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Posted: 3/12/2006 1:29:53 PM EDT
 www.thermaltakeusa.com/product/Chassis/fulltower/armor/va8000bws.asp Here's what I have in mind for the system (newegg.com): Thermaltake XASER, Armor Series VA8000BWS Black Computer Case With Side Panel Window - Retail Thermaltake A2309 iCage 5.25" bay convert to 3 x 3.5" HDD Module - Retail PC Power & Cooling 510 SLI-PFC 510W Power Supply - Retail* ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce SPP 100 ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Toledo 1GHz HT 2 x 1MB L2 Cache Socket 939 Dual Core Processor - Retail ZALMAN CNPS7700-CU 120mm 2 Ball Cooling Fan with Copper Heatsink - Retail OCZ 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel Platinum - Retail eVGA 256-P2-N565-AX Geforce 7900GT CO Superclocked 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16- Retail Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic 7.1 Channels 24-bit 96KHz PCI Interface Sound Card - Retail 2 x Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200KS 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s - OEM SONY Black 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-ROM IDE DVD-ROM Drive Model DDU1615/B2s - OEM SONY E-IDE/ATAPI DVD Burner With 5X DVD-RAM Write Model DRU820A - Retail MITSUMI Beige 1.44MB 3.5" Internal USB2.0 8 in 1 Floppy Drive Model FA404A/404M BG Kit - Retail U.S. Robotics USR5699B 56Kbps PCI Bus (Plug and Play) Internal Fax Modem - Retail Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. Gateway FPD2185W 21" Widescreen High-Definition LCD Flat-Panel Display Sound okay? (I'm not waiting until 6/6/06 for AM2 w/ DDR2)  * Ditched the Antec PS for PC Power & Cooling. Thanks BarryTolar. * Ditched the PC3500 RAM for PC3200. Thanks QuantumPion. * Ditched the WDC Raptor RAID drives for standard drives (not using RAID). |
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Posted: 3/12/2006 7:17:03 PM EDT
[#1]
change the HD to seagate.
change the cdroms to ANYONE but sony and ditch the frikin modem, and you will have a good machine |
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Posted: 3/12/2006 7:24:39 PM EDT
[#2]
Why are you mixing Black , White , and Beige external devices in a black chassis ?
Seagate 7200.9s are nice but I'd imagine that if you RAID0 the Raptors they'll be a good bit faster and yeah Sony optical devices in a word suck personally I'd go with a PC Power and Cooling Power Supply as opposed to the Antec unit - but of course that's just a personal thing That motherboard can kinda be screwey when it comes to memory - might be fixed now with BIOS updates but I've not checked in a coupla months You'll love the Dell monitor and they seem to be really really cheap these days |
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Posted: 3/12/2006 7:32:10 PM EDT
[#3]
What is your intended primary use? Gaming? Encoding/multi-tasking? If for gaming, downgrade the CPU one step and upgrade the videocard.
Defnitely ditch the SONY drives. |
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Posted: 3/12/2006 7:34:38 PM EDT
[#4]
Those Raptos are the love... I wish I would have waited..... There just bad ass.
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Posted: 3/12/2006 7:35:39 PM EDT
[#5]
Some people are still on dial-up ya know. |
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Posted: 3/12/2006 7:35:43 PM EDT
[#6]
Big +1... Get a 7900GT and an Opteron 185 Also look at the Plextor SATA DVD-/+RW FAAAASSST |
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Posted: 3/12/2006 9:01:59 PM EDT
[#7]
All those parts that are Beige include black bezels. Some of the OEM versions include the black by default, but having built PCs for almost 20 years, the only OEM parts I purchase today are hard drives. The OEM parts always have driver problems. As for the other questions: I need the modem for the occasional FAX. I am holding off on the hard core video cards until Windows Vista is released. There may be issues with Vista and current cards that do not support HDCP. I would like to play DVDs on the puter, so I don't want to commit until Vista is released. This is not really a gaming puter, but I want to have that option.
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Posted: 3/12/2006 9:03:52 PM EDT
[#8]
And what's the deal with Sony?
I have a Sony DVD-ROM and burner in my current puter and they work great, except for one problem: The burner likes all media except Sony media. 
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Posted: 3/13/2006 3:39:49 AM EDT
[#9]
check their website for firmware updates. make sure you get the correct one for your model drive |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 3:57:27 AM EDT
[#10]
looks ok.
