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Motherboard

Duke E. Pyle

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I'm going to be getting a motherboard combo soon. MB, Memory, and cpu. I'm wanting to get something that has no problem playing the newer games. Basically i want to get something that can run the best of the last generation of parts but can be upgraded without replacing a bunch of shit. What i want to get right now is something that has agp and pci express slots so i can get a 9800 pro now<--agp, and a pci-e card when they come way down in price. Right now this is what i've been looking at: http://www.partspc.com/ProductDetails.asp?CatID=203&ProdID=13485

It has agp and pci-e slots, 3.2ghz, intel socket, ddr2 1gb pc 4200. Has anyone ever had an ASRock motherboard or know anything about them? I figure if i get this and put in a 9800 pro i should be ok till pci-e becomes affordable. What do you guys think? It seems to be pretty cheap for $350.00 bucks. What is SATA 150 , and will it affect future upgrades?
 

Nizzle

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I'd recommend going to www.tomshardware.com if you haven't been there already. He has some good insight on PC components and resepectable reviews.
 

Cman

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I haven't paid attention to mobos in a while, so I'm not completely up to date on the newest shit, but I have a pretty good idea of whats going on.

Lots and lots of USB ports. As many as you can get your hands on because everything uses USB now. Cameras, scanners, printers, ipods, you name it. And make sure its USB 2.0. Might want a few Firewire (1394) ports too

SATA is the new hard drive technology that is about to replace IDE. Its a good idea to have it on there, but obviously, if you don't have a SATA hard drive, it doesn't really matter.

For RAM, I would definetely go for DDR. Also try to get the thing were its double speed or whatever. I forget what its called. Stay away from RD RAM or whatever other kind there is now.

I think PCI Express is overrated. It got a lot of attention when it first came out, but I never really heard of many things that were using it or why there is an real need for it at all. Add on slots are kind of becoming unecessary in general, because more and more stuff is being built into the mobo itself or else its controlled within the OS with software instead of hardware.
 

Duke E. Pyle

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Nizzle said:
I'd recommend going to www.tomshardware.com if you haven't been there already. He has some good insight on PC components and resepectable reviews.

Yeah man, i love that site, that's where i went and found out about this mb. They have a section called "Build a gaming computer for $500". I also meant to ask about RAID. From what i understand this is where all the files are split in half and put on 2 or more hard drives and read simultaneously for a much faster process. Am i correct on this and would this work for games too. Is it reliable? I don't know anything about pci-e, but pci is x4, agp is x8, and pci-e is x16, so i figure that with the way games are going it might be something to look at later. Which reminds me, i got my brother the game F.E.A.R. for Christmas and get this shit...it is 5 disks long! This mutha is 5 fucking gigs and recommends a 3.0 cpu and 9800 pro! Thats over twice the size of Battlefield. Anyway what about ASRock though, i know everyone likes Asus and Abit, but i couldn't find the combination i'm looking for on those boards. I guess with an Intel chipset and Toms recommendation it should be pretty sound, but if i had some reassurance i might go ahead and get it. Also about the usb's, i was wondering, if i had to i could get a usb hub, but would this hamper it at all?
 

Nizzle

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The PCI-e cards are pretty awesome. I've got a Radeon X800 XT with 256MB. I've also got two hard drives, but not RAID. Just make sure whatever you do is get at most a 10000 spin disk. It makes a huge difference over the 7200s. I play UT2k4 on the highest settings and get over 100 FPS. Online games cap you at 90 FPS, but I get nearly 160 FPS in single player. I have yet to run a game that looks choppy.

Here's what I've got

Motherboard:
CPU Type Intel Pentium 4E, 3400 MHz (17 x 200)
Motherboard Name Dell Dimension XPS Gen 3
Motherboard Chipset Intel Alderwood i925X
System Memory 1024 MB (DDR2 SDRAM)

Display:
Video Adapter RADEON X800 XT (256 MB)
Monitor Dell 2001FP (Digital) [20" LCD]
Multimedia:
Audio Adapter Creative Audigy / Audigy 2

Storage:
IDE Controller Intel(R) 82801FB/FBM Ultra ATA Storage Controllers - 266F
IDE Controller Intel(R) 82801FR SATA AHCI Optical Drive _NEC DVD+RW ND-3100AD
Optical Drive SAMSUNG DVD-ROM SD-616E (16x/48x DVD-ROM)

If you're upgrading, make sure you have adequate power supply and cooling fans!!!
 

