Building New PC, Need a bit of Advice

[sweetnightmare]

I have bad news for you. If you intend to use Win2000 and Mandrake you will need more RAM to keep them working at a decent pace. I use both (80% Mandrake/ 20% Win2000) and my concern nowadays is RAM, I use 256 but when you have a fully equipped win2000 that value is very low... I would bet more on mem than in cpu speed, but that's your choice I am just advising based on my experience. Even Mandrake can require a lot of mem but that depends (on both OS) of which kind of soft you will use. Good Luck with your new PC.

I think it's better a slow 1200 Duron and 512Mb of Ram...

Question: Have you ever considered the time your CPU remains idle?

[aeallison]

I have to agree with the others on the ram, I have 780mb and still not enough for compiling large animation sequences, I would also consider removable drive trays so you can put linux on one drive and win2k on another, I just plug in the drive with the OS of my choice, I tried a dual boot and win 2k ate my linux...

[Fakeboy]

You could probably pick up a low-end DVD rom for a couple bucks more than your CD-ROM, and you may want to upgrade your RAM to 512. Also make sure your case has a 400+ power supply... that is about it I guess...

[briareus]

-> point to ponder: You may want to check documentation for your components, because i think that heat/cooling issues can be affected by your overall case size-etc. My AMD set-up was running a little hotter than it should have been in another case. Just a thought. Other wise, the system w/256 sounds great.

[doma]

i would recomment 350w psu because the Amds require alot of power to work properly and 300watts wont cut it

[grygst76]

Athlon's or Durons LOVE 512 of RAM due to the thoroughput of bus speed make sure you buy good chips though, I had bad luck with no-names with bad sectors of memory. Your combo sounds decent although make sure the onboard audio can be disabled, otherwise expect the exstacy not to work due to irq and dma problems. other then that if the bios has the ability to set agp aperture size, keep that to a minimum as well; because basically you are telling the system to "steal" that percentage of memory for the card so lower it to 16 MB--trust me your PC will love it because the video you have has enough memory on it to support almost anything you throw at it. Good Luck and have fun!!!


Wanted to add to this yes--use a 350-400 watt supply or the system will be slow due to the power hit from the video and cpu or crash consistently!!!!

[cheesegoduk]

Hey Thanks folks for all your help, I am hoping to order the parts today. I have decided that I will now use 256mb of ddr 2100 ram and a CD rewriter. I might also use the other 6gb hard disk for linux instead of windows 98, Because A friends says he as found a way to play the game I wanted windows 98 for
Anyway thanks again for all your help

[Sosodef]

well if you thinking of building your own PC, which i think its great!! but i have this advice for ya, er0k posted a good post on that, probably it might help you.


http://www.antionline.com/showthread.php? s=&threadid=231871&perpage=10&pagenumber=1

http://www.antionline.com/showthread...0&pagenumber=1

some thing is wrong with my browser ****, i cant really copt and paste the link, damm am dooped

[cheesegoduk]

Ok thanks folks,
My final spec is the same except
Soltek SL-75DRV5 VIA KT333(because its a 333chipset)
and 256mb 2700ddr ram

Got one last question, I had heard that Geforce 4's have a problem with voltage i got a message saying that it needs 3.3v, does this mean the power on the AGP(which is an AGP pro slot) because that can go to 1.7 I think. This is the only thing thats putting me off ordering, A friend has tried a geforce 4 on a 733mhz board and it works fine.
Thanks again for your help

[bimmer]

hmmm .... well .. there's something major u should take in consederation ... what will be running on ur pc ( graphic design, programming, normal use , word processing )
the main issue here is the CPU ... check a compareson on the net between Intel & AMD.

and choose what most sute ur needs.