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eli

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Apr 30, 2003
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Hey, I haven't been up to date with the computer world for about 1 year. I am interested in building a new system, but I need a little help choosing a motherboard and cpu.

So the biggest question that I have is to go with either AMD or Intel. I am not planning on doing to much gaming or anything, just a lot of photoshop, other applications, and lots of media. I would prefer it to be a cool running cpu I would like to keep the processor under $175 if at all possible.

As for the motherboard...something without bells and whistles that is reliable. I don't plan on overclocking, and the simpler the better. I want quality, but the cheaper the better for me.

Thats about all the info i need at this point, the rest of the parts I am just going to read reviews on, and use my own judgement.

Thanks,
Eli
 
I'd go AMD for gaming. As for processors, well, you can look at it this way. You can get a socket 939 X2 3800+ which is a dual core, or, you can get a Sempron 3400+ this month and get the X2 3800+ later when prices go down. Both CPUs coming out this month.

As for motherboards, there's an ULi chipset coming out that allows AGP and PCI-E on the same motherboard if you still have an AGP video card.

Anyway, don't feel like hangind around too much on the net so that's it for now.
Minimum I would try to aim for if you can afford it is a 6600 GT.
 
sounds good...like i said though, I am not planning on gaming, so maybe that would change something?
 
Gaming or no, AMD is generally the best bang for the buck kind of thing. Like they said, you can even just grab a sempron (which is not a bad chip btw) just so you have the right kind of hardware and someday later upgrade when prices become reasonable. Sempron is actually a pretty good chip (many are just A64s that fail to run in 64-bit mode, which still isn't even hardly being used as much as it should be yet.)
 
Thanks guys, thats good know that does look like a pretty sweet chip, but a little too pricey for me. I was thinking more along the lines of Athlon 64 2800, at around $130. I am not sure about the mobo yet, its rather confusing considering there are so many chipsets available.

I dont want to start a new thread just for this question, so I am just going to ask here...Aside from being able to plug your Cable TV cable into a TV tuner, and be able to watch TV on your computer...is there anything else you can do with it? Does it come with some sort of device in which you can tune into channels and not even pay for it? With my purchase, I was kind of hoping get a TV tuner because recently we stopped getting tv......and i miss it so.

Anywho, Thanks a lot for the advice guys, I'll return the favor when I'm up to date on hardware again.
 
Uhm, wait, do they not make a socket 939 sempron? You really need to go with 939 because AMD apparently decided to make it more their permanent direction to go. They kind of messed people up that way. Maybe just grab a cheap 3000+ or something, but, definitely go with 939 or you may regret it down the road (unless you don't mind having to buy a new MB and CPU both whenever you wanted to upgrade.) Actually, if you get the Venice 3000+, you might get a darned good overclock out of it and run it at 3500+ levels, maybe even better. However, the venice is a tad costly I'll admit. If you do go with socket 754, then you'll have to buy both a new MB and a new CPU next time you want to upgrade, but, if you stay with 939, you can hold out for those dual cores to become affordable by us mere humans or something like that and use the extra money you save by not having to buy a new motherboard. Not to mention just what a pain it is swapping motherboards anyway (heck, even when you have the same CPU it's a pain.)

As for the tuner, no you can't just get free cable or something if that's what you're asking. The computer can't do a thing in the world if no signal actually exists. You can still use antenna for free and watch any local stations that might work though. And there's no reason you can't actually get a cable service and watch that on the PC.

The main point of getting a tv tuner is so that people can watch and record TV on their PC. You can also hook in devices like a console, but, usually they'll look better on an actual TV if you have a halfway decent TV.
 
thats a damn sweet deal, I think I might take that. In terms of Video cards compared to one year ago...is there a better company?...ATI or Nvidia
 
.is there a better company?...ATI or Nvidia
Click to expand...

Not really, Nvidia has the most powerful card out right now, but I don't think you care about that if you aren't into gaming...
 
Actually, nVidia does have a bit of an advantage in the mid-range card market. ATI has been concentrating on making their latest and greatest a little bit better one step at a time this whole time while nVidia did the opposite, making their greatest a little cheaper and weaker one step at a time.

The 6600GT is probably the best overall choice for a tolerably priced card if you want the POTENTIAL to do some gaming. It will even do things like Doom 3 with great quality. If you just want a desktop, you might want to go with the 6200 because it at least has the potential to do things like the NVDVD properly (it can now use hardware acceleration for deinterlacing and such.) Don't get the so called Geforce 4 MX, gaming or no, you'll be upset later when you find out that it has no real pixel shaders (just the very most basic thing to do bump mapping, but, nothing complex enough even to do the nice water effects.) I strongly recommend going with the 6x00 series because you may someday want PS2.0 for video watching (media players are starting to take advantage of this.) The 5x00 series is pretty bad at 2.0, even if they technically do it. In that pricerange, instead of a 5x00 card, it's better to get the equivalently priced Radeon card.