 Its not revolutionary tech though. You could do the same work with a lower processor, and getting a better fan and overclock it a few hundred Hz. ZALMAN has the best fan right now that rivals water cooling.Also SLI is kindof a rippoff, money making scheme. I would get one good card. I also recommend that you get an Audigy2 or FXI soundcard and a 5.1 or 7.1 sound system with at least 96+ snr. Also make sure that your PSU has at least 20 amps available on the 12+ bus. If you can get faster Ram would help too, get at least DDR2 PC2-4200, your 3500 tech is 2 or 3 years old. You could also just get one DVDR+/- drive. No sense getting 2, its just more amperage load and more things to go wrong. Also, the hard drives. I would get two 20 or 40 gig drives and put them in Raid configuration-0. Then get a third 300gb drive just for storage. This setup will be faster and cheaper than your two 150gb raptors. BTW, 10,000 rpm SATA is a great choice but 15,000 rpm SCSI-U320 is better. Good luck and remember to update your mobo firmware and use a Ghost program. |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 4:08:49 AM EDT
[#11]
I second the raid0 suggestion.. I was "shocked" at the performance increase.. You'll have to go SATA to do a raid0 system drive.
All my systems are SATA raid0 system drives and raid0 data drives, a total of 4 drives. You can use the 10k raptor ATA drives for the data raid0.. XP handles it just fine with dynamic drive... Don't forget to save incrementl images during the build process .. there is no fault-tolerance in raid0 |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 4:25:50 AM EDT
[#12]
I've been going back and forth on that as well. It does seem to help, just not by a huge amount.
I was looking at the X-Fi XtremeMusic card, which appears to do on-the-fly DSP to sweeten the audio, but it's not clear to me how much of a benefit it gives me, considering I am only interested in 2.1 stereo audio (for the most part).
 Check.
The board doesn't support DDR2. The best you can do with AMD for now is DDR1. The memory I speced is said to be about as fast as it gets for that board.
Yep. The only reason I want two is because some of the software I use wants to hit the DVD drive off and on as it's used, so I thought there was no sense in overusing the burner.
That's a great idea. I do need a lot of disk space on the C drive to support multiple OSs under VMWare Workstation. If I just ran one OS that would be the say to go. This is the first SATA system for me. I have been using nothing but SCSI since the early 90's. I gather this new system will be slower than my last (as far as disk I/O) goes.
That's the first thing I usually do.
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Posted: 3/13/2006 4:40:45 AM EDT
[#13]
+ Dual-core is preferable if you're going to multi-task, but if gaming is your #1 option then you should either bump up that 7800GT, get another 7800GT in SLI config, or spring for the 7900. Skip Sony (or Lite-On) drives; Plextor is nice but expensive. I don't like Lite-on drives because they are very noisy (I have 2) and my dad says his Sony drives in his Vaio keep crapping out on him. NEC makes a nice cheap burner for $40. |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 5:05:50 AM EDT
[#14]
Check your specs on your mobo, as far as I know AMD mobo can only handle DDR400 ram.
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Posted: 3/13/2006 5:16:51 AM EDT
[#15]
Don't mean to hi-jack, but what is the prevailing method to get OS for home builds? Are you guys buying the full versions or........aquiring it?
I'm looking at trying to build, but does it save that much money over a Dell/Gateway package? I put together a package very similar to this off NewEgg this weekend..... |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 5:24:43 AM EDT
[#16]
penzon |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 5:46:29 AM EDT
[#17]
Some advice:
Get cheap-ass ram. Fast ram makes ZERO difference, unless you are planning on heavily overclocking, in which case you don't want Corsair anyway. For the price difference you can get a Geforce 7900 instead of a 7600, which would give a vast improvement for games. RAID0 does not improve disc performance at all with only two drives. There is too much system overhead. This has been proven in many performance benchmarks all over the web. Just get one raptor for your OS and games (wow the 150 gb raptors are out, sweet!) and get a second, big hd for storage, if you need more space. Ditch the sony drives, get plextor (or lite-on if price is a concern). Thermaltake is mostly crap. It is cheaply built and overpriced. For my current pc I got an Antec Sonata II case with a Zalman cpu and gpu fan. Antec cases are built very well, and zalman fans are really nifty. It is very quiet and is plenty cool even with all fans on minimum speed. The days of needing a giant aluminum case with 4 chassis fans were over after the Athlon Thunderbird. If you are overclocking, then get a watercooled set up, which is far more effective. Otherwise a silent case like the Sonata, or the P180 (which is really sweet, I hear). |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 6:07:43 AM EDT
[#18]
Wrong.. Try it for yourself.. that's the only way to really find out whats real and whats not in this busniess... |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 6:15:21 AM EDT
[#19]
I'd agree that plain old generic PC3200 ram will do, unless you plan extreme overclocking. Get a good brand though; crucial or Corsair is what I'd pick. My current rig has 2gb of the Corsair Value Ram, and I've got it overclocked from default 2.2ghz to 2.53; it's very stable with Folding at Home.