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Duke E. Pyle said:
I also meant to ask about RAID. From what i understand this is where all the files are split in half and put on 2 or more hard drives and read simultaneously for a much faster process.

RAID is faster and more reliable. That's why almost all servers have them. RAID 1 uses two disks and reads faster, but writes the same. RAID 5 is what most servers use. Three disks, reads and writes much faster, and one of the three disks can go bad without loosing any data.

I'd tend to agree with Niz. For much less money you could get a 10,000 RPM disk. RAID would cost you more, and needs a higher level of support than you are probably used to.
 

mindido

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Duke,

I've never heard of ASRock mobo's so I have no idea if they're any good. I'd do a bit of checking around on them before I'd buy one. I've used Abits, ASUS and Gigabyte mobos and have had no complaints.

A couple of things about the ASRock. If I'm reading correctly, its RAM maxes out at 1 GB. That could be a real problem for gaming. Also, I can't be sure of this (as I can't get a real good look at the mobo) but it appears to have only one SATA slot.

And lastly (probably opening a can of worms here), I'd seriously consider a 64 bit machine since the MS 64 bit OS is "supposed" to be out this year (2006). Granted, no one really knows yet what it looks like or if it will really be out next year but, if it does come out, and the original version is pretty good, you may find yourself kicking yourself if you didn't go with a 64 bit machine.

Personally, if I were in your position (and I will be within the next year or so), I'd get a 64 bit machine.
 

Cman

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The only reason to employ any type of RAID is for redundancy and backups. If you're not the sys admin for a big company or something, then you don't really need to worry about it.

There are much simpler ways to back up your "home" stuff.
 

Bob_Box

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I've built a few computer with ASrock mobo on them.....they're cheap and have the features you need and I haven't had any complaints about them
 

DDMD

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RAID:
Redundant array of independent disks
also
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks

RAID 0 is used by many gamers and others looking for faster hard drive speed.
RAID 1 puts the same data on multiple drives. If one drive fails the data is safe on the other drive(s)

RAID 0 speads data across two or more hard drives and this allows the drives to take turns writing the data speeding up data transfers. Data is read and written faster than one drive but if either drive fails ALL DATA may be lost.

I run a RAID 0 setup for two 160GB SATA drives for games and media.
I have a small fast SATA 10,000 RPM drive for the main Windows install.
This is fast but not very expensive.

I believe other RAID levels need expensive advanced controllers. Not worth it.
Get a good motherboard with the latest SATA support and RAID onboard.

ASRock motherboards are cheap ASUS boards. They are good quality but lacking in features and performance.

Forget AGP it's headed the way of the VESA local bus.
 

Duke E. Pyle

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well mindido's post scared me away from getting that mb. I didn't realize that pci-e cards were already affordable! So i'm skipping agp now. Here's something i don't get though...the amd 4000 is the highest in my price range that i'm willing to go and i got this chart from tomshardware that show's the 4000 outperforming all the current intel chips in gaming. Can someone tell me how this is? Isn't the speed of that processor at like 2.5? Why does it beat intel at every game posted which are 32bit games? It's not like it runs intel out of the water but it clearly gets a better framerate with all games it shows, and that's going against 3.4's. Now my problem is this....the 3.4's are only a few notches down from the 4000 in gaming but they out perform them considerably during multitasking and every other test that they show!!! What the hell am i supposed to get? I would love to get the fx 53 but its out of my range, and the 4000 somehow by the spirit of Moses beats the fx 53 in half the tests anyway!! Check out this chart and look through the different tests on the pull down at the top. I don't know what to do man. What do yall think about it? http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html?modelx=33&model1=224&model2=240&chart=60 edit apparently the fx 53 and the 4000 are the exact same processor just a name change
224-240-69.png
 
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mindido

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Duke,

I can't tell you which mobo and processor to buy but here are a few questions to ask yourself.

1. What do you want to do with the machine now?
2. How long do you expect the machine to last for what you want it to do?

We know that you want to do some gaming and, presumably, will want to do that into the forseeable future. Since gaming is a leading edge technology, that means that, if you want to keep up with it and be able to play the most modern games, your going to have to upgrade your machine every couple of years (more than likely every 2 to 3 years).

