Looking at building a new PC...

[IronMonkey]

Hi everyone.

I'm looking into buying & building a new PC, mainly for gaming & Internet use, but its been 3 years since I last built a PC & I'm slightly out of the loop when it comes to all the latest technologies.

I don't want anything top-of-the-line that is going to cost me an extortionate amount of money. I just want a machine that will comfortably play new games at 1024x768 32-bit (and I'm not even that bothered about AA / AF).

I prefer to buy mid-range products for the best cost / performance ratio & I want to stick with AMD as I have used AMD systems for years, so I'm not even thinking of Intel.

I was considering an ABit AN9 32X Fatal1ty motherboard, but it seems to get mixed reviews. Does anybody on these forums have this motherboard? If so, what experiences (good & bad) have you had with it?

I realise that if I dig deep enough, I will find people having problems with any product I research, but I just want a system that is going to be stable & powerful enough for say, Battlefield 2 or F.E.A.R.

As a reference, my current system is:

- ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe rev.2
- Hercules Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB
- Corsair 2x 512MB PC2700 XMS DDR RAM
- AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (at 2.09GHz)

This was a pretty decent system at the time, but it is a little long in the tooth now. It runs FarCry, Half-Life 2, UT2004, etc at acceptable framerates in 1024x768 32-bit but I want something that will run these games ultra-smoothly.

Bearing in mind, I have a lot of experience with both PC software & hardware (I've just been out of the market for a couple of years so haven't really kept up with it), I'll more than likely be able to handle any technical jargon you can throw at me.

Does anybody have any suggestions for a decent motherboard as a starter for building this new system?

My requirements so far are:

- Socket AM2
- PCI-Express
- 2x SATA II sockets at least
- Up to 4GB DDR2 RAM
- 4x rear USB sockets
- Built-in LAN (not necessarily wireless but I would consider it)

I'm not really too fussed about the sound side of things to be honest, as I only ever use 2 (pretty poor!) speakers or my headphones, so I've no need for 5.1 / 7.1 channel sound, but if its built in then I won't say no.

Any help / advice / recommendations any of you can give me would be great.

Oh and lastly, sorry for the long post!

Thanks!

[bradavon]

Tom is your man on AMD, pop him a PM pointing him to this thread. That's what I'd do.

[EvaUnit02]

I prefer to buy mid-range products for the best cost / performance ratio & I want to stick with AMD as I have used AMD systems for years, so I'm not even thinking of Intel.

Fanboyish when it comes to CPU's is so old hat and honestly retarded these days, most people with a brain just go for raw performance and that is provided by Intel's Core 2 Duo. Get a Core 2 Duo E6320 or E6420.

As for video cards, you'll want a high mid-range DX9 card. The ATI x1950 and Nvidia 7900 series should play any game currently available with good performance and on max settings. Just don't be surprised if you can't play Unreal Tournament 3, Crysis, Bioshock, etc. as those are DX10 games.

Most motherboards thesedays have on-board Gigabit Ethernet so that ain't a problem. If need Wifi, just get an external Wireless-G USB adapter or internal PCI Wireless-G card. They're dirt cheap these days. Just make sure there are both XP x86 (32-bit), Vista x86 and Vista x64 drivers available, you need to keep your options open. Wireless-N is too expensive at the moment.

[IronMonkey]

Cheers. I've posted this same thread on the AV Forums, but the general feeling seems to be that Intel Core2Duo is taking over the Dual Core AMD processors in best bang-for-your-buck at the moment.

Still, I'm tempted to stay with AMD because they haven't failed me in the past.

[Lourdes]

Cheers. I've posted this same thread on the AV Forums, but the general feeling seems to be that Intel Core2Duo is taking over the Dual Core AMD processors in best bang-for-your-buck at the moment.

Still, I'm tempted to stay with AMD because they haven't failed me in the past.

C2D oblitered AMD's offering months ago. Brand loyalty is really a bit silly in a situation like this.