Why worry about whether or not a given videocard is "vista compatible"? By the time Vista comes out, the card will be 1-1.5 years old at least, and I'd wait awhile for the major bugs in Vista to be ironed out. So by the time Vista is ready for prime time, you've got a 2 year old + video card, and it's getting long in the tooth anyways. I replace video cards when the replacement gives me roughly double the performance of the old one, which works out to be every 2-3 years. |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 6:17:00 AM EDT
[#20]
I would buy DDR500 RAM and buy an ATI 1900xt if I was you.
All the AMD mboards say they support DDR400 but most of the Nforce4 boards can actually handle DDR600. How do you think us overclockers overclock if these mboards were locked at DDR400? Hell I even have my old nforce3 board running at DDR450. |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 6:18:13 AM EDT
[#21]
+1 wrong. Good build, but as said before, go with anything but Sony on the optical drives. Plextor > All Nice case too, I have the same one on my lan party machine, but the aluminum one. I have the same PSU also. |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 6:30:59 AM EDT
[#22]
No, it's QVLed for the CMX1024-3500LLPRO as well. |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 6:53:33 AM EDT
[#23]
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Posted: 3/13/2006 6:56:17 AM EDT
[#24]
You say "wrong" but you really have no proof, just your own intuition. I'm sorry, but there are detailed scientific benchmarks all over the web that prove RAID-0 with only 2 drives does not enhance performance. You may FEEL that there is a performance boost, but it is just in your mind. I used to have two 40-gb drives in raid-0. I was skeptical that RAID-0 was not any faster, so I did some tests myself, and found out that there was almost no gain using RAID-0 as well. This is esepcially so for using RAID-0 with fast, modern drives like the raptors.
from anandtech:
from storagereview:
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Posted: 3/13/2006 7:03:56 AM EDT
[#25]
Again, with the ram, there is no speed difference between OCZ SUPER SUPREEEME ZOMGHAX DDR550 ram and value priced pc3200 ram (that uses good chips, samsung or micron perferably), unless you are going to overclock. Simply sticking in ddr500 chips will not give you any performance gain over regular ddr400 chips unless you crank up your memory controllor speed. And with AMD systems, having good memory timings is more effective then increasing the bandwidth (clockspeed). So there's really no need at all to get pc4000 ram.
Personally, I don't like to overclock, because I prefer 24/7/365 reliability over a few percent performance increase, which translates into the difference between 65 and 70 fps in games. Overclocking is nice if you are stuck with an old machine and can't afford to upgrade, but want to play newer games. But if you have the cash to buy a whole new rig, you might as well buy the parts to fit your performance needs, rather then messing with overclocking. That is just my suggestive opinion though. You can save >$120 going with this ram: www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820227210 which has over 400 positive reviews on the egg. With $120 you can get a better video card, another hard drive, etc |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 7:07:50 AM EDT
[#26]
If buying DDR500 I recommend Gskill or OCZ.
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Posted: 3/13/2006 7:09:33 AM EDT
[#27]
Nice and I like WD drives which were just bought out by Segate?
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Posted: 3/13/2006 7:09:37 AM EDT
[#28]
Why the ATA hard drive? Does the motherboard support SATA II?
