Building A Computer: Help with Parts :)

damnyanks

My current computer is overused by me and my family. It isnt the best although its not **** either, but either way I need a new one .


I have between 800-1400 o's so could someone help me with what I need.
I use the computer mainly for development of websites and small programs. I have alot of different server software, databases, languages etc. installed for local development. I also use the computer for games but not as much

I would hope to install Linux on this new PC as well as windows.

So far this is what I have in mind.

CPU 1.6-1.8 Mhz
RAM 512-784
HD 50-80 GB
Win2K

Is that all I should focus on ? Should I care about what video card or screen or anything else I get ?

Should I maybe push a bit higher on the CPU ?

Can someone give me some sites for good cheap parts.

Has anyone checked www.pricewatch.com and if so is it worth using ?
Please bear in mind its a full system I am looking to make here so I would need all parts necessary

PPC

Check out this offer from Komplett.ie

Kali

Originally posted by damnyanks Is that all I should focus on ? Should I care about what video card
or screen or anything else I get ?

If you're doing development work, I'd definitely reccomend a high quality trinitron-type 17" or 19" .. anything with a low dot-pitch and high refresh rate, your eyes will thank you after staring at long lines of code well into the wee hours of the morning (plus gnome/enlightment looks so much better at 1280x1024+)

Video-card wise I'd just reccomend a geforce4 mx440 (after reading several reviews recently ... see other threads), basically if games aren't your main thing, then you just want something hella cheap that'll more than happily do the job (when backed with a decent cpu) without worrying too much about ultimate fps.

While on-board graphics have come alongway

Should I maybe push a bit higher on the CPU ?

Well, I'm still more than happy with my p3-600, but as a rule of thumb always get the best you can afford (take a look at the Athlon XP range for price/performance).. then again I've found that Windows 2000 runs quite happily on nearly anything... Win XP on the other hand is a bit more cpu-hungry.

Can someone give me some sites for good cheap parts.

Theres a sticky thread on this board on this topic. Check it out. http://www.komplett.ie seems to be one of the better sites price-wise these days.

fatmander

Your system specification, is more than apt for home use.the only
things I could recommend (imho) are ...

the chipset of the motherboard..
all processors (AMD & Intel) have (at least) 2/3 main chipsets supported . (the chipset is the little black boxes on your motherboard that enable your chip to communicate with the ram and pci/agp cards)
to make any sense of it all sd-ram is cheap and ddr is twice as fast,
ddr-ram is nearly as cheap as sd-ram, but quite marginally better
rd-ram (rambus ram ,only for P4's) is expensive and overpriced and crapish and not as good(imho) as ddr-ram
So the point is make sure your motherboard is using a ddr chipset


the graphics card
I think that a bare bones ge-force 2 mx200 should suffice for games, I used one a for a year up until lately and happy enough.
its not as good as the ge-force 4mx440 but it's well cheaper,pick one up for about 90/100 euros at most ,second hand ???
P.S. get a good keyboard

PPC

Originally posted by fatmander
P.S. get a good keyboard

Get a Cherry or Keytronics.

I've had my Keytronics 5 years now and its still good. (even got blue led's now)
Very sturdy keyboards and anyone i know has had theirs for ages.

Cherry are ment to make really good ones aswell.

daveJAM

Yeah, Keytronics are great. I've had one for 6 years now. Its on my old PC but thats only cos its AT and i dont have another AT keyboard to replace it. I have an adapter to use it on ps2 though and its way better than the one i have now which is on ly 3 months old. I took it apart a while ago and cleaned it out and its like new. They last ages and the keys give the perfect resistance to pressing them. they feel so good to type with.

damnyanks

Thanks for all the help so far.

Has anyone looked at www.pricewatch.com ? If so is it worth using ?

Quigs Snr

I generally don't bother with pricewatch.

Goto Ebuyer.com for really good prices (UK) I use them all the time and have no problems with them.

Go for an Athlon XP - an 1800 complete with heatsink and fan comes out round 100 sterling on ebuyer right now. Stay away from intel as they are twice the price and no better, probably worse if anything. I wouldn't bother too much paying the extra cash for the XP2100 or anything like that, it's not all that much quicker. Not for your type of usage anyway.

