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I will be building a conroe based system...please help.

L

Lyquist

2[H]4U
Joined
Aug 21, 2004
Messages
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I have been with AMD for a long time, but I have decided to build a conroe based system sometime in late August, early September. Could you guys recommend some parts for me? The machine will be used as the centerpiece for my home studio. I am not a gamer at all, so that is not a consideration. I will be using two monitors as well. Any advice is appreciated.

Lyquist
 
No overclocking etc... right? Well, that's beside the point. Here's the system I'd be looking at if I was you:

Core 2 Duo E6300 - http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2280517&CatId=2397

- $213

Intel i965P motherboard -
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813121035

- $130

1Gb (2x512mb ) Corsair XMS kit -
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820145566

- $104

Sapphire X1800XT Video card -
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102007

- $235 (dual monitor supported)

Antec Truepower2.0 480W Power supply -
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817103929

- $76

I just put this together. You can change things from there. Those are the crucial things. The rest is up to you. The case, fans, hard drive. W/e you want from there.

Here's one more thing, DO NOT CHEAP OUT ON THE POWER SUPPLY. Some day, you'll turn your computer on and it won't turn on because your power supply died, or blows up, or burns, or w/e. There. haha, Have fun.
 
Wait on the graphic card at the mo , the 1950xt is coming out and i know you are not going to be gaming but you will see price reductiions at the time from Nvidia and Ati , rest of the system i very much have to agree with Stealthy fish.

The conroe is more for the overclocker and the gamer . I too am going conroe and as soon as i can but situations in the UK regarding the E6600 are not looking too good. There is one thing good about this all and that iis the choice of motherboards the wait will bring and i want something where i can use my 7950 and a DX10 card that will be quad stle like the 7950 . Most likely i will be not going quad qith my 7950 cos i have a 21crt and my 7950 seems to be perfect for it .

It was missing a good CPU though but that will all change and milk as much performance as it possibly can. :)
 
if gaming is really no concern, just get an X1300Pro or 7300gs. Dual monitor support with 1 DVI and 1 VGA. If you need dual DVI, then there are some 7600GS and X1600 cards that meet that, and still come in at half the price of an X1800XT, and about 1/4th the power consumption.

2gb of DDR2 667 or 800 is good. Corsiar VS DDR667 2gb kit runs about $150-160 right now. Patriot also has some good 2gb kits that quite affordable.

Motherboard, you can go with a fairly simple Gigabyte DS3 P965 board, up to the Asus P5B deluxe that's decked out with dual gigabit lan, external SATA and 1394 along with built in wifi. (Though at teh P5B deluxe's price, a 975 board might be better).

Power supply, if you're not overclocking, and not going for the 100+W video card, something fairly small, reliable and quiet would be my choice. A nice SeaSonic S-12 330 or 380W perhaps.
 
FreiDOg said:
if gaming is really no concern, just get an X1300Pro or 7300gs. Dual monitor support with 1 DVI and 1 VGA. If you need dual DVI, then there are some 7600GS and X1600 cards that meet that, and still come in at half the price of an X1800XT, and about 1/4th the power consumption.

2gb of DDR2 667 or 800 is good. Corsiar VS DDR667 2gb kit runs about $150-160 right now. Patriot also has some good 2gb kits that quite affordable.

Motherboard, you can go with a fairly simple Gigabyte DS3 P965 board, up to the Asus P5B deluxe that's decked out with dual gigabit lan, external SATA and 1394 along with built in wifi. (Though at teh P5B deluxe's price, a 975 board might be better).

Power supply, if you're not overclocking, and not going for the 100+W video card, something fairly small, reliable and quiet would be my choice. A nice SeaSonic S-12 330 or 380W perhaps.
Click to expand...

seasonics are quite expensive, but if you've got the money and you want the silence, then i agree with this guy, a seasonic is good. DS3 prices have went up a little bit :( and yea, it's pretty much your call about the RAM. 667 or 800. If you're not overclocking, it doesn't matter.
 
The DS3 is 149.99 at the Egg. It says 142.99 on froogle. Hopefully they'll honor the froogle price. :)
 
This computer will be the centerpiece for a home recording studio. I will obviously not be overclocking. I do want as much RAM as possible and at least two 300+ GB HDD's. Most of the money is going to go into a firewire audio interface. I will not be gaming AT ALL, but I will want dual DVI. I just don't want to spend alot of money on video. I would go with Matrox, because I've always liked their drivers and 2d quality, but they are very expensive for some reason. Thanks in advance for your time. I will also want the fastest RAM that I can afford. A motherboard with firewire would be nice, and a motherboard with as many PCI slots as possible. I'll either use a firewire audio interface or multiple m-audio soundcards. I want to be able to record at least 8 tracks at one time.....eventually building up to 24 at a time.

Lyquist
 
What is your budget for the whole rig? That will help us a lot as to where money can be spent extra :D or needs to be shaved.
 
I'm not really sure what my budget is yet. I would like to get everything I need for around $3000...but realistically it may be more than that. Going with two nice DVI flat panels is not going to be cheap, and the remaining audio equipment I'll need isn't going to be cheap either.
I'm really going to be building this in stages. THe first stage is just the computer, and I'll probably just use my existing monitors for the time being, then I'm going to buy monitors, and then the remaining audio equipment I'll need.