On the question of CPU power, just what exactly ARE you going to be doing? If you want to do tougher things like video encoding, it might be wisest to stick with something like the Venice (which you may well be able to count on going to 2.5GHz if it's well cooled.) If you plan to check your e-mail and write a little letter to someone in Word, then shut it down for the day, go with the Intel, it's a better price for upgradability in some more reasonable future. The equivalent AMDs compared to that P4 aren't nearly as upgradable to be honest. Socket939 is where AMD seems to want to stay now, and the Venice is one of the best.
 
sounds awesome...ill check out those video cards. But lets say i never game on this computer, and I baught a matrox video card, like the Millennium for example. Based on reviews it gives much better text and 2d image quality, and probably a lot better multimedia. What are your thoughts on this?

thanks a lot for the info man :)
 
My thoughts are that matrox seems to be best at the stuff the professionals want or something. There is a possibility they put more quality into certain aspects of the display clarity -- some nVidia cards have an issue where the analog conversion components to the VGA out for CRTs aren't as good quality as they should be, but, in recent years this has become a lot more rare, I suspect their quality requirements on those components are a little better now. Those problems are bypassed by plugging an LCD into the DVI in every case though, plus, I think I saw an option for "high res" 2D, which means it does a better quality scaling up to the monitor's native resolution in the case of LCDs giving the nVidia cards perhaps an advantage for all those people who insist on buying an LCD and running it in a non-native resolution (for shame!) I don't know of any high res mode on ati cards, but, they've had better quality control, so I haven't heard any complaints about the convertors on their cards. Still, the main problem lay in the fact that nVidia was sending their chips to other companies to make the actual cards, but, ATI was only making their own cards for the longest time, so ATI's advantage at the time was the fact that no part of the card was out of their control and they could ensure the right parts were put in. That advantage is partially nullified by the fact that these days ATI does the same thing, though they do still make reference cards. Still, it seems they learned from nVidia's mistakes or something because no one has complained that I know of. Either way, I haven't heard any nVidia complains in a while on the analog thing, so I think they've gotten a handle on it at last (this problem existed all the way from the geforce 2 and maybe one or two before it to the gf4 that I know of, possibly a few others past that.)

Overall, I'm still inclined to say that ATI and nVidia actually do still offer better multimedia options. ATI has had things like DVD hardware acceleration (at least, part of it, not the whole thing) since the days of that god-awful Rage Pro, which I still have in my "HTPC"/Retrogaming station. (Horrible 3d, but great 2d for the time though.) nVidia more recently has this thing called nvdvd, which not only gets hardware acceleration, but, out of the NV4x series cards (and I presume anything newer) will use hardware acceleration for some very high quality deinterlacing and such. It's not just a serious load off your processor, but, I for one haven't been very satisfied with any of the software deinterlacers the DVD programs I've tried had to offer.

The main thing I'd say is make sure you get a card that can manage Pixel Shader 2.0 properly. That means no low low end geforce fx 5x00 cards. MAYBE the high end would suffice. The thing is, media player classic has already started doing pixel shader video filtering, and I expect this to pave the way for other players to someday do them as well. What this means is that even a system like mine can potentially do lanczos resizing all the way up to my maximum resolution (for now bicubic is the best offered) with minimal load on the processor, freeing it up to do other processing such as denoise, dering, and such. As it was before, I was maxxing it out just resizing nearly and couldn't do the extra processing, bear in mind I was resizing up to 1440x1080, so that's a fair bit of raw power needed there. As I understand it, before PS2.0, the necessary things needed weren't possible. The Geforce FX 5x00 series does PS2.0 pretty slowly though. You're probably better off with an equivalent ATI card if you get one with that sort of thing in mind, but, if you were to try the 5x00 series, I'd say tend towards the high end, like the 5900 or something as it's not such a bad card for the time. Anything from the 9500 up I think is supposed to be ok. I used to have a 9600 Pro, and, in fact, that card isn't dead quite yet as I got somewhat tolerable quality out of Doom 3 even (well it didn't look ugly anyway.) Media player classic's code isn't specific to nvidia cards, so you're fine with ATI with it, but, you do loose the nvdvd if you wanted something like that. This is why I suggest the Geforce FX 6200 as a good compromise as it offers basics at a pretty decent price. I'd suggest Radeon 9600 Pro as the alternative to that if you wanted ATI. In either case, I thing you would be better off without Matrox as they just aren't really what they used to be these days, competing with nVidia and ATI is no easy task. Mind you, in the CAD world, Matrox may still be ahead for all I know, I just know that in the desktop world I'd rather not go with one these days.

I may be wrong, it may be that media player classic is the only one that ever does this (though, I might add that DOSBox has been using hardware accelerated video resizing for a while, albiet only just VERY recently in the form of pixel shaders, which is intend to help the ATI cards most, but, they should work on nvidia cards too.) I'd be sorely dissapointed if everyone but microsoft didn't do this though in the next few years though. After all, doesn't it just make sense to have the video card do video processing instead of only the CPU? Since PS2.0 is now common to MOST households (bloody geforce "4" mx screwed everyone up as it was dangerously common thanks to nvidia making it sound better than it ever could be) it's getting to be reasonable for such a thing to be done now. I expect ATI will come out with their own competition for nvdvd very soon in fact (if they haven't already and I was unaware of it, I don't keep up with ATI news as well anymore.)
 
damn good info...don't have anything else to say besides thanks :)
 
Glad to help, and I wish you good luck.

I did forget to mention I think that the equivalently priced Radeon cards are better at all forms of pixel shaders than the geforce fx 5x00 series btw. So if you look at something in that pricerange, probably choose the radeon over the fx5x00. I know right now PS2.0 isn't much good for you, but, I think it will be someday down the road.
 
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