Building PC

[Jas0n]

[liljim]

Hey Jason,

Its going to be a nice machine but i do have a couple of things you may want to consider.

The first thing i want to call attention to is the HDD. You listed a sata drive with a 8MB cache. You may want to see if you can find one with a 16MB cache for the same price. Also keep in mind that the board you listed supports sata300 instead of the standard sata150 which will obviously give you twice the transfer rate with twice the cache to back it up.

Next is memory, your board will support dual channel memory. It may be cheaper for you to buy 1 gig of dual channel instead of 2 gigs of single. 1 gig of dual channel would be plenty of memory and also leave you the option to add another gig of dual when your finances further allow.

The motherboard has integrated 8 channel sound so buying a sound card would be more for show than a necessity. The board only has 2 PCI slots so theres not much room for expansion but it does cover your wireless card and the option of a sound card. The case should accept the board just fine, i dont see any problems with hardware being in each others way.

Have you considered the 6800 nvidia cards? They are a little cheaper than the 7800 and still offer unreal quality and performance.


Thats just things you can think about to maybe help your budget without sacraficing performance. Hopefully it helps

[Jas0n]

Well with the HDD, 16MB cache ones seem to be a hard find in australia atm, they seem to be too large ( 500GB ) and cost heaps more.
With the memory, i'd like 2GB, bcoz im a BF2 player and i like it to load really fast =)

Now with mobo and its PCI slots, this is wat it says its got:

2 x PCI-Express X 16 slot, supports two PCI-Express interface Graphics cards with SLI mode

2 x PCI-Express X 1 slots

2 x PCI slots (PCI 2.3 compliant)

So does that mean, i got 2 spots for graphics card, and 4 slots for something else....LOL
geez im dumb.

Yeah ive toned the G card down, going for the 128MB BFG 6600GGT OC, that saves me 200AUD =P, hopefully performance is just as good.
Oh and the power suppy, if i switch to a Antec True Power 480Blue, wouuld that be enough to power the whole system, inc. x3 80mm case fans.

[liljim]

The expansion slots are pretty much as you described,

2 for video
4 for other things however,

Im not sure what kind of use one can get from the 1X pci-x slots. I dont know what kind of cards are out there to fit these. I dont have any experience with them and havent researched it yet.

How bad is the price difference from single and dual channel memory in australia?

[Jas0n]

Ok i assume it is RAM your talkin of. Um, depends if its a generic (unknown crappy ones) brand or known brand (Kingston,G.skill,OCZ,Geil,Corsair).
Oh and the DDR2 RAMs (which i cant use) 2GB ones seem little cheaper than 2GB DDR ones. But its like a 5-10 dollar difference.
But that RAM i mentioned in the 1st post above, is the cheapest im gonna get DDR RAM for 2GB and will work in my new system.....well the cheap part is a yes, working in my is a still undecided one =P

[liljim]

[Jas0n]

[liljim]

hehe..now were on the same page.

Here are the detailed specs for that board

Processor
Socket 939 supports AMD Athlon64 X2/ 64 FX/ 64

Chipset
NVIDIA nForce4 SLI MCPs (media and communication processors)
Super I/O: ITE IT8712 chip

Integrated peripherals
T.I. IEEE1394b controller
CICADA8201 Gigabit LAN PHY chip
Realtek ALC850 Audio AC'97 Codec




Memory
Type: Dual channel DDR400/ 333/ 266 -184pin
Max capacity: Up to 4GB by 4 DIMM slots


Internal I/O Connectors
4 X Serial ATA || connectors (3.0Gb/s)
2 x UDMA ATA 133/100/66 Bus Master IDE connectors
1 x FDD connector
3 x USB 2.0/1.1 connectors (supports 6 ports)
2 x IEEE 1394b connectors (supports 3 ports)
3 x cooling fan pin headers
CD in


Expansion Slots
2 x PCI-Express X 16 slot, supports two PCI-Express interface Graphics cards with SLI mode
2 x PCI-Express X 1 slots
2 x PCI slots (PCI 2.3 compliant)


Rear Panel I/O
4 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports
1 x RJ45 port
Audio (4 x Line-out/ 1 x Line-in/ 1 x MIC) connector
Coaxial S/PDIF input/ output function
PS/2 Keyboard/ Mouse
1 x COM port
1 x LPT


CPU/AGP/DIMM setting
CPU HT / Multiplier / Vcore Voltage adjustable via BIOS
PCI-ExpessX16 Voltage / Clock adjustable via BIOS
DIMM Voltage / Clock adjustable via BIOS


Power
ATX power connector and ATX 12V connector
Power-off by Windows 98/ Me/ 2000/ XP shut down and switch


Form Factor
ATX form factor
30.5 x 24.4 cm


H/W Monitoring
System health status auto-detect and report by BIOS
Hardware detecting and reporting for case open, CPU voltage, and fan speed


BIOS
2 X 4M bit flash ROM, Award BIOS

Other Features
NVIDIA SLI multi-GPU support
Support NVIDIA Firewall
Norton Internet Security
Download Center
XpressTM Installation
XpressTM Recovery 2
Q-FlashTM
@BIOSTM

Heres a link with all the info

[Jas0n]

Yeah, that'd bbe right, was just checking it out b4 when you mentioned about Dual Channel Memory. =p

[th3_d0n]

I play BF2 on a 6800 GT and it still looks really good. I've played it on a 7800GT as well, and i think it's safe to say you won't be disappointed.

If you are after a cheaper graphics card I would recommend the 6800GT, especially as you'll have 2 gigs of RAM, I turned the settings down because the loading times were quite long as I only have 1 Gig of ram.

But, the 7800GT is really something. If you want one I say go for it. It'll last you a long time, and they do look awesome.

[Jas0n]

Say, since im not OC`ing anything, well apart from getting a graphics card thats factory overclocked. I dont really need extra fans/cooling stuff do I? Stock Heatsink will do? bcoz i hear some peoples AMD X2 3800+ get quite hot although they dont OC and use stock HSF.


Cheers

[liljim]

[Jas0n]

Okay then, i'll leave the extra PCU cooling for some time later down the track and stick with the stock HSF, but using AS5.