A PC for my brother

[PMazz]

My brother asked me to put a new bare bones PC together for him. As I'm a fan of Asus, a MB with all the bells and whistles looks to be a P4G8x deluxe OEM with onboard sound, LAN, and Firewire. Throw in 512 MB PC2100 DDR SDRam. For video, he likes to game some, aan Asus GeForce4 V9180 TD with 64 meg ram, AGP 8x. Looking at prices for CPUs, the P4 2.4G is pretty good BFB. An 80 gig Maxtor and a Lite-on CDRom and floppy and case should do it.

I haven't put one together in a while, since my HTPC actually, and this stuff changes pretty fast. Any thoughts, recommendations or just plain snickering is appreciated.

Well, not the snickering....

Pete

[SiliGoose]

Sounds like a nice system for a "bare bones". I agree, the P4 2.4 ghz is a great deal.
How is the onboard sound with that mobo? Soundcards are pretty cheap...might want to consider throwing one in and disabling the built-in sound.




-Sili

[PMazz]

I used bare bones only for the fact that he will re-use his moniter, printer, keyboard and mouse.

Onboard sound would be used for just games and the occasional music CD. He's not hardcore in anything he will do with it. I may re-use his modem and soundcard if they're PCI cards, but his current system is a P266 and I'm not sure yet if they're ISA or not. I'll have him open it up and take a look before ordering parts. I just thought it would be the best solution for him to get everything onboard. The Asus does show a SPDIF output, along with the usual connectors.

What's the "Serial ATA" interface for? It shows it has it, but it's new to me.

Pete

[SiliGoose]

Serial ATA is the new bus for hard drives. It's meant to replace IDE. It's theoretically much faster but it's still early. The initial reviews I've read haven't been very impressive. That will no doubt change as it gains acceptance (& maturity).




-Sili

[Gordon Moore]

Hey PMazz,

Here's some poop on serial ATA

Right now 150MB/s

http://www.seagate.com/newsinfo/tech...ata/index.html nose around in here for more answers.

Basically they're saying 600MB/s by 2007. Well whoop-de-doo because you can practically get that with USB2.0 480 MBps

and Apple is offering firewire 800 ... 8O

so it is a good progression, you wonder why they aren't pushing the technology forward faster than they are.

Ah well...if it isn't done right, it isn't worth doing.