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Posted: 3/13/2006 7:23:37 AM EDT
[#29]
It supports SATAII, but the Raptor SATAI drive blows away all the current SATAII drives I looked at. |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 8:49:58 AM EDT
[#30]
Smart man. Big fan of the raptor series here. |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 10:41:54 AM EDT
[#31]
tag
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Posted: 3/13/2006 11:08:02 AM EDT
[#32]
Execlent choice on the Power supply (the 510 is one amazing PSU)
Haven't bought a retail optical device in years so I was unaware of the black bezels (still have Sonys though - and Plextor does own everbody else on the market for the people that claim raid0 doesn't make a difference - don't trust everything you read on Storage Review Raptors are hella fast and I'm getting about 40% faster overall throughput on 2 of them than a single on the same board as he's planning to use again the exact speed increase will depend on useage patterns but for gaming the benefits are huge as is with content creation - just surfing the web or typing in Word nope but then again this system doesn't seem to be set up for "general" computing anyway looks like a good system to me (I'd wait till Vista for 64bit windows though - sure XP 64bit is FAST but apps arn't there yet) Barry |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 11:20:59 AM EDT
[#33]
Really? What motherboard and hard drives do you have? Which controller and driver are you using? What performance benchmarks have you done? I have personally benchmarked three different raid-0 setups versus their non-raid configurations and have not found any meaningful performance increases. Some artificial benchmarks will report higher theoretical throughput, sure, but have you measured loading times? Or timed operations or actual data transfer speeds? Or did you just upgrade from a system that did not have raid to one that did and say to yourself "yeah, sure, that seems a lot faster then it did before!"? Again, I have personal experience and benchmarks performed around the interweb to back me up. You have "you're wrong" and "oh, don't trust those storagereview guys". If you actually have a setup that is measureably faster, then I'd like to know so I can use it! Don't take me for some kind of prick whos arguing just for the sake of arguing. I'm just trying to debunk a widely-held belief that most people fool themselves into accepting, before the original poster spends a lot of money that could be better spent elsewhere. |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 11:23:59 AM EDT
[#34]
Ok...first, if you're not buying right this second you might want to hold for the 2007/2407 models, as they are coming out very soon...not much of a spec difference but the shell design is nicer and slimmer than the previous panels. ...well, I'll not say anything about the Xaser, because that's mostly personal opinion... Do you absolutely plan on going SLI? If not, you might want to reconsider the A8N32-SLI Deluxe over say, the A8N-SLI Premium. The A8N32 gets you the full PCI-E pipeline in SLI config, but the board design/layout means that with two videocards run in SLI you'll either run into 1 of 2 situations: 1. Two PCI slots are blocked, leaving you with only one available. If you're going with both an internal modem and soundcard, that will represent a problem. 2. You'll will have some airflow restriction to the video cards, which depending on your setup could cause temperature issues. I'd also second the nod for switching the Sony to something else, but again...personal preference. Other than that, looks like a kickass build..... |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 11:33:06 AM EDT
[#35]
Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe 2 X Raptor 73GB onboard Raid controller time to boot windows loading games not synthetic benchmarks takes 12 seconds with a single drive to boot to the desktop and 7.5-8ish under raid0 has nothing to do with "seat of the pants" feelings if you've got a 10 gig file and it's split into 2 parts 5gb on drive 1 and 5gb on drive 2 , each drive can stream say 100mb/s - combine them and that's 200mb/s - a single drive can only do 100mb/s (also applies to writing large files) which is faster ? not really rocket science - onboard raid controllers suck no doubt , there are MUCH better raid controllers on the market(ICP for one) that have much better firmware there are some hellish cheap raid controllers that don't do crap they just make a big volume outa the spindles with no optimizations at all I can show you usage patterns that RAID 0 is the only way to go , some where RAID1 is the smart way , etc for all the RAID levels - running 0 is rather stupid because of the chance of failure but in some cases it's much faster Barry |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 12:14:10 PM EDT
[#36]
What raid controller are you using? From what points are you using to measure boot times? I have never seen that big a difference with my drives, although my 73 gig raptor non-raid boot up times are significantly shorter then what you have. I havn't tested an nvidia board before, but I have tested an intel and a via board with hipoint, promise, and ICH controllers, and all give similar results. OK, splitting a 10 gb file in two is one instance where striping does give a performance boost, because it is pure read/write access to the drive. But unless you are editing uncompressed audio/video files, you aren't going to encounter this ideal circumstance normally. While striping does theoretically double your throughput, because it writes half of each file to each drive, in practice it's not that simple. For one, you aren't writing each sequential alternating bit to each hard drive, it is split into blocks. Second, software/hybrid raid controllers aren't very good at managing the data compared to a dedicated controller card. |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 5:50:08 PM EDT
[#37]
I was planning on doing just that. I am also looking at the Gateway 21" wide panel, which is getting good reviews and supports HDCP right now. Although, it's $600.
