My first custom/homebuilt/yeah

A

Ace~of~Spades

n00b
Joined
Jan 29, 2006
Messages
12
So I'm building my first thingy. I noticed that this seems to be the place to throw down my ideas, let them get slapped around, make my new ideas, and defend my old ones. So... yeah... Have at it. :D

Aerocool Aeroengine II, Silver (I haven't seen too many of these in custom PC forums....)
Asus A8N-SLI Premium
Maxtor 250 gig / 7200 RPM / 16mb cache
NEC 16x6x16x DVD-RW (um... i got 2 of these)
Ultra X-Connect 500W

The above listed I already have, so moan all you want(please)... Below however...

AMD64 X2 4400+
XFX 7800 GT (eventually gonna have 2)
Corsair TWINX Dual Channel 2048MB PC3200 DDR 400MHz

I will eventually have pics up somewheres when she's all together... In the mean time I've been wondering... Why did I get a mobo with so much SATA, and then get IDE devices? :confused:
 
The stuff you speced out looks pretty good

Make sure for the ram that you get 2 sticks of 1gb instead of 4 sticks of 512
 
discochan said:
Make sure for the ram that you get 2 sticks of 1gb instead of 4 sticks of 512
Click to expand...

yeah, the RAM i've got lined up is 2 x 1gig

BTW Any suggestions on a CPU fan would be appreciated
 
Well, I'm not that big a fan of the Zalman 9500 (no pun intended :rolleyes: ) I went ahead and got the Thermalright SI-120
 
Wow the 120 is huge, that'll keep that chip cool no matter what you throw at it.
 
discochan said:
The stuff you speced out looks pretty good

Make sure for the ram that you get 2 sticks of 1gb instead of 4 sticks of 512
Click to expand...

I'm curious why you would say that. The only benefit I can see to this advice is that you would have room to upgrade later on if you choose to or if the board won't support dual channel on all 4 DIMM slots.

From the server side of things, it is always better to have more, smaller density DIMMS installed rather than 1 or 2 large ones to limit contention. In a dual core system, this becomes more of an issue as there are 2 CPU's trying to access info in mem simultaniously.
 
blackrino9 said:
I'm curious why you would say that. The only benefit I can see to this advice is that you would have room to upgrade later on if you choose to or if the board won't support dual channel on all 4 DIMM slots.

From the server side of things, it is always better to have more, smaller density DIMMS installed rather than 1 or 2 large ones to limit contention. In a dual core system, this becomes more of an issue as there are 2 CPU's trying to access info in mem simultaniously.
Click to expand...

What about on the gaming side of things? I have no need whatsoever to build a server machine... at least not today anyway... Is it better to have 2 sticks of RAM or 4? (assuming the total RAM is equal in both cases)

Also, I believe that my Mobo does support daul channel on all four slots, unless I am reading the manual wrong...
 
Whether we're talking servers or high end gaming rigs, performance is still performance.

Maybe the crew at the [H] could run some bench tests to see if there is any difference between 2GB in a 2x1Gb and 4x512MB.

I'm not sure how the X2 accesses the Hyper-transport bus. Does each processor get a dedicated connection to the bus or do they share one connection. If they share one connection then there shouldn't be any contention for mem access. The only real benefit to going 4x512MB would be the insanely low timings that can only be found in lower density chips (2-2-2-5).
 
The RAM i'm looking at right now has a latency of 2-3-3-6... I dont know enough to know how that compares to 2-2-2-5, how much difference does +/- 1 or 2 here and there make?

edit: this is the ram --> Corsair TWINX2048-3200C2
 
blackrino9 said:
I'm curious why you would say that. The only benefit I can see to this advice is that you would have room to upgrade later on if you choose to or if the board won't support dual channel on all 4 DIMM slots.

From the server side of things, it is always better to have more, smaller density DIMMS installed rather than 1 or 2 large ones to limit contention. In a dual core system, this becomes more of an issue as there are 2 CPU's trying to access info in mem simultaniously.
Click to expand...
The only reason one should go with 2 sticks adding up to 2GB instead of 4 is that you will only be able to use a 2T command rate, instead of 1T that you can with 2 sticks. It is a known issue with AMD 64 boards. Whether or not it will give you a noticeable performance boost is highly debated.
 
Well, i got all the components, threw it all together and i must say... compared to the OEM I was using, well, there is no comparison... I absolutely love it :D
 
Pretty much a cut and paste from my reply in another thread:

for the same $$$ your spending on your mobo and 7800GT, you could get the EVGA bundle Sli Mobo + 7800GT, perhaps for less even. I thought they were going out of stock and EVGA was phasing it out, but Newegg has em back in stock again.

Linkage: http://www.evga.com/articles/public.asp?AID=258


I also second the "Get another PSU", Ultra has been known to be shady in the past (and are currently on the PSU "Do not buy list" sticky at the top of the PSU section, but if you want a real answer ask the fellows in the PSU forums, they'll set you straight.
 
FiZ said:
The only reason one should go with 2 sticks adding up to 2GB instead of 4 is that you will only be able to use a 2T command rate, instead of 1T that you can with 2 sticks. It is a known issue with AMD 64 boards. Whether or not it will give you a noticeable performance boost is highly debated.
Click to expand...


See, this is why I love the [H]. Thanks for the info.
 
Yeah I know this post died a long time ago, but I wanted to update it anyway.

I ran the Ultra power supply since i had already paid for it, and it held up just fine, but just incase i went ahead and decided to get a new PSU, a new HD (SATA this time), a second video card for SLi and a water cooling unit.

still in the air about the PSU... too many conflicting reviews...
 
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