On 29 Oct 2004 02:35:43 -0700,
(DEf) wrote:

Hello,

my PC needs an upgrade, and since my harddisk died yesterday, this is
the moment. At the moment i've got a Celeron 500, which i build my
self years ago, and it worked great. Now i want to build a AMD athlon
XP based system. I'm a student, so the amd 64 is too expensive for
me....

I can get a cheap amd athlon xp 2600+ (333 fsb) processor, and i have
read good reviews about it....but my problem is which motherboard to
choose. I was thinking of a Asus a7n8x (deluxe)...with the nForce2
chipset.

Now i got some questions:

- Does anyone have suggestions or alternatives? I use mu PC for normal
work, but especially for recording my own music (!) Are the VIA
chipsets worse?

They are a few percent slower and don't lock the PC/AGP bus,
a detriment to overclocking. In everyday use the difference
isn't noticable.


- Is it worth it to buy dual channel memory, or is it almost senseless
with an amd system (keep in mind that i use it for a lot of recording
and playing (realtim) so called softsynths. That means that i need a
very low latency time etc.) Or do you prefer to buy one single
memory-chip.. instead of two and use it as dual channel?

Dual channel on Athlon XP is best for powering integrated
video. You may be better off buying a single module in the
capacity you need, if that's only 512MB. For 1GB the price
of modules is disproportionately higher so 2 modules makes
more sense.


- Same question for serial ata. I read most of the time people don't
notice the difference. But does it have benefits with recording music
an stuff?? If not i can safe a few bucks....

No benefit for that use BUT if you ever wanted to add more
than 4 drives total or support future drives the SATA may
come in handy... but then you could also buy a PCI card to
add those functions.


You may find nForce2 (or any integrated audio for that
matter) to have noisey analog I/O, if that is important then
you may need budget for a sound card too.