. This way cool air is being forced in near the expansion cards, and out all the opening in the case. What made you decide to put your holes in the top of the case? Have you seen any one else do it -- and if so, how did it work for them?

 

[bratwurst]

Fans on the top to blow out - to get the hot air out since hot air rises and since most cases are closed there, the hot air sits there and isn't caught up in the airflow.

I have seen it on a good amount of cases, but mostly it is not a standard thing.

 

[clydemoore]

How about drilling holes in removable portion?

Originally posted by bratwurst
I still haven't drilled that fan hole in the top though, it turns out the crap case I bought you can't take the top panel off. Which means I have to completely remove the motherboard and everything else before I do the surgery on it.

Is this a tower case? Most tower cases I've seen have a part of the case that is removable from the rest of the case, all together. Have you considered drilling a hole in the side of the removable portion near the top of the computer? Maybe one hole on each side of the case? The first fan would be opposite the motherboard, where air would flow most freely. On some cases, putting a second fan on the case behind the motherboard would cause the air to flow past the backside of the motherboard, which might help keep it cool as well.

Generally the motherboard does not come up as high as the transformer, so putting a hole on both sides in front of the transformer but behind (or near the back) of the drive bays in the removable portion of the case, would provide air flow.

 

[clydemoore]

Re: I do NOT recommend I Buy Power . com!

Originally posted by clydemoore
I had iBuyPower.com put a computer together for me with an Asus p4c800 motherboard, Pentium 4 2.4 GHz processor, and Raid 0 - dual 80 Gigabyte Wester Digital Hard Drives and a few other things amounting for nearly $1900.

It took iBuyPower.com a month to ship the computer, two weeks past the initial estimated date.

After more than a week of supposedly being tested, they ship the computer with defective media reader and speakers.

They charged me $80 for Corsair memory upgrade and install ordinary Kingston "Value Memory" -- insist they did me a favor and say Corsair memory is unreliable. They won't refunded the difference. Reseller Web sites put Corsair memory at nearly $100 more than the memory in my machine.

They charged me for Sony DVD player and install a generic player.


They Poorly installed the Thermo monitor unit, so it reads the back of the unit's temperature on 3 displays instead of CPU, Hard Drive, and top of computer.

For more info check out,

http://burlingtonvt.org/society-and-culture/discussion-boards/messages/232.html
http://cvpcug.addr.com/cvpcug/newsletter/from-the-editor/editor-2003-10.html

I think it is only fair to update you all regarding my purchase of the computer put together by iBuyPower.com! After filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau ( http://bbb.org ), iBuyPower has decided to honor their RMA and refunded the money for the 6-in-1 media reader/writer. They have sent me cheaper speakers than the origninal set, but these speakers do work. And they sent the two 512 MB PC3200 DDR DRAM modules.