Building A computer....

[space_cowboy]

Invest in a good video card, lots of memory, and fast HD (ATA ultra 133 or better).
These parts will help compensate for a under powered (slower CPU) machine. when building a new system or upgrading always think about bottle necks.
You would'nt upgrade the engine in your car without upgrading the transmission and matching the rearend gears. Same goes for a computer. If you have a super fast system and put in a 8meg video card - you just created a bottleneck.

It's all logic - doesn't it make sense

-Space_Cowboy-

[JT]

Definetely go with the Antec power supply. They are by far the nicest IMO. The models I use speed up and slow down my case fans as needed to keep the CPU within a constant temp range. The wattage really doesn't need to be very high unless your hooking up a lot of perifrials or SCSI systems. 350W should be fine or even excessive for most systems. The quality of the power supply is the important part. Sometimes these things go out, and you want to be damn sure the only thing you loose is the power supply when that happens. The Antec case fans are the best out there too. I really like RAID but it can be a little tricky to set up. On many boards that support RAID you can run 8 IDE devices on them if you include the 4 RAID. That's a really nice way to go. RAID is not a brand of HD. It's just a way of integrating HD's together. The HD's you RAID together don't even have to be the same brand. As far as memory goes, I'm still stuck thinking Rambus is the best. Never was very cost effective though. dDDR is really kicking some ass now days too. Memory and bus speed is really where computers are still improving so much in performance now days. Most processors now days run so much faster than the buses and memory anything past about 2.5 gig processor isn't doing much to add performance. ISA is a antiquated card slot like a PCI slot. It's so old I'm suprised to hear you even ask about it. Not much use for anything ISA any more.

[fubr]

they got them 3-d cases also you can see through.
you can put a hamster and a wheeel in it and friends will get a kick out of it when you tell them he is suppling the power.

soyo are much better than asus m/b's
or at least the asus's ones I have dealt with but I suspect the suppliers was re-selling them or something.

[tbelisle]

DO no get a (all in one)system board!
I do this for a living and you will regret it.

Compaq and HP shit are the worst on the market, especialy for video issues.

[BlackSunday]

Is SDRAM better than DDR memory?

G

DDR is better

SDRAM = Single Date Rate
DDR = Double Date Rate

I also build all my PC's my current setup is

AMD 64 3200+ CPU
MSI K8T Neo 800mhz FSB MainBoard
1GB DDR 400Mhz Ram
eGeforce 5700LE 256MB Vid Card
Western Digital 40 Gig 8MB Buffer HardDrive
:D

[JT]

It's not really worth it to go out and get the newest, baddest CPU. Sure you get a little more, but for half the cost you can usually get something that's only about 20% slower. RAID is very cool IMO. It's not for everyone though. Be warned that you may be in the computer shop asking a pro joe to set your RAID up for you the first time. If you going to be doing much with video/DVD recording, then your going to want at least 120Gig HD's....unless your not planning on saving much on your HD's. I have a PVR card in my main computer and a dedicated 400Gig HD (two 200Gig's striped with RAID) for storing my video captures. With a simple 4 way switch I have Charlie, Bev, DVD and VHS piped straight into my computer. That allowed me to record the entire Bond Marathon plus about 10 other movies in the last month and I only used up about 1/4 of my storage space. One of these days now I have to go back and put it all on DVD. As far as memory goes, yeah, you will see a jump in performance by going with 1Gig over 512Mb. You won't see much of a jump in performance by going with 2Gig over 1Gig though....If that makes any sense. Once you've got a gig of memory that's not going to be your primary bottleneck any more. If what your mostly planning on doing is audio recording then you won't need nearly as much storage, memory or processing capacity. Video editing can be pretty demanding. If your going to get into gaming then your big investment should be your video card. Your going to spend at least $170 for a good video card for gaming. And you probably don't want voice recognition either. It's been a couple years since I tried Dragon's Naturally Speaking voice recognition software, but it's really not worth it IMO. You end up spending hours and hours (I'd say 6-10 for set up and requires many 20 minute dictating follow up's) to calibrate the software. Then, you better not catch a cold or get hay fever, because it will change the sound of your voice. In the long run you end up spending more time screwing with the voice recognition software and editing the errors it makes than you would just getting a little better at typing. Besides that, I don't know about you, but when I have company I don't necessarlily want them hearing what I'm typing anyway. :p :cool: There are a lot of reasons the keyboard will be sticking around for a long time to come.

[Cid6.7]

Right off the bat I'd say get a 64Bit processor everything seems to be heading to the 64bit direction..You can get a 64bit 3200+ for $10 more then a "normal" 3200+ anyway..
DDR ram is way better then SDR.DDR id getting cheap because all the new stuff coming out is DDR3 ..My Asylum vidcard Gforce 128MB 5700U crapped out a few months ago so they replaced it by my suprise I got one with DDR3 ram & wow the difference is incredible I do alot of gaming & it rocks..
I have 1 question I'm building a new pc The one I'm running now has a 30G (BOOT DRIVE) & a 160G HD.What I want to do is clone the 30G to the 160 & keep the 160 in the new pc when I do this will I beable to boot from the 160 if I create a boot partition on the drive & clone the 30 to the boot partition..??

[dRaNo]

I did add a extra cooling fan to mine and have checked, cool air comes out instead of hot air like before.

For a power supply I have 350 watt it came with a 250 watt.

So far, I have not put as much money into my machine as I have the crank shaft in my race motor that is a steel crank shaft not a cast iron crank shaft.

The best way to go is to buy all the parts and put it together yourself just like when building a race car motor you want all the best you can buy.

Ghost
Gotta agree with you there, building your own is the way to go. Not only will you save a little bit of cash, but you also get the satisfaction of having built it with your own two hands.