Any suggestions for this spec?

daveg · 03-10-2003 6:50am #1

Guy's,

A mate of mine is looking at the putting the following PC together. Any advice on the spec would be much appriciated....

Case Xaser Thermaltake III in blue
Power source Xaser to suit above
Main board ASUS A7N8X Deluxe
Processor AMD athlon XP 3200+
Ram Generic 512x2
Graphics card Sapphire 9000 ATI All in wonder 64 MB
Sound card Audigy 2 ZS
Hard drives Western Digital 20GB 7200
Hard drives Western Digital 120GB 7200
CD Rom LG 52x
DVD+RW Pioneer 106
Modem Creative V92
10/100Nic 3Com Etherlink
Floppy Sony
OS Win XP Pro
Keyboard Xaser multi function
Mouse Xaser IR
Monitor 15'' TFT

Extras
Printer Any
Scanner Canon 3000 USB2
Speaker system TBC

I think the soundcard and NIC could be overkill as the Asus has it all on-board. He's looking at using the system for home movie editing hence the ATI AIW card.

Thanks in advance...

Redshift · 03-10-2003 7:02am

Pretty sweet, though if finances allow a 128mb graphics card and a 17" monitor would be well worthwhile also the CD rom might not be needed id the DVD +RW can do it all so if you ditch that the nic and sound card you should save enough to at least upgrade the graphics card.

daveg · 03-10-2003 8:52am

Does the ATI Ram work same as the Ti4200? ie. 64MB is faster than the 128MB?

talla · 03-10-2003 9:30am

I build a rig fairly similar to that myself a couple of weeks ago. Theres definitely no need to get another NIC. The ASUS Deluxe has two onboard NIC's, a 3 Com one and and Nvidia one. I went for Audiogy 2 soundcard as well over the onboard sound, just disabled it, so I couldnt tell you what the sound is like.
I went for a serial ATA drive, as that particular drive supports raid. There only a couple of euro price difference between serial ATA and IDE hard drives. It istalled windows 98 in 9 minutes and windows xp pro in just over 20.

I dont see any mention of speakers in your post, I went for this surround sound system from the Creative store Creative® Inspire™ T7700, €143 and free delivery here . 7 Speakers and a Subwoofer. Good luck with the rig anyway.

Dempsey · 03-10-2003 9:37am

Is this your board? ?

Ya the getting of the audigy and the lan card is not needed when the features are onboard. id get a a 3000+ because that board has a 333MHz bus and the 3200+ runs its bus at 400MHz, unless im forgeting something and put the difference into getting a 9700Pro

daveg · 03-10-2003 11:13am

Originally posted by Dempsey
Is this your board? ?

Ya the getting of the audigy and the lan card is not needed when the features are onboard. id get a a 3000+ because that board has a 333MHz bus and the 3200+ runs its bus at 400MHz, unless im forgeting something and put the difference into getting a 9700Pro

Yep... thats the board. Thanks for the suggestion on the 3000+

Thanks all for the reply's so far. Keep em coming...

Dempsey · 03-10-2003 11:17am

Id also recommend getting a Western Digital Raptor Hard Drive as the main drive and having your 120Gb for the storage of the finished home movies

l337 · 03-10-2003 2:24pm

personally i would never use generic ram.... have had too much bad luck with it in the past...

i'd probably go for the 3000+ too for the extra couple of quid..

and whats with the 20G hdd... why not spend the extra 20 or 30 yo yos and get a 40 or 60

and maybe a dvd drive instead of a cd drive for on the fly burning... its not much more expensive

MadKevo · 03-10-2003 3:37pm

Originally posted by daveg

I think the soundcard and NIC could be overkill as the Asus has it all on-board.

There are already two NICs on-board, one of them a 3com.

The on-boards sound is generally well-rated.

Ensure that the RAM is certified compatible with the board, esp for dual-channel operation, movie editing in very memory system intensive.

/MK.

