Upgrading my pc

tyRion

I'm planing on building a AMD system, like plonks

Just a few AMD Qs,

Are X2s worth the money? AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ 2.2GHz 2MB This looks sweet but i'm not sure i could justifey spending over half a grand on one chip

An addition i would like is a terestial TV tuner card, if it could do Scart Video in that'd be really cool

I have an old Gateway2000 (Pre ATX) Which i have moded to fit an ATX mobo and it works quite well. I kinda did a half upgrade a while ago but the only thing worth keeping from that is my sound setup.

I'm looking at spending up to about E1,500, but the less the better

Heres a list of what i need

• 939 Mobo
• 939 CPU
• 1Gb Ram
• PSU
• Graphics card [less than E200]
• HDD [200Gb is loads] maybe two in RAID1 though i hear you loose preformance
• DVD Burner

plonk

What are you using the pc for

tyRion

I'm not a mad gamer, so I don't really need a top notch GPU, but i do play the odd game so I would like the PC to stand up to the likes of HL2 & Far-Cry

I would like to do a bit of Video Editing, I have old Camcorder tapes I want to stick on DVD, so VIVO would be nice. I'd also like to make it a PVR, but not very heavy, most of the shows would be ripped to DivX and stuck on DVDs

I do a good bit of stuff with PhotoShop so I take it alot of ram would be nice and A dual core chip would probably be sweet for multi tasking.

How does Cache size on a Chip make a difference

gline

tyRion wrote:

I'm not a mad gamer, so I don't really need a top notch GPU, but i do play the odd game so I would like the PC to stand up to the likes of HL2 & Far-Cry

I would like to do a bit of Video Editing, I have old Camcorder tapes I want to stick on DVD, so VIVO would be nice. I'd also like to make it a PVR, but not very heavy, most of the shows would be ripped to DivX and stuck on DVDs

I do a good bit of stuff with PhotoShop so I take it alot of ram would be nice and A dual core chip would probably be sweet for multi tasking.

How does Cache size on a Chip make a difference

a 6800gt would prob be good enough for what you need, dont know if you can get vivo though. I'd say 2gig ram would be what u'd need and a dualcore for a bit of futureproofing (also i think u can configure photoshop to use 2 cores ?)

tyRion

gline :: cheers

Ok, this is how its looking so far

Graphics Card

• Gainward GeForce 6600GT 256MB GDDR3
• PowerColor Radeon X800GTO 256MB GDDR3
• Club3D Radeon X1600XT 256MB GDDR3

CPU

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+

I need advice on HDD, Mobo, RAM, DVD burner, Fan and PSU. I've done a bit of looking but I havent been keeping up with Tech specs latley (I used read PC Extreme, I had a subscription, but they went bust)

When getting 2Gigs of RAM is it better to get 4x512Meg sticks or 2x1Gig sticks?

DemonOfTheFall

2x1 sticks definitely. AMD doesnt like having 4 sticks of ram.

conzy

2x1 sticks definitely. AMD doesnt like having 4 sticks of ram

Yup the command rate drops to 2T instead of 1T, which is very bad news for a AMD setup

I got a leadtek 7800gt for around €300 on OcUk its a great card, comes with VIVO and lots of software, might be a bit out of your price range since your not looking for a gaming PC

plonk

As you can see above i got the powercolour radeon for 182 and its brilliant for the money. Fear runs fine on it and havent overclocked it yet

tyRion

RAM :: How does this look?

Games shall only be played the odd time so i dont need mad gaming specs, plus i'l like to keep it all with Komplett for reasons of VAT,

Is there much of a difference between the three cards? ATI or nvidia? Which works better under Linux?

Which Zalman Fan?

DemonOfTheFall

nVidia for linux.

That's a good price for decent corsair ram.

tyRion

How does this look?

tyRion

Order place'd! I added a few bits and it came to E1,558 in the end, ex VAT