Building my first computer

C

claudius

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 26, 2005
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120
Basically my parents have given me permission to build my first gaming rig for Christmas. I have been researching a couple months now but just wanted some final advice on things. Do here the parts are...

COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-WW Black/Silver Aluminum Bezel, SECC Chassis ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail

ASUS A8N5X Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail

eVGA 256-P2-N516 Geforce 7800GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card - Retail

FSP Group (Fortron Source) AX500-A ATX12V 500W Power Supply - Retail

AMD Opteron 170 Denmark Dual Core Processor

(2) G.SKILL Value 1GB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered System Memory Model F1-3200PHU1-1GBNT - Retail

Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST3120026A 120GB 7200 RPM IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive - OEM

Microsoft Media Edition

Microsoft Office

The total is about $1300


NEC Black IDE/ATAPI DVD Burner Model ND-3550A - OEM

What would this computer be able to play on high/medium settings, is everything compatable w/ each other. Thanks.
 
Yeah you'll be able to run games great with that. Not the highest settings but definitely medium/high

No sound card? :(
 
i thought that he would be able to run everything on damn high settings with that setup, where do you see it being limited.
 
Johnnyscans said:
i thought that he would be able to run everything on damn high settings with that setup, where do you see it being limited.
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In terms of texture settings, and AA he'll be fine. Probably the highest. But once you add the more advanced shadow features his card will run out of steam. The 7800 GT is an awesome card, but even with a 7800 GTX SLI setup people still cant run some of the latest games at MAX settings
 
yeh youll be able to play new games qiote easily with that...if i can play fear with my x850xt pe at 1280x1024 with 2aa/8af and everything on high u should be able to do it with 4aa/16af @ 1280x1024
 
Very nice rig, should tear through games at all but the extreme highest settings.
 
I'd ditch the 3700+ in favor of getting a 939 Opteron, but good choices on everything else

GForce64 said:
Very nice rig, should tear through games at all but the extreme highest settings.
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He'll be able to play at all highest settings
 
quick question after looking at this, whats the difference between teh a8n-e and the a8n5x. the website says the a8ne is nforce 4 ultra and the 5x is nforce4, but what does this acutally mean in terms of performance.
 
Johnnyscans said:
quick question after looking at this, whats the difference between teh a8n-e and the a8n5x. the website says the a8ne is nforce 4 ultra and the 5x is nforce4, but what does this acutally mean in terms of performance.
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Ultra = faster
 
Go with a sata hard drive instead of the one you picked. Also, get a Thermalright XP-90 heatsink and a 92mm fan for it.
 
JasonE4 said:
Go with a sata hard drive instead of the one you picked. Also, get a Thermalright XP-90 heatsink and a 92mm fan for it.
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Nice stuff, but unecessary for what he is looking for. Won't see a real world difference in going from IDE to SATA, and he can upgrade the CPU cooler later.

I'd be interested in how he came to that price total. I'd bet someone could find him a better deal.
 
Johnnyscans said:
price is dead on according to newegg i think
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EXACTLY! Depending on where you live and how much time you have, you can probably do better than buying from the Egg, esp with shipping and tax costs. At least do a Pricegrabber search.
 
i just think a lot of people enjoy the convienence (sp) of shopping with newegg due to selection and the ability to get pretty much anything from the same place.
 
c1001 said:
Nice stuff, but unecessary for what he is looking for. Won't see a real world difference in going from IDE to SATA, and he can upgrade the CPU cooler later.
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Why not get a SATA drive for pretty much the same price? And, if he's going to upgrade the cooler at some point, it might as well be now. An XP-90 is under $30.
 
That's a good point and I often buy everything from one site just for the convenience and expedience (is that a word?). However, if I was in a position where I had to ask a parent for permission to build a rig, then I'd probably have more time than money available to me and would search around for the best value.
 
JasonE4 said:
Why not get a SATA drive for pretty much the same price? And, if he's going to upgrade the cooler at some point, it might as well be now. An XP-90 is under $30.
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Less headaches. He's not running an intel chipset OR a dedicated controller card
 
ScHpAnKy said:
Less headaches. He's not running an intel chipset OR a dedicated controller card
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Windows XP doesn't natively detect sata drives on NF4 mobos?
 
JasonE4 said:
Windows XP doesn't natively detect sata drives on NF4 mobos?
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Windows XP doesn't natively detect anything, on any chipset. However, XP has drivers built-in for some controllers, and the NF2/3/4-board's controller are typically not on there, thus this requires a seperate floppy (and a floppy drive installed into your pc :( :mad: )

However, some manufacturers are including standard sil and promise controllers, which makes a lot of the headaches go away, but a lot of the controllers still require seperate drivers :mad:

On intel chipsets, I have yet to run in to any such trouble, as most of their boards have native bios support, but I still hate sata... and it's stupid cables :mad:

Eventually I'll upgrade, but it won't be for a loooooooong time.
 