Motherboard is very important, a quick suggestion, as you dont need a very good graphics card, just enough to get by with a few games, then you might find some of the nvidia nforce motherboards to be good value. As far as I can see they are a very solid board with a build in geforce 2 MX card and sound. (You can upgrade the card later if you wish also). These boards also support DDR ram which is the way to go at the moment.

If not the nforce, I would say avoid the ECS boards, good performers, but a bit unreliable. For an office machine I like the Shuttle AK32 board. Built in sound and also supports DDR, works out about 50stg and I find them very stable indeed. You could then buy a geforce2 Ti or Geforce4 MX440 card for about 70-90stg.

Ramwise, 512 should see you right. Win2K supports the 768 if you wish. Probably best to start with 512 and add more as you need it. If you are using IIS, Coldfusion, or especially Oracle/SQL Server, the more RAM the better. Although I have production machines in work with serious databases on them (SQL 7) running well on 512 RAM. (That said I have others running on 2GB RAM)

HardDisk, IBM 60's are about 100stg as are Western Digital Caviar drives, quite good drives, try to go for a 7200rpm one with ATA100 UltraDMA.

To get a feeling for price, create an account on ebuyer, do all your shopping and get a quote. It will give you an idea of what you're going to get for that cash. For the record, even given the currency rate and expensive delivery, I still work out a fair bit cheaper with ebuyer, and I have spent over 5000stg with them in the past 7 months.

(If you create an ebuyer account, you need to put 'EIRE' or 'Rep Ire' in as your postcode).

damnyanks

I will be running IIS, CFM and SQL or MySQL for sure on the machine so should I go for 784 ? Also if I am to run linux on my machine as well would there be anything else I should think about to help improve performance

So far I have the following

Relisys 12x40 IDE DVD-ROM Drive - Retail Box 029546 43 £27.56 £27.56 

AMD Athlon XP1800+ 1.53Ghz Boxed Inc Heatsink & Fan

Advance 6T/Socket370 FCPGA Micro ATX 1GB max memory with audio and graphics. Tualatin ready

IBM Deskstar 120GXP 60GB IDE 7200RPM Hard Disk - OEM

Educational MS Student Licence Personal Operating System 2000 Millennium Edition

512Mb PC133 SDRAM

I know the OS is a bit dodgy I just clicked it when I saw it
I still need the screen, graphics card, sound + video card (???)


Is there anything else bar the case, keyboard mouse speakers ?

Are the choices I have made so far any good ?

Quigs Snr

They do business with Ireland. You will see when you select delivery method that there is a 'DELIVERY TO EIRE' option. As I said, I have spent 5k stg with them since november. The registration form is very bloody confusing and at the end of it your address will still look a little like this :

Whoever,
Dublin,
UK Rep Ire.

Doesn't matter though, it will still get to you. I had them talk me through it on the phone the first time. Since then about 3 other guys here in work have started using them.

Quigs Snr

By the way, if you are doing development work 512MB ram should be fine. IIS/CFM/SQL will only start to creak if you have lots of open threads, ton's of users/process's logged on and several hundred MB's or GB's of data, poorly indexed or not indexed/optimised at all.

I am a developer my trade, however the past 9 months I have been filling in as SQL DBA, I have also been doing a lot of part-time contract work and am having no problem developing SQL databases with some pretty complex queries on 256MB RAM. So I would say that for now 512MB of DDR ram will do the trick for you very nicely indeed.

seamus

Originally posted by damnyanks
Also if I am to run linux on my machine as well would there be anything else I should think about to help improve performance

A decent bootloader is about all, simply for your own sanity, and especially if you may be using both OS's a lot. Linux will run on anything. I have a minimal linux install on a 586 (133mHz) with 16MB ram, and a basic monitor, and it works fine, even when running server stuff.

Static M.e.

While were on the subject , whats the best mother board out their at the moment , or the one you would recommend most?

Quigs Snr

If money is no object, look at any of the recent Abit boards. I don't think there is any one best board, but you can't go far wrong with the abit's.

JustHalf

Quigs... P4's recently shot down in price. You should be able to find a 2.2 GHz P4 for around the same price as an Athlon XP 2200+ (same price from manufacturers as of last week) quite soon.