Video card wise I'd try to get an 8800GTS, there's the 8600GTS which does DX10 and is cheaper but you seem to want a system that will last for a bit. The 8800 will play DX10 games, the 8600 will too, but not so well.

[EvaUnit02]

No one knows how either card will perform DX10 games, no DX10 games are out yet.

[Lourdes]

No one knows how either card will perform DX10 games, no DX10 games are out yet.

You can hypothesise based on their current numbers.

[tom2681]

@IronMonkey:
Since your current system isn't far from my old system (I had a 2400+ Barton not long ago), you could try one of these:

-X2 5600+ @ 2,8 ghz.
-X2 6000+ @ 3,0 ghz.

I've got an X2 4600+ for the moment (very happy with it).

Can't comment on the AMD vs Intel thing with so many Intel fanboys around, though.

I was considering an ABit AN9 32X Fatal1ty motherboard

Stay with ASUS, man !
An M2N motherboard is all you need IMO.

About the GFX card:
I suppose you have an AGP card, no ?
If you want an improvement over your 9700, you'll need a X1950 Pro (X1900 GT or X1800 GTO would be nice too).

Re: sound:
If you prefer headphones, you could try mine:
5.1 headphones from Trust:
http://www.trust.com/products/product.aspx?artnr=14804

Headphones + integrated USB soundcard + Microphone.
It doesn't get any better than this.

[EvaUnit02]

IM, do you plan to keep your old machine running as 2ndary system?

Motherboard brands:-
Asus and Gigabyte are great. They have solid x64 driver support.

Sound:-
Onboard is fine. Hardware-accelerated sound is pretty much dead with Vista so forget Soundblasters. Most modern onboard codecs have SPDIF as well.

DVD burner:- Go read reviews of some over at Speedlabs.org, cdfreak.com. Do research into the hacked firmware available over at rpc1.org and tdb.rpc1.org.

The most highly recommended burners:-
Pioneer DVR-111D
Asus DRW 1608P3S (OEM Pioneer DVR-111)

This is an excellent resource.
http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/forums.asp?s=2&c=9&t=9764

Powersupply:-
It is paramount that you get a good powersupply from a known reliable brand. PSUs are the most important part of PCs and are often overlooked. 500W is the minimum these days.

Brands to avoid.

Good brands:- Zalman, Cooler Master, Silverstone, Enermax.

[tom2681]

+1 for the Pioneer burners.
And I'd like to add Fortron to the list of good PSU brands.

[EvaUnit02]

Again I have to stress the importance of a good brand PSU, you don't want your expensive components going poof.

Also invest in surge protectors.

RAM:-
You need a minimum of 2GB these days. DDR2-800MHz aka PC2-6400 being the current standard, but if you don't have the budget then you can easily survive with DDR2-667MHz aka PC2-5300.

[tom2681]

Re: RAM:
Some people might disagree, but I think that brands are also important when it comes to RAM.
I'd recommend either Kingston or Corsair.

[bradavon]

Only silly people buy non-branded RAM and Motherboards. You'd not buy a Chinese CPU you'd never heard of, why do the same with RAM and Motherboards?

Decent makes are so crucial it can't be stressed enough to a stable system. To add to Tom's two RAM makers I'd also add Crucial. The only area I'd buy unbranded is a case. It's a case! Sure some like to spend nutty money. I don't, again it's a case.

I also happen to think "most" monitors after a certain price bracket are much a muchness.

Also invest in surge protectors.

These range from uber expensive to uber cheap. From what I gather they all do the same fundamental job. I now have two, one for my PC setup and another TV setup. I've yet to see what would happen if it fails but they were cheap so why not.

[Lourdes]

There is NOTHING wrong with cheap or generic RAM. It's a very simple product and it's all about the chips used, not the brand. Every RAM 'manufactuer' you've heard of purchases the chips from someone else and just assemble/brand the memory. Or sometime even just brand. So if you do some smart shopping you can often find cheap RAM with excellent chips.
I'd also happily purchase a Chinese motherboard using a decent chipset because it will work just as well as any other. However as an enthusiast I spend more on a brand with performance features and options. By the way, some big names have been known to just rebrand cheap boards from Chiense brands.