Wow, lots of replies, sry I have been busy the last ccouple days. I'll probably end up adding a different heratsink but not yet. SO when my processor becomes outdated I'll get a opteron or something like that, so I guess this will be my final set up. Is there a chance that the computer won't end up working.

Oh ya, I found a $20 price drop on the PSU so ill probably get that there.

Would it be smarter to get the 148 opty, but I won;t be doing major OCing and will it work on my mobo? And all optys are dual core correct,b/c my dad is pretty interested in the dual core stuff.
 
NEW update, my dad wants me to add on the Media Center so I will be adding that on instead of Home Edition

Any replies to my other post;)???^^^
 
claudius said:
Would it be smarter to get the 148 opty, but I won;t be doing major OCing and will it work on my mobo? And all optys are dual core correct,b/c my dad is pretty interested in the dual core stuff.
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The opterons are not all duel core, all of the 14X chips are not, as well as 15X chips, if I recall
 
ScHpAnKy said:
Windows XP doesn't natively detect anything, on any chipset. However, XP has drivers built-in for some controllers, and the NF2/3/4-board's controller are typically not on there, thus this requires a seperate floppy (and a floppy drive installed into your pc :( :mad: )
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The controllers on NF3 and NF4 boards are ATA compatible. They can work w/ the standard MS driver. Or at least, the SATA ports on my NForce3 dual Opteron rig were detected on install, and the NForce4 machine I just built for a relative installed onto an SATA drive w/ no floppies. I suppose it is possible that the original XP version wouldn't detect them, as my pro disk for my main rig has SP1 on it & the home OEM disk I picked up for the new build has SP2 on it.

You don't need the NV driver unless you're using raid mode. Then you have to use the floppy if you're installing XP onto a raid volume. Actually, I wouldn't recommend installing the NV IDE drivers at all unless they've fixed that damned optical drive empty buffer problem.

That said, the main performance reasons to use SATA at this point are freeing up the PATA ports for opticals, etc. and that there are faster SATA drives available. 16MB cache drives (I think... don't recall seeing one in PATA), Raptors, etc. Plus the cables are easier to deal with.
 
How much of a performance difference will I see w/ the Opteron 170 and the Athlon 64 X2 3800+/4200+ processors? Which would be better in the long run?
 
claudius said:
How much of a performance difference will I see w/ the Opteron 170 and the Athlon 64 X2 3800+/4200+ processors? Which would be better in the long run?
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You won't typically "see" a performance difference between the cpus unless you have something that really taxes both. However, the opteron is a good deal faster, expecially when it's the same clockspeed. Also, opterons are generally cheaper than their Athlon counter-parts.
 
claudius said:
How much of a performance difference will I see w/ the Opteron 170 and the Athlon 64 X2 3800+/4200+ processors? Which would be better in the long run?
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At stock clocks, the 170 will sometimes beat, sometimes tie the 3800+. 4200+ vs. 170 will go back & forth depending on the app. In both cases this is the result of the 1MB/core cache on the Opteron & the 512k/core cache on those X2s. Some apps really don't care about the difference, and will see little or no performance improvement. Others really like it, resulting in the Opteron easily beating the higher clocked 4200+.
If the program's working set (amount of data used frequently basically) is substantially bigger than either chip's cache, the larger cache will provide an advantage, but not usually a massive one. If it's smaller than the smaller cache, you'll see effectively no difference at all. When it gets interesting is when an app has a working set that uses more space than the smaller cache can offer but less than the bigger one. Say, 900k for example. That'll often result in the cpu w/ the 512k being blown away by the chip with the larger cache. Fitting the whole working set of the program (or even the whole program) entirely in cache can yield several times faster performance. Of course, if you really want to see it go fast, find an app that fits entirely in L1 cache.
This isn't of much interest in gaming... pretty much any modern game is going to have a working set way over 1MB. So the bigger cache will help, but won't result in a massive performance improvement.
As best I can tell, the PR scale for X2 chips is, based on the 3800+ at the bottom, something like this: +400/200MHz, +200 for 1MB cache instead of 512k. That'd make the 170 an X2 4000+.
Personally I think I'd pick between the 170 and 4200+ by price unless OCing. You can't really give either one the "definately faster" title, so I'd get whichever one I could get for less $$$. For OCing I'd get the 170 based on thier overclocking reputation.
 
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