going to build a gaming pc soon..

M

maxiedaniels

Gawd
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May 25, 2005
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so i want to build myself a top-of-the-line gaming pc soon.. many questions tho. first of all, its going to be my second computer that i build. the first one i built was a cheap computer, i built it to see if i could build a computer basically. but along the way, i ran into a few problems which apply to my new computer i want to build. so here are my questions (quite a few.. i have no idea who to ask tho..)

1) when i built the old computer, my cpu temperature was running at about 45-50 degrees celcius. is that too hot? since it was just a work computer which i sold to my friend, i didnt think it was a big deal to have it running a little hot. however, with a gaming computer, i cannot have that problem. i doubt ill try overclocking the computer much though.. so.. yea.

2) should i consider a water cooling system? the setup for water cooling seems very complicated.. i might be wrong.. but i've seen pictures and descriptions.. ahhh confusing. is it worth it if im not going to overclock much, if at all?

3) whats the whole deal with pci-e not being a whole lot better than agp? is that true? up until yesterday, i was thinking about building the computer now, and buying a geforce 6800 ultra. however, i read about the new nvidia card coming out... i think i will wait for it. but should i just get the agp version of it?

4) my motherboard for the first computer i build ended up being completely dead when i ran the computer for the first time. so, i had to go return the motherboard (thank god i purchased it at a electronics store instead of online.. i did it in the same day). i really know nothing about motherboards. i want to go with intel, so what motherboard would everyone recommend? what is the fastest processor nowadays?
(and also, just for future reference.. where do i find out about motherboards? it seems that the only way to find a motherboard is go to newegg.com for example, and look at listings until i find one that seems to have everything i need...)

5) for a processor fan/heatsink, what brands are good? i heard thermaltake is overrated.. i dont know much about them though. and im a little scared of putting on thermal paste

6) what is SATA? i wasn't exactly smart when i bought my harddrive for my first computer i built.. i just walked in to the store and got someone to show me what hard drive to get. what is the standard hard drive setup called? and is SATA a lot better?

those are all my questions. thank you in advance for even reading all of that.. :)
-max
 
1) Get a better vented case with more fans
2) eh somepeople like them some dont, a bunch of fans will work good enough
3) no comment (dont know)
4) id go with amd for gaming, and ask on these forums ect
 
do some searching there has been many posts on this....however i understand that its nice to get individual help.

couple of things:
AMD is known to be slightly better for gaming...and socket 939 procs/mobos are the way to go if you are planning on upgrading in the future...not that other sockets arent upgradeable, but it seems that the new wave of procs will be socket 939.

You should be fine without WC as long as you have a couple of case fans and monitor the temps...if you arent OCing much then it shouldnt be a big deal.

Get atleast a gig of ram, and dont skimp...this will allow your computer to run faster/smoother....if money is there bump it to 2 gigs

Pci-e seems to be the gateway to future vid cards...not saying that AGP is bad, but having a mobo with a pci-e slot will help upgrading down the road...

once again search...
 
1) Get a case with plenty of fans. Take a look at the Silverstone TJ03. That thing's got style. (Note: click cancel if it asks to install Chinese support). That'll keep your temps lower. But they are not bad as you quote anyway.

2) No. Those who go water cooling should be familiar enough with it without asking if they should use it. (no offense intended)

3) PCI-E is notably better on paper, but there's no difference with today's graphics cards. What you want to look out for is hard drive controllers, network cards, etc. Those will benefit from PCI-E more at the moment, since they only use PCI right now. So the reason to go PCI-E graphics is upgradability.

4) Not touching this as I don't follow Intel stuff...

5) ThermalRight is good. Various people like various brands, but I've been using TR for a while now.

6) SATA is to normal IDE (Parallel ATA or PATA) what PCI-E is to PCI. It's faster (but like PCI-E, it doesn't matter with the current crop of drives, unless you get a drive with Native Command Queueing, which I won't explain here.) and has much smaller cables. It's got hotswap capabilities which don't mean much to people not using some form of RAID that has redundancy (RAID 1 or RAID 5 for consumers). All in all, it's definitely worth it. I recommend not buying PATA again except for optical drives (and only that until those start becoming common in SATA form)
 
1) It depends on the processor. Those temps are fine, though. Pretty much the average temps everyone has.


2) It will cost you, first of all. If you're not going to overclock much, then the only benefit you'll really see is a quieter system, since you can achieve very good overclocks even on air with most processors today.

3) Performance difference between AGP and PCI-E are indeed non existant. But then again, so is the price difference. PCI-E will become a more popular upgrade path, so there's no reason to not get it.

4) Not familiar with intel motherboards, so not going to comment.

5) Thermalright and Zalman are pretty big ones, but I personally went with stock heatsink since it works fine even when OCing with my A64.

6) SATA is just the next evolution of PATA. It has the ability to provide higher transfer rates, even though hard drives generally aren't able to take advantage of this. Good thing about SATA is you have some higher end hard drives available as options, and it's easy to set up a RAID array since most motherboards include SATA raid onboard. Physical differences include a different, much smaller cable than the PATA ones, and different power cable.

EDIT: Guy above me beat me to it.~
 
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