Building a new PC, advice wanted.

Instant Sunrise · Post by **Instant Sunrise** » 2006-07-28 05:21am

I have decided that with the jump to a lot of new standards, it would be easier for me to simply build a new PC, than to continue to upgrade the one I have. This PC is going to be meant for Flight Simulator X, Windows Vista, Supreme Commander, and Falcon 4.0: Allied Force, as well as running application's like AVID Media Composer. I'll be using this for Gaming and video editing, and using it for dialog recording.

I have thrown together an interim spec sheet for what I will plan on building. However, I need critiques on if the parts I have chosen are good.

CPU: Athlon 64 dual core 4200+.
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-M55plus-S3G nForce™ 430 Socket AM2 ATX Motherboard.
RAM: 2GB DDR2 memory.
HDD: Maxtor 250 GB SATA.
DVD: To Be Decided
VGA: ATI Radeon X1900 XT.
SND: SoundBlaster X-Fi Fatal1ty ed.

I also need to calculate the amount of power that this will need, so that I can get an appropriate PSU for it.

Yes, this is overkill.

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2006-07-28 06:42am

No, its not overkill. Right now, Oblivion could put a serious hurting on that rig with the right settings. And it will be outdated two months from now.

Do yourself a BIG favor and wait to about October/November. Then get yourself a mid-range Intel Core 2 Duo (Conroe, which bets the tar out of AM2 right now, and started shipping yesterday), and Intel or Nvidia based mobo (depends on if you want SLI or not) and a G80 (which should be out around that timeframe). If you really want ATI over Nvidia, go with the Intel chipset (or an ATI one, if released) and if its out, an R600 card. This set up should last you a lot longer.

But this month is not the time to build a new computer. If you have to buy now, you can order a Core 2 Duo and Intel based motherboard, and go with the X1900XT. A word of caution tho, what MS is trying to do with FS X on DX10 hardware is very ambitious and should look absolutely stunning. Running it on a DX9 might be a bit disappointing.

Wait, save up some more, and get a better rig in a couple months is my recommendation.

Edited because its too early in the morning.

Edit 2: Found a page with FS X screenshots. The one in the middle of the page is how it looks with DX9. The one on the bottom of the page is what they think they can do with DX10.

Lord Edam · Post by **Lord Edam** » 2006-07-28 11:51am

I spent a couple of weeks specing up a new PC to run VMWare, and was planning on using an X2-5000 in an AM2 board.

Until I started reading Core 2 Duo reviews. Those chips piss all over anything available to consumers. It's going to be a long time before AMD can catch up with them.

Dream Machine:
Core 2 Duo E6700
quad 80GB sata2 drives in Raid 0 (and Sata2 is *very* important. you need the disk throughput. I can't understand why people specing "performance" machines go for a single 250GB drive when twin 160s in RAID-0 would be better for not much more)
4GB DDR2 ram
twin Radeon X1900XTX in SLI configuration (yeah, crossfire. Bah! It's sli. It's been SLI since 3dfx invented it)

costs about £2000 ex vat.

Oh and my boss has just authorised it

but our supplier only got two of the chips a week ago and they're both being used for internal review, so I've got to wait till late august for delivery.

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2006-07-28 11:54am

Arrow wrote:Wait, save up some more, and get a better rig in a couple months is my recommendation.

Wasn't this what people were saying a couple of months ago?

Post by **Beowulf** » 2006-07-28 12:07pm

You can always get a significantly better computer by waiting a few months. Don't you know that?

In anycase, right now, I'd be getting a Core 2 Duo machine, over any AMD machine. A Core 2 Duo E6600 will beat a Athlon FX-62 soundly, IIRC.

I don't see the point in RAID-0 for a consumer machine. You probably won't notice the increased responsiveness, while you will notice the decreased reliability, if one of the HDDs fails. If one fails, your computer is temporarily hosed, and everything on both drives is lost, as opposed to only everything on one drive.

Basically, you can wait until the next great thing is out, or buy now. Just be sure to get what's actually good if you buy now. And the current hotness is the Core 2 Duo.

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2006-07-28 12:55pm

Uraniun235 wrote:Wasn't this what people were saying a couple of months ago?