Dempsey · 03-10-2003 6:39pm

Daveg, i built a 2.8c P4 machine there last week and i bought most parts from komplett but the likes of the case and the ram i got else where. Overclockers.co.uk have a good selection of cases, they seem abit expensive but get a good one and you wont be sorry. I used www.shop4memory.com for memory. Good selection and free delivery in ireland.

Captain Trips · 03-10-2003 9:00pm

If it's really for home movie editing, he should get
1. A SCSI HD setup. Smaller space for the cash, sure, but much better maintained throughput even compared to ATA133. Tell him to get two, it doesn't matter which is OS or not, but basically a full defragged/clean HD to maintain say the 10MB/sec he'll need.
2. A CRT screen, because most TFTs blow with dark areas on the screen unless he is getting some uber 16ms, but in that case he'll be limited to 262,000 colours (or thereabouts).
3. More RAM. A gig is great, but two is better.
4. Recording live from a VIVO ATI card would not be as good as using a dedicaed capture card.
5. Forget about the Audigy unless he plans to use something other then stereo. Get any card with good gold inputs. A bit of a waste of money.

Dempsey · 04-10-2003 11:07am

The WD Raptor is the fastest drive short of going SCSI. If ya cant afford SCSI, thats your second best option

Col_Loki · 04-10-2003 12:24pm

To be honest if your thinking of spending that ammount of money on an Xp3200+ or Xp3000+ go for the intel 800mhz FSB "C" chips.

Im a total AMD guy myself but for sheer performance at this point in time intel are definetly on top. The Vastly increased FSB is very good for Dvd ripping, encoding...... etc.

If he would think of overclocking then Pc4000 Ram and a 2.4C or 2.6C will get him to around 3.1ghz with an FSB around 1000mhz.

If not then mabye a 2.8C with Pc3200 Ram.

id get a a 3000+ because that board has a 333MHz bus and the 3200+ runs its bus at 400MHz, unless im forgeting something and put the difference into getting a 9700Pro

The Asus board will run the 400mhz Xp3200+ no problems at all. I would agree its not a great choice ***, You can get Xp2500+'s to run at that speed with no real problems.

Graphics card wise it would prob be better to get a Tv card seperatly and mabye get a 9600 128mb graphics card - just my opinion.

On board sound on the Asus board is suprisingly good, if your really into your sound then the Audigy 2 is a great card....... not as much difference as you would think.

The Xaser III case has 7 fans which is great for cooling but tends to be noisey. I have the Xaser II with 5 "silent" fans and got annoyed with it and got a sonata and water cooling...... hear the silence.

Generic ram is a bit dodgy IMO , although the "oem" stuff on komplett seems to constantly be Twinmos, which is nice

.

Loki

daveg · 07-10-2003 10:42am

Lads aplogies for not replying earlier. Thanks a million for all your suggestions. I will pass them on.

sci0x · 10-10-2003 6:43pm

Originally posted by talla
I build a rig fairly similar to that myself a couple of weeks ago. Theres definitely no need to get another NIC. The ASUS Deluxe has two onboard NIC's, a 3 Com one and and Nvidia one. I went for Audiogy 2 soundcard as well over the onboard sound, just disabled it, so I couldnt tell you what the sound is like.
I went for a serial ATA drive, as that particular drive supports raid. There only a couple of euro price difference between serial ATA and IDE hard drives. It istalled windows 98 in 9 minutes and windows xp pro in just over 20.

I dont see any mention of speakers in your post, I went for this surround sound system from the Creative store Creative® Inspire™ T7700, €143 and free delivery here . 7 Speakers and a Subwoofer. Good luck with the rig anyway.

Or if you dont want to spend that much on speakers you could go for the Creative Inspire P580. Its a 5.1 speaker system that is perfect to enhance the movie or gaming experience. They work with the Creative Sound Blaster 5.1 sound card. It retails for €79.99

Midia

Any suggestions for this spec?

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