What parts would you use?

Balfa

Hmm. If you were to build a system today with the following guidelines, what parts would you use?
high quality, as in reliable, well-built components, not necessarily very fast or anything
- cost-effective (ie no top of the range CPUs or video cards that demand a huge premium)
- using AMD rather than intel
- no super fancy UV-lit cases or anything, just sensible

Please be specific about brands and models used, and why you chose 'em.

str8_away

That sounds like come college report.
Are you asking us to do research for you or are you really looking for advice?

Tell us more about the system you are thinking of building and what you are planning to use it for also how much are you planning to spend.

Typedef

If it were me.

I'd build a nice SMP system, with SCSI disks.
I'd use Intel, mostly because the current generation of motherboards has a much higher FSB then the AMD counterparts.

That said cycle for cycle the Athlon XP is a much better CPU, still, the motherboards it runs on do not have sufficient FSB, AMD need to address this. AMD need to address the gap between the clock frequency of their top of the range CPUs and those of Intel.

I wouldn't really bother with a kick ass graphics card, because I don't play games and old Voodoo 3 would probably do me just fine!

Gerry

Why can't you read the 1000 other threads where people are asking the EXACT same question? Do you think that the answers given to them wouldn't apply to you?
I personally can't stand this attitude.

Your other points are posing questions that you could at least try and answer by yourself. You can figure out where the best value lies by dividing mhz by price, you will see large jumps towards the top of the range, and you can make up your mind here how big a jump is too much for you.
This will work fine for your cpu, as you are only considering amd cpu's.
For graphics cards, you can just see which of the geforce mx line offers best value, which of the ti line offers best value, and then make a choice between the two depending on your budget.

Balfa

Gerry First of all, you didn't HAVE to reply if you didn't want to. Thankyou for taking the time to reply despite being obviously frustrated at the question. Second of all, i'm well aware that certain questions are asked to death on this forum, which is why i always search for similar threads before posting my own. The problem is it's not a very specific thing i'm looking for, so it's hard to find anything with a search engine. The only thing i found relating specifically to quality as opposed to performance was those two brands of power supply mentioned in the sticky. I was hoping maybe this quality thing could be applied to other things, not just power supplies... I'm wondering if maybe some people have had a bad time with certain video card makers like leadtek or asus, or with certain motherboards, or ram. Like my SB PCI64, which is from a reputable brand, but the drivers or firmware seem really bad and it crackles a lot and skips and pauses during moderate hard disk access far more than other cards i've experienced. I know about the performance of the various CPUs and video chips, i'm just wondering about the overall quality, or lack thereof, of specific brands. Sorry if my question was misleading.

And str8, college report? what are you on?


PS - i know FSB speed is very important, but are the gains in performance really worth paying the exhorbitant premium that intel chips command?

koneko

Maybe the reason your pci 64 is so bad is because it's a Dell-supplied P.O.S. OEM card. What do you expect for a tenner? :rolleyes:
Get some quality parts next time. I have the Audigy myself and it's sweet as strawberries.

If I were to build my PC (and, erm, I will be doing this, sick of my current rig), I'd use a high-end (ish) P4, big-ass harddrive(s), GeForceFX (next year?). I wouldn't build a system without decent graphics, being a gamer and all.

By the way, when you're talking about brands of GeForce cards, it makes very little difference as the reference board/design is the same in all of them.

Gerry

If I misunderstood your post, apologies. I thought you were asking for a spec to be drawn up for you. If you are comparing brands of components, fair enough.

I can tell you straight off that the stuttering you are experiencing with your sound card is related to your chipset, is it made by via?
SB pci64 is a very commonly used, no frills sound card, which normally works very solidly.

I don't think dell's oem version is going to be much different, to be honest.

It is worth evaluating the reliability of different brands of components. Performance will not be massively different, normally you will be comparing motherboards with the same chipset, so performance will be within a few percent. What you should be worrying about is stability, and features.
As koneko says, theres no difference between most brands of geforce graphics cards. Sometimes the ram may be slightly faster with one brand, and different cooling solutions will be used, thats about it.

In general, you will find horror stories for any manufacturer, I guess it is possible to narrow down particularly bad manufacturers, its also important to remember that a manufacturer may be good at making one line of products, but other product lines may have problems.

Take asus for example.

Excellent motherboards, very reliable and well performing, however waay overpriced, especially considering asus are the worlds largest mobo manufacturer.

Their graphics cards are excellent, and they somehow manage to be extremely well priced.

Other stuff like cd drives are not likely to be any better than any other manufacturer, and so I wouldn't bother going asus for them unless asus are cheaper.

Moving to hard drives, everyone has a horror story about one particular brand of hard drives which let them down. Recently it has been ibm, but every manufacturer has plenty of people who will swear never to buy them again.

Balfa

I installed the latest drivers for the VIA KT133A on my mobo, and both the stuttering sound and CD problem i've been going on about are fixed. thanks a million, gerry

JohnBoy

Check out http://arstechnica.com/guide/system/index.html for an honest appraisal of three different home-built specs.

they base their systems on the feedback of their forums, who are in my experience very knowledgeable people.

these are not just specs dreamed up from nothing, they are based on the systems that ars users own and build.

John

ps www.arstechnica.com rocks