[bradavon]

Of course but good luck trying to find out what the chips are, buy branded buy safe.

I'd also happily purchase a Chinese motherboard using a decent chipset because it will work just as well as any other.

Fair enough. I beg to differ, from experience actually. You can only research chipsets so much.

By the way, some big names have been known to just rebrand cheap boards from Chiense brands.

There's only so much you can research.

[EvaUnit02]

Brand doesn't matter when it comes to video cards that's for sure, it's the chipset that matters. Almost everyone just uses reference Nvidia/ATi PCB & components, including the big name Taiwanese players like Asus.

[IronMonkey]

Ok, well thanks everyone for your input so far.

I've spent the last couple of weeks looking into things, and so far have come up with this system:

ASUS TA-250 Case (not set in stone)
ASUS Crosshair
AMD Athlon 64 5600+
Corsair 2x 1GB DDR2 (800Mhz)
ASUS nVidia 8800GTS 640MB
250GB SATA II Seagate
500GB SATA II Seagate
ASUS 16x DVD-RAM
Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit

What do you guys think so far? That little lot will cost around the £900 mark. I may even chuck in another 500GB Seagate HDD for another £70...

Its funny how before I started reading up on stuff, I set myself a budget of £600-£700, but now that budget is looking more like £900-£1000 since I keep seeing all these nice shiny new computer parts!

I figure if I'm going to buy a PC that will last me 3-4 years I might as well put a bit more money into it now to make sure it lasts that amount of time...

[EvaUnit02]

What is the powersupply? Cheap generic ones don't cut the mustard, unless you like stability problems or in the worst case scenario fried components.

Remember the good brands are Enermax, Zalman, Silverstone and Cooler Master. Don't touch Thermaltake.

Also remember that 500W is the bare minimum these days.

Regarding video cards:- It's not worth the money buying factory-overclocked (Eg Asus call their factory-oc'ed cards TOP) ones, buy the basic card and overclock it yourself.

Cases:- Get one with pre-installed intake and exhaust fans, case fans do wonders for your temperatures.

[IronMonkey]

Hi everyone.

Bearing in mind I'm not interested in overclocking at all (I'd rather have a stable system for a good few years than possibly wear out my components more quickly), I'm really struggling to see why everyone is recommending I go for a Core2Duo when benchmarks seem to suggest otherwise. I used Tom's Hardware CPU charts to compare an Intel Core2Duo 6400 & an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ (see here).

The reason I compared these two processors is because they are similar price-wise - there's only £10 between them so I thought this was a fair test since I'm going for bang-for-buck.

The results came back & the Athlon won in all but Call Of Duty 2 (by a 13FPS difference), DivX encoding (the Athlon lagged by 7 seconds), Ogg encoding (by 24 seconds), PhotoShop CS2 rendering (the Athlon lagged by 8 seconds), Price / Performance Index (not even sure what that means), Multimedia Integer & Multimedia Floating Point in Sisoft Sandra (don't know what those are either) and Xvid encoding (the Athlon lagged by 9 seconds).

Now thats 38 tests. The Athlon beat the Intel (sometimes with a considerable margin) on all but 8 of these tests. Considering I very rarely do any video / audio encoding, I can forget those results.

The fact that Call Of Duty 2 runs at 153 FPS on the Athlon & 166 FPS on the Intel, I'm never going to be able to tell the difference on that game. Besides, I always runs games with Vsync turned on & my monitor's refresh rate is 85Hz, so my frame rate on my games will be locked at 85FPS.

I only play at 1024x768 on my CRT monitor & am not going to be buying an LCD. If I ever do plug the new PC into my plasma, I will run it at 1366x768, so I'm never going to be using the ultra-high resolutions that some gamers use.

