DIY PC (again)

Kairo

Right, heres the basic makeup of the PC I'm thinking of getting:

Prices from www.munstercomputers.com

Abit KG7 DDR 266MHz+ o/b RAID ATA1004 DIMM slots IR£194.13
AMD Athlon XP 1600 (266MHz) IR£174.20
2X 256MB DDR PC2100 Registered ECC IR£172.66
Sparkle Geforce 3 Ti 200 64Mb DDR +TV-out AGP IR£284.00
SoundBlaster Audigy Platinum Retail IR£206.40
Subtotal: IR£1,031.39
VAT: IR£206.28
Total: IR£1,237.67

Prices from www.overclockers.co.uk

Abit KG7-RAID (Socket A - AMD Thunderbird/Duron) £109.00
2X Crucial 256MB DDR PC2100 ECC (Registered) £55.00
AMD Athlon XP 1600 £95.20
Hercules 3D Prophet III Titanium 200 (AGP) - Retail £176.00 Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum £134.40
Subtotal: £569.60
Shipping: (Parcelforce Euro 48) £39.00
VAT: £106.52
Total: £715.12

Which totals to about £915 punt.

So am I missing out on some tax/extra shipping cost or are munstercomputers trying to rip people off sevearly. I was planning on ordering from to UK, as finding the parts in Ireland would be difficult, or so I thought. After checking out that site I thought that I'd save some bit of money....guess not.

Any recommendations? Im also adding a Pioneer DVD, Msoft Optical Intellimouse Explorer, 40gig HD, an SuperThermalSk6 heatsink, and probably a Coolercase to the equation. Just wondering is all that gear compatible, and are AthlonXPs clockable?

elexes

SoundBlaster Audigy Platinum Retail i think ull need a bios update for this if u get the raid mobo ( i reccomend that u do )

jbkenn

So am I missing out on some tax/extra shipping cost or are munstercomputers trying to rip people off sevearly

Comparing a small Irish company with the likes of Overclockers is like comparing your corner shop with Dunnes/Tesco etc. they move product in huge volume and therefore work on tighter margins.

jbkenn

Gerry

Thats strange elexes, I put together a machine yesterday with the kg7-raid and the audigy platinum, and it has quite an old bios, (it fails to report the fake xp speed rating, shows the athlon 4 at its real clock speed). This machine has no problems at all playing sound, I've run for a good while at this stage. Of course more stress tests may yield some problems. If you are referring to the via 686b/sblive bug, well boards which do not have a via northbridge do not seem nearly as affected as those which have both via northbridges and southbridges.

The kg7-raid is an excellent board by the way, it has almost all the speed of the kt266a, but with proven stability and quality. Extra programs like wpcredit would have very little impact with the kg7, the bios lets you adjust almost every chipset register. For example, there are about 50 or 60 ram settings.

Kyro, you will need a heatsink and fan as well, if you are ordering from ocuk get the alpha 8045. It takes a little longer to install, but its a brilliant mounting system, theres no way its ever coming off, and if you follow the instructions there is no chance of damaging your chip. When it is mounted, the advantage is that its better than almost any other cooler, since it is 80mm square, and takes an 80mm fan. The standard ystech 80mm fan pushes out more air than a delta, but is far less noisy, more of a rushing sound than that ****ing whine. Ok, its still not mounted in a case, but 33 degrees full load is not bad for an xp 1600. Bear in mind that thats not the full core temperature, since it is measured by the thermistor in the cpu socket (although I did ensure that it was touching off the back of the cpu)

JustHalf

Originally posted by Kyro
Any recommendations? Im also adding a Pioneer DVD, Msoft Optical Intellimouse Explorer, 40gig HD, an SuperThermalSk6 heatsink, and probably a Coolercase to the equation. Just wondering is all that gear compatible, and are AthlonXPs clockable?

That kit should work together.

The Athlon XP's are overclockable... you can do this by increasing the front-side bus speeds beyond the standard 133MHz without any changes to the chip. You can also unlock the multiplier... there's an article on Tom's Hardware on how to do this.

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/01q4/011112/index.html