I've been asking myself that same question. It seems that the higher end boards are all SLI. If you want two gigabyte LAN ports, 6-8 SATA ports, or those "special extras" like serial and parallel ports, you need a higher end board. And I am aware of the problem you mentioned. It pisses me off that they cannot design a board where the PCI slots are usable when running in SLI mode. It's even worse if you run those double-wide GeForce 512 cards.
I've never had problems with them, but everyone here says they suck. The Plextor SATA drive looks nice, but it appears to be very picky about which SATA chipset is used. |
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Posted: 3/13/2006 6:08:45 PM EDT
[#38]
Another board I am looking at is the Asus A8N-E. It's non-SLI and only cost about $95. It appears to have everything I wanted other than an external SATA connector.
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Posted: 3/13/2006 6:10:28 PM EDT
[#39]
didnt read if anyone looked at this yet: make sure your flatscreen has a low ms refresh rate. i wouldnt go with anything over 6. i know there's a good gaming 19" my friend got that does like 3-4ms at 1280x1024. you dont want to build that rig and have it ghosting
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Posted: 3/13/2006 9:58:45 PM EDT
[#40]
Here is an example of why you need a "deluxe" board. It seems if you want the "little extras" like a 1394a port, you need an SLI board because the Asus A8N-E (non-SLI) MB does not include Firewire. That is just stupid. Now I have to get an add-in card and waste a PCI slot on 1394a.
That kind of BS is just stupid in this day and age. PCI slots are not exactly plentiful.
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Posted: 3/13/2006 10:05:26 PM EDT
[#41]
+1000000000000000000000000000 Got two 74s in this box RAID-0 nothing like un-raring a 8gig file in under a minute  when I used my 2.8 as a daily machine I had two 34s in raid-0 (now its a server using raid-1) |
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Posted: 3/14/2006 4:17:41 AM EDT
[#42]
again, my single raptor system runs just as fast as my raid-0 system, and with the money I saved, I was able to get an extra GIG of ram. So what is more important to you, a whole gig of ram which will have noticeable effects on all areas of system performance, or a marginal to nill improvement in write throughput plus the addeed unreliability of having the MTBF? |
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Posted: 3/14/2006 4:19:38 AM EDT
[#43]
It wouldnt matter much to me, as I allready have the RAM maxxed out. Might as well do RAID 0. I dont put anything inportant on those drives anyways, other than windows and games. Easily re-installed. |
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Posted: 3/14/2006 5:52:46 AM EDT
[#44]
well if you have money to burn, then go for it. That's what I did for my last build. But for my current build I saved almost $300 (the cost of the highest end video card) by just not wasting dough on expensive ram and a second raptor for raid. Those raptors ain't cheap.
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Posted: 3/14/2006 4:47:22 PM EDT
[#45]
ARFCOM answer.. get both Not sure what the differance is between the two systems, but I think a better test would be to pick one and try it with raid 0 and a single drive. Use SiSoft Sandra to benchmark your results.. The differance (especially with raptors) is alot. as far as ram, I have 2gb in this one, and 1gb in the 2.8 (my last build).. I do agree that when I purchaced this system new, the two 160g wd drives in raid 0 were no faster than a single raptor... but 2 raptors in raid-0 it a huge increase. |
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Posted: 3/26/2006 12:52:43 PM EDT
[#46]
It's not the drive speed that is the limiting factor on speed. It's the transfer rate. SATA I = 1.5 Gb/sec. SATA II = 3.0 Gb/Sec |
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Posted: 3/26/2006 1:16:03 PM EDT
[#47]
My intuition has nothing to do with it.. To learn this busniess you have to do it yourself.. Try RAID0 for a week.. copy DVD sized files between RAID0 drives.. and come back and tell us which is faster.. raid0 or single drives.. Think about how raid0 works.. With a built in hardware raid0 controller on your mobo you have literaly twice as many read and write heads handling data simultainously.. Of course you have to back up your data... You should always do that, raid0 or not... You have to do that on a single drive also... If you don't find stuff out for yourself you will always be at the mercy of others... |
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Posted: 3/26/2006 1:34:39 PM EDT
[#48]
This memory was made for that board. corsair xms3500llpro. www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820145594
as far as running it in SLI, I am with 2 7800gt's with my sound card inbetween. no problems. mmk |
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