If you believe the above paragraph is correct, and don't have unlimited funds, you really only have one option. Carefully study the current tech and figure out what you can afford (if seems you've done that). Don't buy "the best" mobo, processor, or video card currently available as you'll be paying a premium for that. I would recommend buying the third or fourth generation as they're usually in the sweet spot of being a reasonable price and performance.

Several years ago I used to do a lot of work with AutoCAD which, at the time, was one of those leading edge technologies. Every couple of years I wound up having to buy a new machine in order to use Acads new capabilities (this is also true of the computer graphics industry). This turned out to be a real pain especially since there was nothing wrong with the machine, it just was no longer fast enough to do what I needed it to do.

So, my philosophy. Do your homework and figure out what your willing to put into the machine at this time. Don't put any more money into the blasted machine than you have to (because in two or three years you'll have to do this again)!!!

Because of this, I've only purchased AMD's for quite a while now. They're cheaper and have better performance (they have for quite a while now).

My roommate is a student in computer graphics and we recently (last spring) went through this process. We wound up getting her an AMD 64 3.2 GHz processor with a Gigabyte mobo and 2.5 Gigs of RAM. I think that wound up costing about $400 or so. The Intel would have been about $100 more.

Hope that helps.
 

blazin

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AMD and Intel have 2 different styles of posting their stats for their processors. Intel ones tend to be the best possible stats with everything done perfectly to push them to the best result for that catagory, while AMD tends to give average usage stats. You notice the quality difference using the processors and there was an article about it somewhere i'll see if i can dig it up.

Personally i'm using a 3500 Vience atm and while its clock speed is 2.21GHz, AMD estimates it to be the equivilent of a 3.5Ghz Intel hence the 3500. AMD has been doing this a while. I haven't looked at hardware for the last couple months but when i last looked (building this machine) Intel had really no option for a 64bit machine.

Another thing is that PCI-E has been affordable for quite a while. Even when i built my machine PCI-E was about the price of an AGP card or cheaper even. I was debating PCI-E or AGP myself and figured i might as well go PCI-E since the mobo's are about the same price and the PCI-E cards depending on the card cost less, same or more. I got the 6600 since i was tight on a budget and figured better to replace the vid card than processor later on.
 

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Blazin you're not all wrong...but then I also don't believe AMD is going to give a fair comparison of their chips to Intel. I also trust Tom's Harware on this stuff. He will basically tell you that AMD outruns Intel at the top end (meaning gobble all the power you can for gaming) of the CPU scale. When it comes to mobile chips for laptops, Intel still gets the nod for battery life/cool running and speed.
 

blazin

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You're right they won't always give a fair comparason, but from my experience...it usually is actually pretty fair as far as competitors go. In the past quite often AMD processors ran better than the Intel counterpart they estimated, although its happening less now. AMD's are, and always been power hogs, but most people don't mind that for desktops. If its a gaming machine you really don't care, since you're gonna by a nice PSU for your vid card and soundcard anyways. For a moble machine i'd actually prob opt for a powerbook.
 

mindido

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Preferred,

"When it comes to mobile chips for laptops, Intel still gets the nod for battery life/cool running and speed."

I would agree with that but I'm pretty sure Duke isn't building a laptop. I haven't checked on that recently, but is that even really possible?
 

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mindido said:
I would agree with that but I'm pretty sure Duke isn't building a laptop. I haven't checked on that recently, but is that even really possible?

No, you're right. Just a general comment about how Tom's sees it all. I can't even remember what they prefer at the low end....Sempron or Celeron.
 

Duke E. Pyle

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You know what i've learned so far?...This is how they get you. I can get a 3000 for less than half of the 4000. The performance difference is far from staggering and i'd settle for the 3000, but in order to to upgrade later on i'd have to get a 939pin/4000 so i could upgrade to an FX chip later on, where i'd have to scrap the 3000 and start over.:bah: I'm seriously looking at a gigabyte board for the 4000 if i can get one with a great chipset at a decent price. So this leads to what could be my last question....As long as i choose a motherboard that supports a 4000 939pin, i can upgrade to one of the high class FX chips later on which are 939 can't i, i mean the board should be able to mesh well a few steps up shouldn't it? I'm pretty much bald-headed on my right side now!!
 

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Duke my man, you're mak'n a carreer outta this. Just buy a mo bo you can afford and move on with your life!
 
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