GameBanshee Forums

w00t! I'm rid of my P3 550 and moving to better things piece by piece lol!!! I ordered my motherboard and 512Mbs of DDR333 RAM yesterday and I'm borrowing my friends processor till I can afford my own. An Athlon XP 1700+. I don't even know why I'm typing this, I'm just so excited to get off this piece of crap I call a computer! Should be here next week. w00t!

I hear that - I used to own a piece of crap too (Pentium I 200 Mhz), but then I got myself a fine piece of hardware too (XP1400) and it's been smooth sailing since (well, compared to before ). Mad props to you for getting a new machine

threw a new graphics card in my computer yesteday - a nice GeForce 4 TI4400 by Asus instead of my old GeForce 2MX

next item will be a new harddrive

New hardware is fun

Heh. Reminds me that my first computer was a Radio Shack 2, complete with a 48K cassette drive.

::waves hand hypnotically in front of the GameBanshee community::
You all need to buy MSI motherboards.

: ockets checks from MSI::

And do what our friend Xandax says and get a GeForce4 Ti video card; you'll be amazed at how good things look. Make sure that you get a 128 MB card; the 64 MB card is a little cheaper, but the extra memory is worth it.

: ockets check from nVidia::

Hey HLD, if you didn't know I'm refusing to post smileys. Taking a leaf out of your book. What's good about MSI motherboards then?

They're inexpensive, easy to install (very few jumpers and no dip switches) and best of all, I haven't had any stability or compatibility issues with mine. Their driver support also seems to be up-to-date and their tech support people answer questions promptly, courteously and accurately.

I'm going to get a new harddrive and a soundcard when I go to Japan. As usual, to avoid paying 17.5% VAT in UK.

@HLD: There's someone in need of help in Morrowind forum on computer.

Originally posted by HighLordDave
They're inexpensive, easy to install (very few jumpers and no dip switches) <snip>

Since when have dip-switches ever provided somebody that acutally looked in the manual any problem

I got a Gigabyte. Only $115 and looked really good for the price. Well, anything looks really good to me now because it supports something better than a slot P3 *grrrr*. But my next purchase after my processor (hopefully a 2400+) is going to be a graphics card and I'm trying to decide a) how much to spend and b) Radeon or GeForce. So far I'm leaning towards a 128MB GeForce Ti4200. It's relativaly cheap and it has great performance (my friend has one). Radeon is better, but only for top of the line, which I don't wanna spend the money for. The cheaper Radeon's don't seem as impressive as the cheaper GeForce. They're more on par with the MX series, which I don't want. Another question. Do you guys think it would be worth another $200 to upgrade to 1GB of RAM, or will it not make any difference over the 512MB I'm getting (taking into consideration that I play a lot of games and do some n00b graphics work)? The other thing I need is a new sound card...I'm thinkin Audigy (I see they have Audigy2 now, any info on those?). And yes, I am going pretty much all out on my upgrades. I just got a job like a month ago (w00t) and I'm upgrading this comp I've had for like 2 years, so every time I get payed I get a new upgrade lol. Nothing I have except my hard drives is worth saving. I might even replace my 20GB with a 120GB though, just cause it never hurts

How much can you afford? Pick a maximum amount that you want to pour into this machine and then spend up to that limit with the best components you can afford.

A couple of thoughts:

The Radeon 9000 Pro is essentially a Radeon 8500 with a new paint job. The Radeon 9700 has an entirely new chipset, but you will need a motherboard with 8X AGP support to take advantage of everything it has to offer. I am currently recommending the GeForce4 Ti cards (I got a Visiontek Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4200 with 128 MB of DDR RAM at Wal-Mart for $200). If you can afford one of the Ti 4400 or Ti4600 cards, get one, but don't get less than 128 MB of video RAM

If you can afford 1 GB of RAM, get it because you can never have too much. I would, however, suggest that 512 MB will be more than sufficiend for now and you may be better served by putting the extra money you'd spend on RAM into something else and then adding more RAM at a later date.

