Future PC

[Sentrosi]

Looking to upgrade from my 2200+ System to an A64 system within the next 6 to 8 months. I was bored at work so I did some preliminary research and thought of my next PC. Flames, comments, praise and adoration requested

First off. I'll be taking my 160GB drive, Santa Cruz sound card, 9800pro and CD burner drive out and put it into the new system. I also have a spare 400W power supply sitting around, so that will go in as well. Here are the parts I'll need and the cost:

1) Case: Antec P160 Anodized Aluminum Super Mid Tower for $130.00

2) Motherboard/CPU: Asus K8V Deluxe w/ a64 3200+ for $571.00

3) Memory: Mushkin 184Pin 512MB x2 ECC Registered DDR PC-3200 for $125 x 2 = $250.00

4) DVD Drive: LG 16x DVD drive for $27.00

This major upgrade will cost $982.00.

[I Hate Pants]

That MoBo is quite something. That case seems pretty nice too. But I always prefered having a window at the side of it.

[ZionsFire]

Originally Posted by I Hate Pants

That MoBo is quite something.
Altohugh im gonna be honest. That case isn't all that great looking.

Does that really matter?

[I Hate Pants]

Damn! you quoted me on my first post before I edited it.

[Sentrosi]

I always follow the mantra: Form follows function. The case I selected isn't going to be shown to anyone, and I'm not putting in any county fairs for a beauty contest. But if you're looking for a sweet looking case, Coolermaster has one sexay case. You can see it here.

[Ait'al]

you want more than a 400 watt. Get atleast a 500 watt!

Yea coolmasters are awesome if you odnt care about seeing in it!

Let me get a link to there newest one, its awesome!
NM its teh one he showed but..

http://www.frozencpu.com/cgi-bin/frozencpu/cst-97.html Its perrttyy!!

and heres there full tower one 8)

http://www.coolermaster.com/index.ph...h&Language_s=2 Main site
http://www.coolermaster.com/index.ph...list&p_class=2 lotsa cases. Search for full sizes 8) Includes all black version of wavemaster 4

NM they took half there stuff off hte site for rearanging ther stuff. Check it out later, they have a full tower in almost the exact same design! 8)

[Sentrosi]

bah, I'm not running any sort of RAID array or running multiple CD/DVD-Rom drives. 500W power supplies are rather pointless for me. I did the research and the new a64's are supposed to use the same wattage as the XP's. There should be no need to increase a 400W power supply to a 500W for the same setup.

[Ait'al]

thats becuase most poeple are using xp on crappy comps designed for windows 2000 or 98. the newer stuff may need more power just in itself let alone the drives. I dont know though. real xp systems need 500 to be safe though i think?

[Sentrosi]

No, the OS has nothing to do with the wattage required. Wattage applies only to your externally powered devices. Optical drives, hard drives, Mobo, fans etc. You could run XP with only a 200w p/s. Hell, mATX machines only have 150W to 200W p/s installed. Why? Because they mainly run two or three wattage crunching items.

Mobo
Hard drive
(optional) optical drive

[Ait'al]

NO kidding it has nothing to do directly with the power usage! were talking about htings taht are usualy in a system running the OS!

And hes talking about the new 64bit AMD stuff!!

[Sentrosi]

Yeah, I know. He's such a penis-head.

[Daleon]

I wouldn't worry about spec'ing out anything right now for 6-8 months down the line. Everything will change in the next 3-4 months alone and by 6-8 the entire market will be different.

As for the case... can't think of anything good to say about it lol. If your not looking for big fancy stuff you can't really go wrong with a good Lian-Li case. Top quality, extremely light, and they keep cooler than most other alum's on market.

[Spee]

Wait....Mobo WITH processor for the A64 is only 600$?



Either I was looking at the 64fx (or whatever the uber 64 bit processor is called) and a kick-ass motherboard, or tigerdirect was trying to rip me off. 1500 for mobo/CPU

[Sentrosi]

Tiger Direct sucks.

I can easily find better parts cheaper by going to pricewatch.com than going to tigerdirect.com.

[Squick]

Jeeze, you guys go crazy expensive on your computers... I always buy the middle of the line stuff, and end up with a fantastic computer for nearly pocket change... For the price of your CPU alone, this is the media center computer/server that I just built:

Case: $25, has three external 5.25" bays, two external 3.5" bays, and two internal 3.5" bays, window, rolled edges, and removeable mobo tray. All Al, no plastic.

PowerSupply: $19, 400 watt generic

Mobo: $89 nForce2 IGP K7N2GM-L (has a Geforce4 MX /w TV out onboard, and it is the nForce chipset, so it has the nice onboard sound and network, the sound which can play MP3s with no load on the CPU)

Floppy: $5.99

DVD-Rom: $28, AOpen 15x

CPU: $52, Athlon XP 2200+

Heatsink: $30, Volcano 11 Plus Xaser Edition (It is huge and copper, has a 80mm fan on it with adjustable speed, it is great because I can run it at the lowest speed and still maintain a cool processor, so it is quite since it is in my living room)

RAM: $59, 512 MB PC3500

Hard Drive: Then you could top this off with a 60GB for $47, but since this is a server/mediaPC I went with a 200GB Western Digital 7200RPM, 8mb cache from my local computer store for $210, by far the most expensive part.

So if you went without the big hard drive it would have been $355... Not a bad computer for everything but high end gaming. Throw a GeforceFX 5600 on for a total of $444, or go for the FX5900 for $540 and you have a damn nice, complete system, for less then what you pay for your processor!

But I see people on these boards talking about how they are running a Pentium 550 and trying to play Planetside... For $355 you have a system on the low end of Planetside-playable, and for $440 you are golden. If you want to go a little bit better triple the ram for another $118 and go for the FX5900 (or whatever the comparable ATI is) and you have a system that will be able to play Doom3/HL2 for under $600!

If you are a BeOS fanatic, you could make a cluster of 10 of the $355 machines for the same price as a new top of the line Dell Precision workstation, no joke! I am no distributed computing expert, but I would have to guess for things like bulk rendering, 10 1.8Ghz machines are going to be faster then 1 3.2Ghz.

Squick