Building a PC

[Eduardo]

A lot of people around the board have been upgrading or buying new PCs. I've decided to jump on the band wagon and build one too. Due to financial constraints though, it will probably take a couple of months to finish. I need a MoBo, AMD processor, RAM, and a case w/PS. I have an older Radeon Video card, OLD SB audio card, 20GB HD, DVD-ROM, 52X Kenwood CD-ROM, and 12X CD-burner. I planon using most of what I have and ugrade in the future. Any and all suggestion are appreciated.

Here's a MoBo that I am considering.

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduct.asp?DEPA=&submit=Go&description=au13

http://home.nc.rr.com/ejimenez

[Gordon Moore]

I'm sure others will chime in soon but since you are looking at Nforce2, sell the soundblaster card and see if you can move up to an ASUS board if possible. Can't say I'm familiar with FIC, seems full featured enough though. Take a look at their BIOS updating process. do they offer a good support page. Know anyone else using FIC?

What kind of budget are you setting out?

Are you looking for a crazy Bing/Trev type case (with a window)?...again I would say hold off on the eye candy and get the most bang for your buck. Cold Cathode tubes and the like look nice but do nothing for performance especially on a budget.

Make sure the case supports an intake and outake fans.

A quality MB will go a long way. However when selecting your CPU you will also have to balance it with the extras. ie: good HSF combo....depending on what CPU you are looking at may dictate what HSF you may want to consider. Ideally, unless you are O/C'ing most people don't want a rocketship sounding pc...So a heatsink that suports 80mm - 92mm fans is preferable. Ie: BIG heatsink...low speed fan.

RAM: PC2700...Kingston or Crucial...don't cheap out on memory as many restarts and weird pc occurances can be often be attributted to crappy memory.

Power Supplies: Again crumby powersupplies can cause all sorts of pc grief. ANTEC, ENERMAX, ZALMAN to name a few are the better ones to look for.


Course all of this adds to the cost but you would be better served getting quality supporting components than putting all your dough into the CPU.
You can easily upgrade your CPU for a performance kick later. I would rather you build a good foundation first. I.e make sure that you could support all the way up to say Barton without buying Barton (ie RAM is up to snuff, powersupply is adequate, board is Barton ready) 'Course this is my way of thinking, it's not the only way.

[SiliGoose]

I could have sworn I clicked on that link earlier and it pointed at an Asus nForce board...it's a FIC now, for sure.

FIC is a smaller mobo maker who excels at value. They pack a lot for the money. I'd suggest you start hanging out at the AMDMB FIC boards http://www.amdforums.com/forumdispla...049&forumid=10

Cold Cathode tubes and the like look nice but do nothing for performance especially on a budget.

Bah! Mine goes faster with the CC's on!! :W

The only other tip I can suggest is not to buy anything until you're ready to build. I did the "buy over a period of time and then build once it's all here" method and it sucked. Why? Because I'd buy a video card one week and then 2 weeks later a better one would come out at the same price! By the time I assembled my monster PC several parts had already lost the "starte of the art" tag. Save yourself some frustration by buying once you've got enough money saved.

Start reading up on components and keep track of URLs with reviews and places with good prices. Use your two month period to become an expert and then order all the parts at once. -you'll be better prepared and your PC will be more impressive (for a month or so)




-Sili

[Eduardo]

Thanks everybody for the advice.

Sili - I don't know if I can hold off. My idea is if I buy one piece it will force me to to finish. But we'll have to see. :roll:

http://home.nc.rr.com/ejimenez

[P-Dub]

Eduardo, having just completed an upgrade, here are my general thoughts. I ended up using my video card, dvd/cdrw drive and mounted my HD.

I'd have to agree with Sili, if you can wait, do it all at once. We all know that pc part price come down with time, so it'd be best if you scope out what you'd like and wait till the price is right and jump in to the fray. But if you have to buy piece by piece, here's my order:

Buy the case first. This as well as the power supply will be one of the few items that won't drop in price dramatically over the next 6 months. Plus having the case makes doing future upgrades eaiser. You don't need those fancy aluminum cases with windows, but a solid case with a power supply will serve you well. Check out this review on some cases and power supplies

I got a Antec 1080 It comes with a Antec true 430W powersupply and 3 case fans. I see it's available in the states from anywhere from $108 - $145. It's kinda heavy but seeing as I don't plan to lift it very often, that's not a very big deal. I thought very worth it. One word of caution is the if you need a lot of free PCI slots, you might not have enough room. What I've found is that with all my cabling inside the case, I can only use at max 2 of my 5 free PCI slots. For me that's not too big a deal as I've got most of my connections running off my motherboard, sound and network connections. I wish I had a digital camera so I could show you visually what I mean.

Next I'd consider the Motherboard. I chose the Asus A7N8X deluxe. The basic Asus A7N8X only comes with one integrated nic, and doesn't have a 1394 ports and doesn't support Serial ATA. Hmm, seems like the price is fluctuating, both these boards were about $20 lower when I first checked, than they are now.

Next the Ram and CPU. I'm not up on ram prices, but they used to vary daily, and I'm betting they still do today. I just bought 2 sticks of Samsung 512M DDR PC2700 about US$69. So far they are serving me well. I see cruicial is selling the same ram size for $82, a great deal.

The CPU, well the longer you wait the lower the price. Pretty simple, eh? Here's a 'recent' price guide for CPU's and ram.




Paul

There are three kinds of people in this world; those that can count, and those that can't.

[Trevor Schell]

Eduardo!

Good Luck with your Computer assembling.
My first computer I made was completed with parts I purchased over a span of 8 months..:E
By the time I had put it together there was already some better components that had been released. If you can do it all at once or over a couple of months at least , would be the right thing to do.