Beowulf wrote:You can always get a significantly better computer by waiting a few months. Don't you know that?

Yup. But its so damn close to the next gen of GPU that I couldn't recommend a current gen to anyone, unless its a cheap placeholder.

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2006-07-28 12:55pm

I could feel comfortable reccomending a current gen GPU to someone, with the understanding that DX10 will soon arrive and by 2008, he'll have to upgrade.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2006-07-28 01:23pm

Lord Edam wrote:quad 80GB sata2 drives in Raid 0 (and Sata2 is *very* important. you need the disk throughput. I can't understand why people specing "performance" machines go for a single 250GB drive when twin 160s in RAID-0 would be better for not much more)

The difference betwen 150mb/s and 300mb/s is examply fuck all when burst traffic from a disk array is less than 80-100mb/s and continious reads at at most 50-60mb/s

And RAID-0 is just asking for failure to come and bit you in the ass. Never mind it is seek times which are important to harddrive preformance, and higher density drives have beter overall seektimes!

4GB DDR2 ram

Windows XP sp2 is hard locked to only address 3.15gb of physical address space. You simply cant get around that.

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2006-07-28 01:24pm

You know, he might be looking ahead to when he'll want to use Vista for DX10 games. Or he could be planning to use XP 64bit, which isn't as bad as it initially was.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2006-07-28 01:28pm

Ace Pace wrote:You know, he might be looking ahead to when he'll want to use Vista for DX10 games. Or he could be planning to use XP 64bit, which isn't as bad as it initially was.

Going for sata2 over sata1 and RAID-0 for the reasons he stated is still fucking stupid.

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2006-07-28 01:30pm

True, I had money to burn, my solution was a Raptor and a Diamomdmax 10 300GB, in hindsight, getting two seperate 250GBs would have been the same money spent and probebly better preformance.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-07-28 02:09pm

I actually wouldn't wait for the new graphics cards, personally. We don't know when they're coming out, we don't know how good they will be, but we do know based on the past that they will come out with the ultra high-end models first for $600 and then come out with the more reasonably priced ones months later. You could be waiting 6 months or more. And yes, DX10 is nice, but you're not going to see many games that require it for a couple years. Better to get a reasonably priced DX9 card now and upgrade to DX10 in a couple of years.

This is what I'd do: If you can find a Core 2 Duo processor, get one. They don't launch until August 7, but some retailers have jumped the gun and started offering them. If you can't find one, wait until August 7. I would go with the E6300 if you don't mind overclocking, E6400 if you do. The E6600 is nice, but it's $100 more for not much performance gain. Anything over the E6600 is a waste of money.

If I was going to get a seperate sound card (which I wouldn't), I'd get the X-Fi Extreme Music. The Fatal!ty has some special extra RAM, but it has to be specifically coded for to be taken advantage of, so it's useless. Basically the same card, just more expensive.

For RAM, I'd probably go with DDR2-667 instead of DDR2-800 unless I was going to overclock. Sure, there's some performance hit, but it's very small and you can easily save $100 for 2 GB.

For video, I'd go with a 7600 GT, 7900 GT, X1800 XT, or X1900 All-In-Wonder. You don't want to spend too much on a video card that you know you will have to upgrade in 18-24 months to get the DX10 functionality. Unless you upgrade that often anyway, of course. I personally only upgrade about once every 3 years. Any of those cards are going to be good. 7600 GT may or may not satisfy you, depending on the settings and options you're willing to accept, but it can be had very cheaply and is a powerful card. The 7900 GT is not quite as fast as the last two, but it's smaller, runs cooler and quiter, and requires less power. The X1800 XT is quite nice, and can be had cheaply. The X1900 AIW is clocked lower than the X1800 XT, but has much more shader power, so it's slower in today's games but will be faster in the future, and costs about the same.

For a power supply, go with a reliable name brand, as there are a thousand and one dishonest tricks companies can use to post high wattages for PSU's that are actually very low wattage. As long as you've got a reliable unit, you're not going to need or want an uber-powerful PSU. A PSU with tons more potential than you need will be inefficient at that power level and will drive up your electricity bill. 450W or so should be more than sufficient, especially since Core 2's are so power frugal. If you go with a card like the 7600 GT, you won't even need that. If you go with the X1800 XT or X1900, you might need a bit more. Try and find one with a Single 12V rail. Dual rails are total bullshit, and only mean that you run the risk of not having enough power for your video card. Most PSU's that are labeled as dual rail are actually single rail (which is good), but try to make sure that it actually is.