And the 1.6GHz Northwood is known to be fantastic.

Quigs Snr

Yeah, noticed that. At the top end there isn't much in it price wise, however, expect the XP's to shoot down too though. The only thing I will say is that an XP1800 is still a good bit cheaper than a P4 1.8 and a bit better I reckon (if you're a gamer).

However, I do think that we could be seeing a swing in the tide towards Intel over the next 6 months or so. AMD are delaying too much in getting out their new product and getting onto their new manufacturing process, code optimised for the P4 is starting to appear and all of a sudden Intel doesn't look as hopelessly at sea on the benchmark tests as they did before christmas. AMD are losing the momentum they had built up. I think that right now AMD still represents the best value, (the motherboards are also cheaper in general, although cheap P4 boards are to be found also), however, I'm not betting the house on it staying that way.

I guess it's good for the balance of power to swing every now and then, keeps the market fresh.

Gerry

Originally posted by damnyanks
I will be running IIS, CFM and SQL or MySQL for sure on the machine so should I go for 784 ? Also if I am to run linux on my machine as well would there be anything else I should think about to help improve performance

So far I have the following

Relisys 12x40 IDE DVD-ROM Drive - Retail Box 029546 43 £27.56 £27.56 

AMD Athlon XP1800+ 1.53Ghz Boxed Inc Heatsink & Fan

Advance 6T/Socket370 FCPGA Micro ATX 1GB max memory with audio and graphics. Tualatin ready

IBM Deskstar 120GXP 60GB IDE 7200RPM Hard Disk - OEM

Educational MS Student Licence Personal Operating System 2000 Millennium Edition

512Mb PC133 SDRAM

I know the OS is a bit dodgy I just clicked it when I saw it
I still need the screen, graphics card, sound + video card (???)


Is there anything else bar the case, keyboard mouse speakers ?

Are the choices I have made so far any good ?

Erm, the motherboard supports socket 370 pentium 3 cpu's, not socket a athlon cpu's

Apart from that, the spec looks good. The IBM is a good fast drive, especially suited to heavy server loads, and not as noisy as the older 75gxp and 60gxp.

As others have said you will be better off going for a board with ddr ram. I'd recommend the msi kt3 ultra for athlon machines, its reasonably cheap, very fast and stable and doesn't seem to have the amount of niggly problems the abit kr7a has.

As for the p4, well personally I will probably go for one for my next machine. They are now faster, and not very much more expensive. There is also less likelihood of stability problems with the p4 platform ( for example, in recent tests on overclockers.com, all the amd boards tested had problems running with more than 2 dimms, whereas the p4 board (gigabyte 8IRXP or similar), had no such problems.The p4 also runs cooler, if noise is a concern.
On pricing, well considering amd have spent the last 18 months making SFA profits because they are undercutting themselves, I don't think the prices on the athlon xp can shoot down much more. A 1.6A or 1.8A p4 will be able to clock up easily to well over 2ghz if you need the speed later on, whereas there is SFA headroom on the athlon xp.

Quigs Snr

Good point regarding headroom there Gerry, the Athlons do not like overclocking at all do they ? Plan to overclock on of these and be prepared for your room to be turned into a sauna. Thermal design is where AMD really fall down in my opinion. Intel are far superior in this regard. Saw a video of an XP melting itself within seconds of a heatsink being removed whilst playing Quake 3. Same test with the P4, it actually kept going for a few minutes, then slowed down and stopped. The chip was undamaged. Great design. I might be making my next one an Intel also. Either way, there Intel seem to have declared war on AMD, which can only be good news for us lot.

damnyanks

What about going for dual processers ? They are selling some pretty cheap 600-800 mhz CPU's on ebuyer.

They only have one motherboard that is affordable if I get this option.

Lets say I do this and get a 1.6ghz and 800mhz does that mean my computer will have the power of a 2.4 or does it work in a totally different manner ?

Kali

damnyank unfortunaly you can't run too different clock speed processors together in dual configuration (unless your talking about balancing cpu load over a network.. but thats software based...)... basically as a rule of thumb if they're not the exact same model of processor, e.g. make, speed, stepping they won't work due to different voltage/power requirements, not to mention slightly varying instruction set extensions between newer and older cpus.