Antec for a case would be recommended .:T
For for a glass window..You can always add lighting and such later. This way you can still see the insides lighting or lot which is still pretty cool.

The ASUS Motherboard is pretty great ( Paul, Bing and myself have one)
With this MB you can go with a Barton processor and the new 333 MHZ bus speed as well as PC 2700 (333MHz) memory.
The Barton Processor is at a bargain price for the perfromance you get.

Crucial or Corsair are the two types of memory that get great reviews.

One of the most important peices will be the graphics card..
You could start with a budget one for now..Then save for a later purchase of a superspeed demon. This will cost double to triple the price of a processor though..

Good Luck..
Looking forward to following your progress.




Trevor
My HomeTheater S.E.
Sonically Enhanced
C5

[Bing Fung]

Eduardo, there have been a lot of good and solid recommendations here so far.

A couple of months building is not so bad if you don't mind not having state of the art components and pricing.

Buying the case first is a good suggestion for it will determine how much room you have and how the parts are layed in. The Antecs are good cases for the price, however you can even save more by getting a generic house brand from your parts supplier. Just make sure it has at minimum a 300Watt power supply, you should find something like this for around $60 (cdn, sorry I only know prices relative to canucks). Sure they are not built as tough and feature filled as a brand name case, however most of them do have the right features and what do expect for $60 (cdn)? Just be sure it has a 300W power supply, is P4 ready (just incase you jump camp), has at least 1x80mm intake fan or placement for one, has 1x80mm exhaust fan or has placement for one, has room for future upgrades such as 3x5 bays, 2x3.5" bays and at a least 2x3.5" bays internally for harddrives.

I have never worked with a FIC however I'm sure it's a good mobo. I suggest following the link Sili posted and maybe doing a search on the board you're interested in. Remember to take it with a grain of salt as well for most times you will hear the bad about one item, but the Goods are not posted because the users are happy and are experiencing no problems so they don't post about it, where as the users with problems are post just because they are having problems and are looking for help.

When ever I build a budget minded PC for anyone, I'll always spend as much as I can on the motherboard. Doing this ensures I don't spend a lot of time chasing problems later on in the life of the PC. That said, I will always build with a Asus, Abit, MSI In that standard order. I have used some other lower cost alternatives like ESC and Soltek, but in the end I have found the Asus to be the less problematic of the bunch. This isn't to say problems can't happen with the Asus, it just seems the Asus based systems have created less problems for me.

If you do stay wih a Nforce 2 based solution, you will not have to use the old sound blaster live as the Nforce has on board sound which is suppose to be pretty darn good. As well you will have an on board LAN card.

Getting good RAM is imperitive, and I recommend Corsair if you can afford it, or the Samsung RAM that Paul and I have. It is a very undervalued RAM that is well made and well priced. In actual tests it attained some of the highest stable clocked speeds, out perfoming RAM from the other well known makers. Also note, the fastest RAM being used in todays hot graphics cards are all Samsung. That said a 512 stick of 2700 DDR will set you back $103 cdn. Cheap like borsht

CPU should be the last item you buy for those prices always fall and give way to the newer arrivals. You can use the stock cooler of a retail CPU and they will do the job well enough. However they can be a bit loud as well, so It would be one of the first upgrades I would do after the system is up and running. You could just upgrade it from the start but that is your call. If you are to by a separate heatsink fan combo, you can save a bit on buying an OEM CPU. It comes with no heat sink fan and usually only a 30 day warrantee. The price difference is so slight these days I would consider buying a Retail Boxed CPU because it comes with the heatsink fan and a 3 year warrantee, even if I didn't use the HSF.


Keep us posted with your travels...

Oh BTW, I have to agree with Sili, cold cathode tubes and see thru-windows do make my PC faster, though strangely enough the benchmarks can't seem to quantify that :huh: :rofl:




Bing

[SiliGoose]

Hey Bing! Good to see you around.

I think another important factor with choosing a "known" motherboard brand is the quality of the manual. It's not an important consideration if you've built a PC before but for your first shot it's nice to have a comprehensive manual.
I've used Asus, Abit, Gigabyte, and Soltek boards. I'd say Asus and Abit have the best manuals with Gigabyte being the worst (surprisingly, little known Soltek had a pretty good one).




-Sili

[Gordon Moore]

Kensington...what the hell was I thinking :wtf: ....brain fart I guess....course I meant Kingston.

[Bing Fung]

Hey Sili... :later:

Agreed, you don't want a manual that that is basically "all your base are be long to us..." (once stated by Kevin :rofl: ) .

I have always liked the Abit manuals for they generally stated what all those BIOS adjustments effect. It's informative for me in some of the more nebulious settings.

Gordon, we knew what you were meaning to say




Bing

[Eduardo]

You guys have a plethera of information. I think I will be doing the PC in 3 stages that should take longer than 2 months. I have been researching from the web sites you guy reocmmended and ASUS A7N8X deluxe definitely has high marks across the board. I will be keeping an eye on the price. I would like it to be quiet as possible. But I also wouldln't mind jazzing it up in the future like Trev's PC. What is the minimum power supply 350W or 400W?

http://home.nc.rr.com/ejimenez

[SiliGoose]

The more power, the better.
I'd shoot for 400w in most systems today. Even if you don't use all the PSU has to offer it gives you flexibility to upgrade when the time comes.

I have a 430w Enermax that has allowed me to effortlessly upgrade to 6 total drives. If I had gone with a lesser PSU I might not have had that luxury.

BTW, I'd recommend Antec PSU's as they tend to have a good price/performance ratio.




-Sili

[SiliGoose]

Make that 7 total drives...if you count that silly (and useless) floppy.

My next PC will NOT have a floppy drive.




-Sili