Before you sink too much money into a good graphics card and a good sound card, you might want to set some money aside to buy a good monitor and some high-quality speakers. It's pointless to invest a lot of money in a GeForce4 Ti 4600 card only to run it through a monitor with a high dot pitch and low refresh rate. Similarly, if you're going to spend $100 on an Audiology card, it's worth spending $70-100 on some good Creative, Altec Lansing or Logitech speakers. So save some money for peripheral components in addition to what you're putting in the case.

Also, nVidia-based cards and Athlon CPUs tend to run hotter than ATIs and Pentiums, so when you're building this machine, spend an extra $20 on a couple of additional cooling fans (I have five in my machine right now; sure, it's a little overkill, but I wanted the geek points).

Originally posted by HighLordDave
Also, nVidia-based cards and Athlon CPUs tend to run hotter than ATIs and Pentiums, so when you're building this machine, spend an extra $20 on a couple of additional cooling fans (I have five in my machine right now; sure, it's a little overkill, but I wanted the geek points).

Check out some of the tech support topics, that should give you some recommendation from all of us. I would say about cooling fans that you can have too many if you don't know what your doing, if you have too many coolers the air can stay stagnant in the middle of your case. I have one powerful cooler at the front of my pc pushing air in and that has helped immeasurably, I don't feel there is much cause for many more.

Originally posted by Mr Sleep
I have one powerful cooler at the front of my pc pushing air in and that has helped immeasurably, I don't feel there is much cause for many more.

Think of the geek points, Mr Sleep . . .

As long as you're blowing all of your air from front to back and the case isn't blocked in, more fans are better.

Originally posted by HighLordDave
Think of the geek points, Mr Sleep . . .

Geek points be damned!

As long as you're blowing all of your air from front to back and the case isn't blocked in, more fans are better.

Blockage is indeed important, I imagine he will have the normal ribbon IDE cables and unless they are properly tied and "out of the way" then it could cause more problems than it solves.

Originally posted by Mr Sleep
Blockage is indeed important, I imagine he will have the normal ribbon IDE cables and unless they are properly tied and "out of the way" then it could cause more problems than it solves.

That's what wire-ties and clips are for.

Our friend Antichrist also mentioned getting a new hard drive; are you running low on hard drive space? I think 120 GB on a single drive runs a high risk of losing a lot of data in the event of disk failure. 60 GB drives are running in the $100-120 range right now, so you might consider getting two 60 GB drives and using one for your program files and one for your document storage and system files, then making periodic backups of everything that's important.

Some of the newer motherboards (like say, the MSI KT3 Ultra2) come with on-board RAID so you could get two 60 GB hard drives and run a level 0 or level 1 RAID so you won't lose any data should one of your drives fail (IDE hard drive failure is becoming uncomfortably common since price and quality have dropped in the last four or five years).

: ockets check from MSI::

Or you could also get an external USB or Firewire drive to store documents, music files and photos on. In any event, don't get any hard drive with a spindle speed of less than 7200 RPM.

It's Big Pimpin' baby!

Originally posted by HighLordDave
Or you could also get an external USB or Firewire drive to store documents, music files and photos on. In any event, don't get any hard drive with a spindle speed of less than 7200 RPM.

I agree with HLD (shock horror ) the 7200 drives make everything exceptionally faster, however I am not sure how necessary they are in external drives.

I don't think it is necessary to get a really big hard disk unless you are installing loads of games/programs or are dealing with massive images, the space will just become superfilous. I have a 10GB from a few years back and have never had any serious problems with space. I say go for 40GB

I've got some really nice Altec Lansing speakers. Kind of cheaply built but they put out nice sound. My monitor is decent, but really not great. The problem is that I live in the Cayman Islands, meaning that to ship things here it's insane amounts of money, not to mention the 20% duty (tax) you pay on everything that comes in. For a monitor the shipping just gets worse because it's big and heavy, so I'm trying to stick to fairly small components, at least for now. Also, I have two hard drives (40GB and a 20GB) in my computer. I'm not sure of their speed though. I've got about 18GB left between the two of them, which is good enough I guess. I'll just wait until some more of that space disappears (which seems to happen fairly quickly in my house lol). I'm also looking into fans. I think I'll get a couple when I order my processor.