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#11
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Strontium wrote:
David Lewis stood up, at show-n-tell, and said: Interesting.I was also looking at intel vs Asus motherboards.I wonder if others had same problems with the Asus? I don't think so. The owner of the shop (I've used this place for about 4yrs, good people) said they've sold a lot of those boards, and have not heard of any problems. I'm thinking it's my card's overclock /shrug. Needless to say, I felt pretty damned foolish returning 3 boards in two days! Ended up buying a cheap GF4 MX440SE just to be sure, with the Intel board. Then, got tired of non-hardware support for gaming and tried my luck with my GF3 The Intel board is nice and stable. But, if you want to overclock, Asus is the way to go (more options in CMOS). However, I don't see why anyone would even want to overclock such a fast system. I o/c'd the GF3, purely to get more out of it. And, it's not proven to be an unworthwile endeavor. Good to know,thanks. -- Kind Regards, David |
#12
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Going from a Duron 950 to a more modern processor is a major step.
You could have gotten a much better value by going with AMD though. I suggest people choose an nForce2 motherboard and an Athlon XP2600+ 333 retail box with heatsink.That combo can be purchased for around $170 if one chooses a more basic nForce2 motherboard like a Shuttle AN35N-ULTRA Nforce2-Ultra400 SKT A DDR400 w/ Audio / Lan / ATX MB - Retail ($68),or under $185 with an EP-8RDA+, nforce2 ,SOCKET A,6PCI,AGP8X, DMA133, 3DDR333DIMM, AUDIO, LAN,USB2.0, 1394,RETAIL BOX($83). For the price, these are awesome combinations. Strontium wrote: Not sure if something, like that, exists. Forums/NG's may be your only resource, for that. Some threads can get fairly long and have lots of info. I'll start the ball rolling... Why I built it: Finally recovering from financial disaster caused by taking a 'sabbatical' (read: I quit my job and moved to the beach). Last box, before I did that, was a very outdated Duron 950/576MB PC100/GF3Ti200. I like gaming. Never (not overly) did, before. But, recently, I'm getting lots of games for free and I love the eye candy. I, also, love the fact that it's a very good test of system stability/performance at that fullest. Old box would run the games fine (the GF3Ti200 is o/c'd to 250/550). However, would get kinda choppy where heavy shading/lighting was used (e.g. at night, in Mafia. snow, in Flytrap mission in Comanche4. Postal2, period lol). And, anyway, it's my hobby. Just was broke for a year and a half. What I built: Decided that AMD is just not my cup of tea, lately. Been loyal to them, for 5yrs. Heard about 800MHz FSB, 400MHz memory bus, and Hyperthreading. Decided to give it a whirl.... Intel D865GBF Motherboard (fried 3 CMOS chips in the Asus PC4800 board, with the [ASUS!!!!] GF3Ti200...reason for getting the Intel board. Store wasn't getting the 875 Intel board, until next day. After 3 boards, I was ****ed...not waiting Glad I did that. Only diff, as far as I know, is Gigabyte LAN and $100 bucks more). Intel P4 2.4C Processor 2x256MB Samsung PC3200 (CSL 3.0...it's all they had) Allied 400W PSU Sony CRX220E1 CD-RW Left everything else intact [(generic 52x CDROM, floppy, case, GF3Ti200, WD 40Gb 7200rpm HDD (ATA5/66), WD 20Gb 5400 HDD (ATA4/33)] How it turned out: After 4 weeks, I'm still very pleased. I can't think of one thing this box can't do, except make my breakfast. In 3 weeks' time, I will be slapping an ATI 9700 in. I can, already, enable all FSAA and VSync in games. But, performance suffers. My GPU, for once, is my bottleneck. Overall, I'm VERY impressed. Installing, defragging, burning/ripping, anything CPU-intensive, anything memory-intensive.....it's all, still, blowing my mind. YMMV - David Lewis stood up, at show-n-tell, and said: Hi Guys, This is my second post on the subject so perhaps what I'm looking for doesn't exist??I'm looking for sites or resources that have recommendations for computer systems i.e. Systems that folks have already purpose built under certain criteria or categories and can be recommended. You know,heres what I built,why I built it,and how it turned out. Any help appreciated -- Strontium "Shortcuts are self-defeating. Mean. If you cannot do it, clean, you'll never reach your reward..." - 311 |
#13
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"Strontium" wrote in message ...
Not sure if something, like that, exists. Forums/NG's may be your only resource, for that. Some threads can get fairly long and have lots of info. I'll start the ball rolling... Why I built it: ...System description/experience I just upgraded a few systems lately, two platforms: 2 ASUS A7N8X AMD w/ XP2600+ 333 FSB CPU and a gig of RAM 1 Gigabyte 8KNXP P4 w/ P4 2.8 GHz 800 FSB and a gig of RAM It was a long night of rebuilding, got to bed around 4am tinkering with things, didn't get a chance to actually have any 'FUN' yet however. Running into a problem reading my XP CD on the one ASUS system which I believe is a problem with the CDROM drive in that one, it's quite old. I ran into a problem with HyperThreading on my P4 System. With HyperThreading enabled I could not use my Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 Platinum. It would hang the system any time it tried to do much with the sound card (like update the drivers!) Once I disabled HyperThreading I was able to update the drivers and then reenable the HyperThreading and at a quick glance this morning at 9am (wee, 4 hrs of sleep!) it looked like it was working...better.. More testing tonight after yardwork. The 2 ASUS systems were upgrading a P2-450 and a P3-500 which is a pretty healthy jump. My P4 is taking the place of my Athlon Thunderbird 900 MHz board, Abit KT7-RAID which I have hated with a true passion. Stability and other problems galore with this board. BEWARE ONLINE REVIEWS! They all extolled the virtues of this board saying how great it is, well, it wasn't. Be VERY warry of online reviews. After reading them for some years, they seem to mostly be written by kids in their 20's that only seem to care about frames per second. What ever happened to more in depth reviews with some benchmarks on other parts of the system? What about disk performance?? Stability of the USB ports to power webcams and provide enough power without crapping out? (My ASUS P2B-DS wouldn't work properly with webcams, I had to desolder a resistor and jumper a pad to get it working!). As I said, I've only had these things together for a few hours and haven't had a chance to really experience them from an application standpoint quite yet but I think they are both quite nice upgrades. A lot of thought went into choosing these components, and it's quite a nerve-racking affair since you'll be marrying the components for a while. I still think that AMD is a decent bargain but sometimes you can run into hassles that I never seemed to have on my past Intel boards. This is why I have decided to boycott purchasing any VIA or Abit hardware. The pain I suffered with the KT7-RAID was too great to give them any more of my money any time soon. The ASUS nForce2 board looks very promising, time will tell, not sure how the Gigabyte will work out, we shall see! Looking forward to getting some games on there to test out the performance! -- Chris - 32 (I think...*checks calendar*) yr old gamer for life AKA: [CoFR]Mirlen |
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