Processor/Motherboard advice

[jrf23]

WOW! That is seriously cheap! Even in the UK you can pick one up for a reasonable price! Nice recommendation! It's nice after looking at expensive bits, to get something I thought would be expensive at quite a budget price!
I'm now almost done with the choices for bits, just need to get the case and PSU but I have another question. Does buying a 10000rpm hard drive make much of a difference compared to a 7200rpm one? (I can't even bring myself to look at the 15000rpm! Too expensive!) Also, the one I've been looking at has a serial ATA-150 connection. Will that be ok with my choice of motherboard?

[fritzi93]

None of my hard drives is faster than 7,200 rpm, so I can't really say. I should think RAM would be far more important to a gamer.

Speed would be important when writing, say, uncompressed video files. Then it would be a bottleneck, but not really problematic. Normally you'd use a non-linear editor that could deal with compressed files. Otherwise, you'd recompress as the file is being written. (Uncompressed video files are enormous). So, in summary, no, I don't think it's terribly important, but if someone else knows more about it, by all means educate my butt.

SATA/150 (SATA 1) is comparable to PATA/133 in practice. Your motherboard will have no problem with it. SATA is designed to be backwards and forwards compatible.

[jrf23]

Cheers again mate. I was literally just reading up on SATA devices on the net so I managed to work that bit out about the hard drives!

Couple of things with the speed of the hard drive, I was reading somewhere that having a faster hard drive helped with the loading times in games, so if you move from one area to the next in a game, it takes less time to load? Right? But then, I was reading at work today (because we dead) that the number of platters in a hard drive affect the speed with which data is read and a slower rpm is not necessarily slower. Something about, being able to read two platters at 7200 is better than reading one platter at 10000 etc. It seemed to make sense to me, but that's not necessarily a good thing, as I'm new to all this!

And finally for now (I'm sure I'll find more things to ask you and anyone else if they actually read this!) is would DDR3 be a safe investment now instead of having to splash out in a few years time to get a new motherboard and everything then?

[fritzi93]

So, how important is transfer rate and seek-time? You've been researching stuff at a furious rate.

Hmm, DDR3 is still rather pricey. OTOH, DDR2 is dirt cheap now, which was not the case just one year ago. That's up to you, do you want to be leading-edge or trailing-edge? Leading edge is expensive, trailing edge is for cheapskates like me.

When I built this computer less than one year ago, I got a board with slots for both DDR and DDR2, as I wanted to use some sticks of DDR that were (are) still good. At that time DDR3 was not yet available. Who knew?

When people talk about building something that's "future-proof" , I admit I'm skeptical.

[jrf23]

Very! But there have been little or no major improvements in those for some time so they've gone down the line of rotational speeds and number of platters! I think at least. Gave another mag a good read today while at work!

I think the DDR3 is pointless for me at the moment. I'd be spending money on something I know isn't fully finished ans still needs work! Besides, top-end DDR2 is half the price of cheap DDR3 (it's not really that cheap!) and it well outperforms the DDR3. So I can save money for a while, go for the DDR2 and get top end stuff that's fully developed!

future-proofing is impossible because the companies just make things slightly different so you have to buy everything over again!

What do you think about the penryn processors coming out? They outperform everything available at the moment, but how much do you think it'll cost?

[fritzi93]

Originally Posted by jrf23

What do you think about the penryn processors coming out? They outperform everything available at the moment, but how much do you think it'll cost?

Too much for me. I give it several months to a year before I consider buying, typically prices fall when the next hottest thing comes out. Sometime in 2008, that'll be the "Nehalem" architecture. That one also 45nm, then 32 nm in 2009, the "Westmere". Really, I've been thinking I'll build a computer around a quad-core 45 nm "Penryn" within the next year. Another reason to wait, besides price, is that the product establishes a track record, so the true capabilities and reliability become known. [shrugs]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...er-caches.html

Note the improvement for software such as video codecs.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/...lpenryn_1.html

The ability to speed up one core when running a single-threaded application will be useful as well.

So, are you gathering your parts yet? We'll want updates on how things are going. Pics too, if possible.

[jrf23]

I think I'm almost done! I've got to wait about a week until I start buying all the bits (because I'm moving back to university and need to sell my old computer first) but when that happens I'll take pictures of everything so don't worry! I'll list all the parts on here when I've finalized my choices so you can see what you think! I think this is the graphics card I'm going for as it £85 in UK, well under half of the last card I thought of! XFX Geforce 8600GT. Do you think this PSU will be ok?

I'm not going to go for the penryn just yet, I'll content myself with the E6850 and know that I can upgrade to the penryn when the time comes! It looks, on paper, to be amazing though. I saw a review of a penryn dual core verses a normal quad-core and the penryn pissed all over the quad core in every situation even in video editing and your sort of stuff. Needless to say, the quad-core penryn was by far the best, almost double the normal quad-core! I think this was in a mag, but I'll try and find the pictures to show you the graphs they had!

[fritzi93]

More about Penryn:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=764&tag=nl.e539

And Nehalem:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=758&tag=nl.e539

[jrf23]

Do you think this is an ok PSU? It's really budget, which puts me off, but it's reviewed well...

[fritzi93]

Probably okay, if it had a propensity to fry mobos, the reviews would certainly mention it. That's not cheap though. This is:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817708001

Reviews are poor, not surprisingly.

[Generator]

should be fine..but also look at thermaltake true power supplys and nesteq EECS 500W Ultra Quiet PSU, 135mm fan .

[Generator]

as your buying decent hardware mobo and graphics card and cpu+ ram..go for a decent psu..its no good getting a cheap psu ,,its like buying a farrari and running it on parrafin..its will go into the tank but the car wont run good.

[jrf23]

What sort of wattage should I be looking for in my PSU? The thermaltake PSUs look good but I don't know much about anything!

With this motherboard ASUS P5K Deluxe should I go for 1066 RAM? I've been looking at OCZ Reaper but it's only 800Mhz! Is there a big performance difference? I can probably get 4GB of 800Mhz and only 2BG of 1066Mhz!

[Generator]

check the new thrermaltake toughpower psu,s look at the bottom Qfan 500 watt..thats exc choice also has cable managment ..or check on the turepower psu,s 500 watts or 550 watts should be fine,,also remember a good amp rating on 12v 18 amps + is good. its your choice really 500watts + is fine. get one thats quiet and large fan like thermaltake 120 mm + it does make a difference ,,,17 db is very quiet. heres the link http://www.thermaltake.com/product/P...ower_index.asp

[Generator]

http://www.journeysystems.com/?powercalc wattage calculator put in specs and calculate what psu you need works for amd or intel