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Opinions on this system

CPU: Athlon 64 3000 ($211)

Motherboard: Abit KV8-Max3 ($139)

Video Card: ATI Radeon AIW 9600 ($170)

Storage: WD 80GB SATA ($77)

Optical: Plextor PX-708A DVD +/- R/RW ($159)

Memory: Kingston HyperX 512MB PC3200 ($136)

Case: SOHO 2 Aluminum Case w/ Extremo 550W Ultra-quiet PSU ($99)

Monitor: Viewsonic A90f 19in ($216)

Total: $1207

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"You must BE the crap." Joshua to Biff

I'd add a ThermalTake Fan for the CPU personally. It's a great addition and keeps things nice and cool.

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-- 1f u c4n r34d t41s u r34lly n33d t0 g3t l41d.

Yeah. I forgot to bring that up last night.

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Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.




Nobody wins in a quick-draw contest.

I would wait for the next gen video cards to come out because the current leaders will drop big time... And I take it you are going to stick with onboard sound and network...

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"Men who experience an erection for more than four hours should seek immediate medical attention."

Levitra Commercial :P

I'm trying to find out if the ice system that the shuttle sff uses can be bought by itself.

Yep, for right now, onboard sound and network

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"You must BE the crap." Joshua to Biff

if you are going to pay extra for the sata hd you should make sure its the 150 model not the 133. if you go with the slower sata speed it would be jsut as efficient to buy a larger ata hard drive.

He's not really spending that much more for the SATA. Just about seven bucks or so. But you do have a very good point about the speed. Even 150 doesn't really even give you that much over the current crop of hard drives. However, I would spend the few extra bucks for:

1. SATA uses a thin and flexible 8mm thick cable that makes the connection process literally a snap.

2. SATA cables are 1m long. IDE cables are just 40cm making it difficult to place the various optical and hard disk drives in your system.

3. The thinner SATA cables also help to improve the air circulation inside the computer.

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Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.




Nobody wins in a quick-draw contest.

very good points anthos, i was just saying if you are gonna fork ove a few extra bucks y not fork out a few more and go with the faster one. while i know its not that much faster i have noticed a difference when you are running programs like dameons tools or any large program from the hard drive. this is also dependant on how much ram you have because the hard drives can use burst transfer when loading to ram. however i have noticed a great diffenence when i am doing video editing. on some of the files i worked on it has saved me hours so it really depends on what you do.

there is only one thing that i would watch out for tho. i bought a seagate sata hd and the thing with those is that the power plug and the sata plug were so close together that if you didnt buy the nicer cables they didnt both want to fit in at the same time (one was off at a slight angle and didnt make a full connection). this can be fixed by filing off some of the excess plastic on the sides of the cables and everything is fine.

Yeah, I'll check on to see if it's the 133 or the 150.

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"You must BE the crap." Joshua to Biff

I haven't been able to find a 133 SATA, Bong. Where'd you find that info?

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Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.




Nobody wins in a quick-draw contest.

sorry my bad its a sata 100 vs a sata 150

The SATA standard itself calls for 150MB/s transfers vs 133MB/s from IDE. The problem is, current generation drives, much like there IDE brethren, will never reach that point. With the SATA's, only one or two models actually have native SATA support. Up to this point, most had an onboard "adapter" to allow conversation between the SATA bus and an IDE based drive. The next generatio will probably be the first time we see ALL drives natively support it.

As for the system, pretty good breakdown, the Asus boards is one of the best current choices for a AMD64..though I'd wait for the nForce 250 chipset - mainly for it's ability to truly lock down AGP/PCI frequencies (useful in overclocking).

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Madness does not always howl. Sometimes, it is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, "'Hey, is there room in your head for one more?" -- Despair.com

Yeah, I couldn't find anything anywhere that called for a speed other than the 150MB/s transfer rate. Next generation, obviously, will be faster. And you, Kagato, apparently hopped right onto the 10K RPM SATA? How do you like those? I've read they even outperform the 10K SCSI drives.

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Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.




Nobody wins in a quick-draw contest.

Yeah, in some respects, the Raptor's are better than the Ultra160 SCSI drives that I used to run, but then again, SCSI under XP is still broke, I'm beginning to think they're NEVER going to fix it.

Overall, they kick some serious a$$, especially when it comes to loading maps and whatnot in various games. For the average gamer, I think they might be overkill in terms of the cost vs space. The average user probably would notice little difference picking up a couple 200GB drives and putting them in a RAID 0 setup.

They're a bit noisy, but not quite so bad as the 10K SCSI drives but can easily get just as if no air movement is provided. The nice thing as compared to SCSI is there's no investment needed in a controller, then again, you can run 21 SATA drives off a single controller

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Madness does not always howl. Sometimes, it is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, "'Hey, is there room in your head for one more?" -- Despair.com