Lord Edam · Post by **Lord Edam** » 2006-07-28 04:29pm

Xon wrote: The difference betwen 150mb/s and 300mb/s is examply fuck all when burst traffic from a disk array is less than 80-100mb/s and continious reads at at most 50-60mb/s

There's more to SATA2 than the bandwidth difference. You're right that there's little difference unless you're going for sustained read (and in reality most modern drives wouldn't max out sata 1, never mind sata2), but NCQ is the big improvement. Less head thrashing, lower seek times, greater throughput.

And RAID-0 is just asking for failure to come and bit you in the ass.

how often do hard drives fail?
Based on personal experience you're looking at maybe 1% average failure rate (I think Maxtor actually specified 0.7%). Run a twin-disk raid-0 and you double your chances. now there's a whole, whopping 2% chance you'll lose the lot!!

If you've only got one hard drive you've lost everything anyway.
If you've got two hard drives in RAID-0 you've still lost everything, but at least you had the performance increase whilst the drives were alive.

with regards to seek times
seagate barracude 160 (ST3160812AS) = 8ms
Seagate barracude 300 ( ST3300622AS) = 11ms

twin drives n RAID-0 will give you lower seek times than the same capacity in a single drive.

Windows XP sp2 is hard locked to only address 3.15gb of physical address space. You simply cant get around that.

2.7 if you have't fiddled with your boot ini, but you can't buy 3.15gb ram chips so the only way to max the memory is 4x1GB in two dual-channel slots. Plus you're future proofing yourself. Most people with 64 bit processors should be looking at either XP-64 or Vista early next year. Infact, anyone buying a new computer now should be looking at XP-64 or Vista next year - as skyman8081 said he was.

Post by **Beowulf** » 2006-07-28 04:47pm

Anecdote:

My friend had his computer hard drive die on him. Lucky him, his insurance bought him a new computer. His new computer had the hard drive fail on him, just days after he had setup a RAID-1 array. The original HDD is going to cost upwards of $500 to get the data back off of it.

Oh, and where are you getting your seek times from? I can't seem to find that info on Newegg, or ZZF.

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2006-07-28 06:05pm

2.7 if you have't fiddled with your boot ini, but you can't buy 3.15gb ram chips so the only way to max the memory is 4x1GB in two dual-channel slots.

Or 2x2GB.

Based on personal experience you're looking at maybe 1% average failure rate (I think Maxtor actually specified 0.7%). Run a twin-disk raid-0 and you double your chances. now there's a whole, whopping 2% chance you'll lose the lot!!

Anecdotal evidence regarding the reliability of hard drives (especially by brand) is completely worthless.

That said, RAID-0 performance gains are typically negligible outside of very specific tasks, and aren't worth the increased cost and risk for consumer-level applications.

For a power supply, go with a reliable name brand, as there are a thousand and one dishonest tricks companies can use to post high wattages for PSU's that are actually very low wattage. As long as you've got a reliable unit, you're not going to need or want an uber-powerful PSU.

I've been hearing over at SH/SC that Antec's been slipping in terms of quality, but Enermax, Seasonic, PC Power & Cooling, Tagan, and Fortron are all still well-regarded brands.

Hamel · Post by **Hamel** » 2006-07-28 06:08pm

X1950XTX is coming late next month, 2.0GHz GDDR4 in the hoooouse

A warning on the Xfi ~ many customers complain of driver problems along with popping and hiss. I've heard that a saturated PCI bus is the problem but do not take my word on it.

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2006-07-28 07:21pm

Hamel wrote:A warning on the Xfi ~ many customers complain of driver problems along with popping and hiss. I've heard that a saturated PCI bus is the problem but do not take my word on it.

I've never had a problem with my X-Fi (and I have one from on the first production run, which didn't have heatsinks), and the latest drivers seemed to have fixed most of the problems other users were having. I suspect its an issue with how people are installing their hardware and drivers. Also long as he build his machine properly, I don't think he'll have a problem.