Lyquist

P.S. I also forgot to mention that the machine really needs to be dead silent. My current condensor mic picks up noise very easily, so I need to minimize noise as much as possible.
 
Silent, eh? You'll want to visit the forums and read the articles on http://www.silentpcreview.com/; they have an obsession with making computers silent.

As far as parts go, the Samsung Spinpoint SP2504C 250GB SATA-II hard drive is recommended as being one of the quietest high capacity hard drives you'll find. However, I believe the SP2004C IDE version is even quieter.

I have to agree on the Seasonic as being a good choice; it's one of the most silent PSU's you'll find, in part to its high efficiency which results in lower heat output. If you really want a passive PSU, the Antec Phantom 500 is a good compromise; it has a passive radiator, and a fan that will only turn on once the PSU's internal temperature reaches a certain point. Be forewarned that one that fan kicks in, the Phantom will become pretty noisy.

For cooling, so far as air cooling goes, you could pair up a Scythe Ninja with a 120mm Nexus exhaust fan. Make sure you use some fan isolators (such as the EAR decouplers or the AcoustiProducts Anti-Vibration Fan Mounts) with any fans you use too. If you want to go into a water-cooling route, FrozenCPU.com currently has the AlphaCool Cape Cora watercooling kits on sale; these kits utilize a passive radiator, so the only potential source of noise in your computer would be the pump (and that pump should be relatively silent). Keep in mind that if you do go with the AlphaCool, you still want a Nexus fan on hand to cool your hard drives. In either situation, air cooling or water cooling, the Nexus fans can be undervolted using a rheobus fan controller to make them silent.

SPCR seems to revere the P180 as being the end-all case for silent computing, although there are others like the P150 that are also good choices. You can line the insides of the case with an acoustic dampening material like AcoustiPack or MuteMat.

One note with the P180's layout; due to its positioning of the PSU and the HDs in a isolated lower chamber, you could just use the Seasonic's 120mm fan to cool the HDs in that chamber, thus saving the installation of the Nexus fan. Then, you could use the Alphacool passive water-cooling kit to cool the rest of the components (assuming that you use waterblocks for the CPU, video card, and chipset).

Addendum:you can look up reviews on all these parts on silentpcreview.com.
 
StealthyFish said:
seasonics are quite expensive, but if you've got the money and you want the silence, then i agree with this guy, a seasonic is good. DS3 prices have went up a little bit :( and yea, it's pretty much your call about the RAM. 667 or 800. If you're not overclocking, it doesn't matter.
Click to expand...

TP 550 2.0 SLI is just $79.99 with free shipping. It was $76 last week.
 
Check out SilentPCreview, it's a site dedicated to quiet systems. I would go for the SeaSonic recommended, they have a good reputation for being quiet. As far as the Conroe, go for the E6600 if you can spring it, as the clock speed and 4MB cache vs. 2MB shold help in audio/compression tasks. Go for a low-end video card like an nVidia 6200-series or an ATI X1300... avoid anything like the X1800XT as A) they're gaming cards and B) they have hairdryer coolers (noise-wise). Good luck :D!
 
GoldenTiger said:
Check out SilentPCreview, it's a site dedicated to quiet systems. I would go for the SeaSonic recommended, they have a good reputation for being quiet. As far as the Conroe, go for the E6600 if you can spring it, as the clock speed and 4MB cache vs. 2MB shold help in audio/compression tasks. Go for a low-end video card like an nVidia 6200-series or an ATI X1300... avoid anything like the X1800XT as A) they're gaming cards and B) they have hairdryer coolers (noise-wise). Good luck :D!
Click to expand...

THey're loud when you crank up the computer, once it's past that point they're pretty quite. My stock fan on my 3500+ is louder for example. I'm using/testing out sparks' 512MB X1800XL that's really an X1800XT :) I hate like hell I missed that sale ZZF via MSI had on these, that was steal.
 
I was thinking about going with the Antec Sonata II. Would that be a nice quiet case?? Remember that I won't be building this until late August or early September. My current machine is doing just fine for audio, but it's not a dual processor machine and my audio application supports dual core, so that's what I want. I could probably go with one of the Pentium D's and see performance increases over what I currently have. Below is my current config...

Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 2700+ Clocked at 2.3GHz
1 GB Mushkin RAM running at 220MHz
Two m-audio soundcards (I can currently record 10 channels at a time, 4 of them digital 6 analog)
DVD Burner
DVD Reader
Floppy
etc....



Lyquist
 
GoldenTiger said:
Check out SilentPCreview, it's a site dedicated to quiet systems. I would go for the SeaSonic recommended, they have a good reputation for being quiet. As far as the Conroe, go for the E6600 if you can spring it, as the clock speed and 4MB cache vs. 2MB shold help in audio/compression tasks. Go for a low-end video card like an nVidia 6200-series or an ATI X1300... avoid anything like the X1800XT as A) they're gaming cards and B) they have hairdryer coolers (noise-wise). Good luck :D!
Click to expand...

Does the ATI X1300 have dual dvi inputs??? If I need regular analog I have adapters.

Lyquist
 
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