Hopefully, that puts my decision to go AMD (price to performance ratio) into perspective. With that in mind, I'm pretty sure this is going to be my final spec:

- Asus TA-250 Mid Tower Black/Silver
- Coolermaster eXtreme Power 650W PSU
- ASUS Crosshair
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ (2.8GHz)
- Corsair 2GB Kit (2X1GB) DDR2
- ASUS NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTS 640MB
- Seagate ST3250620AS 250GB SATAII/300
- Seagate ST3500641AS 500GB
- LG GSA-H30NBAL 16x SATA DVD±RW/RAM - Bare Black OEM
- Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium x64Bit OEM 1PK DVD
- X-Pro 17in1 Int. Card Reader Black

I'm considering going for an aftermarket heat sink fan because in my experience, they can be a lot quieter than the one that comes with the CPU.

The only thing I'm not too sure about is the RAM. It seems I need 800Mhz DDR2 but I'm not sure about all of Corsair's different versions. There are some which are fairly cheap (around £90 for 2x 1GB) and some that are very expensive (up to around £160 for 2x 1GB).

What's the difference? What would be the best version to get to go with the ASUS Crosshair motherboard?

Thanks!

[EvaUnit02]

I'm considering going for an aftermarket heat sink fan because in my experience, they can be a lot quieter than the one that comes with the CPU.

The best aftermarket coolers ranging from cheapest to most expensive:-
Zalman CNPS-7700-Cu (unlike it's more bigger brothers, it also cools the northbridge and RAM since it points downwards.)
Zalman CNPS-9500
Zalman CNPS-9700 (basically a larger version of the 9500)

[IronMonkey]

Cheers for that. I've looked up the CNPS-9500 & CNPS-9700 on E-Buyer & it looks like the CNPS-9500 will do for me. I'm not sure the 9700 would fit in the new case I'm getting to be honest & I don't really want to take the risk of maybe having to send back the larger cooler for another, smaller one...

Any ideas on the RAM?

[EvaUnit02]

Hi everyone.

Bearing in mind I'm not interested in overclocking at all (I'd rather have a stable system for a good few years than possibly wear out my components more quickly), I'm really struggling to see why everyone is recommending I go for a Core2Duo when benchmarks seem to suggest otherwise. I used Tom's Hardware CPU charts to compare an Intel Core2Duo 6400 & an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ (see here).
.

Honestly I wouldn't take results from Tom's Hardware as far as I can through them. They often do weird, silly and unfair tests and they're totally biased towards AMD. Got evidence from a more credible source?

[IronMonkey]

With reference to your recommendation of Zalman CPU coolers (I have one on my 9700 Pro GPU at the moment) I know that they are a good brand so I want to stick with them if I can.

I'm looking at the CNPS7700-Cu. Do you have any idea if this will fit onto an ASUS Crosshair motherboard? I've been searching and can't find the information anywhere. Zalman's website has a list of compatible & incompatible motherboards but it doesn't mention the ASUS Crosshair either way...

[EvaUnit02]

From the back of the box in which my 7700 came in:-
"AMD Socket 754/939/940

Heatsink Zone
No components higher than 39mm (1.53in) should be present within a 68mm (2.68in) radius from the centre of the CPU."

The Zalman CNPS7700-Cu LED is one of the largest heatsinks in production by this Korean manufacturer, and like most Zalman coolers it is squarely aimed at low noise operation in a quiet PC. The CNPS7700-Cu LED is an extension of the CNPS7700-Cu series, and the only thing that separate the two is a red LED illuminated fan. The heatsink is compatible with socket 478 & 775 Intel Pentium and Core 2 Duo processors, and socket 754/939/940 AMD Athlon64 chips. Socket AM2 processors are not supported.

Source

Looks like the 7700 doesn't the AM2 slot, you have to get a CNPS9500 AM2 or a 9700.

[IronMonkey]

I've gone ahead and ordered the CNPS-9500 AM2. Thanks for your help.