Also, I wasn't paying attention to the sound card choice this morning - I have to second the recommendation to go with the X-Fi Extreme Music, everything else is overkill.

Hawkwings · Post by **Hawkwings** » 2006-07-29 01:14am

Arrow wrote: Edit 2: Found a page with FS X screenshots. The one in the middle of the page is how it looks with DX9. The one on the bottom of the page is what they think they can do with DX10.

My jaw drops at that last picture. It looks like a watercolor painting on that page, and if the trees weren't so sharp in the zoomed-in view, I could swear that was a real photo.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-07-29 02:59am

how often do hard drives fail?
Based on personal experience you're looking at maybe 1% average failure rate (I think Maxtor actually specified 0.7%). Run a twin-disk raid-0 and you double your chances. now there's a whole, whopping 2% chance you'll lose the lot!!

If you've only got one hard drive you've lost everything anyway.
If you've got two hard drives in RAID-0 you've still lost everything, but at least you had the performance increase whilst the drives were alive.

with regards to seek times
seagate barracude 160 (ST3160812AS) = 8ms
Seagate barracude 300 ( ST3300622AS) = 11ms

twin drives n RAID-0 will give you lower seek times than the same capacity in a single drive.

In my experience, hard drive failure rate is 100%. I've never owned a hard drive that didn't eventually fail. Did you mean 1% for the first year?

Anyway, RAID is just another one of those things that people pay attention to and spend money on, and the real performance gains are just not noticeable. I once had a RAID array, which I disabled because I wanted to install Linux and it didn't recognize it. I noticed zero performance difference when I de-RAIDed the drives. A couple months later, one of the drives failed, so it was a damn good thing I took them out of RAID.

Lord Edam · Post by **Lord Edam** » 2006-07-29 09:17am

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote: In my experience, hard drive failure rate is 100%. I've never owned a hard drive that didn't eventually fail. Did you mean 1% for the first year?

no, I mean 1% overall. At work we buy in about 250 PCs a year on a five-year rolling program. Personal experience is that we need to swap out two or three drives a year due to hard drive failure

just done a quick google on actual failure rates, and this looks like quite a decent explanation.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2006-07-29 10:58am

That said, RAID-0 performance gains are typically negligible outside of very specific tasks, and aren't worth the increased cost and risk for consumer-level applications.

The only thing I can really think that needs RAID-0 is online video editing. Even then I would be wary of it (RAID-10 is more expensive but also redundant) since you could lose a lot of work.

I've been hearing over at SH/SC that Antec's been slipping in terms of quality, but Enermax, Seasonic, PC Power & Cooling, Tagan, and Fortron are all still well-regarded brands.

The Ars and SPCR guys have also been running into a few more problems, especially the unit that was bundled with the P150 case.

DPDarkPrimus · Post by **DPDarkPrimus** » 2006-07-29 11:37am

I'm going to wait until at least late 2007 before investing in a DX10 card. I hear the first few generations are going to be really loud and run quite hot.

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2006-07-29 11:39am

The first generation will apprently run at up to 300W(just for itself) and be quite hot, however both promise to drasticly reduce this by second gen.

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2006-07-29 02:14pm

Honestly, if you need to upgrade your GPU, just do it now; it's not like DirectX 10 will actually be out for quite some time, and even then, I don't know about the rest of you but I won't be immediately hopping on the Vista bandwagon.

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2006-07-31 03:55am

Also thinking about building a computer, this is what I got:

Code: Select all

NEW: 		DigiComp AMD AM2
Case: 		CO-8007-C43/420W
Floppy drive: 	Black floppy drive
Motherboard: 	MSI S-AM2 K8M890CE VGA DDR2 SATA2 MATX
Optical drive: 	LG Black DVD-RW drive
Processor: 	Athlon 64 X2 4200+/2.2GHz 2x512kb L2 AM2
Graphics card: 	GF 6200LE TC 128MB DDR ROHS PCI-E 64BIT DVI/TVOUT
Harddrive: 	300Gb S-ATA HDD
Memory: 	1GB DDR2 667MHz

This would go at around 800 dollars I think, 670 euros anyway. No OS or screen yet but a 20" TFT would be the choice as well as a TV-tuner card.