Building P4 system, am i missing anything?

[status quo]

very expensive for what it is.

if u need 19" LCD look for samsung apparently. the 191T has a yellowish tint though.

cheap case

why only 512mb ram?

the radeon would be bad with maya.

get a dvd writer instead of the 2 seperate drives.

the arctic cooling cooler although quiet doesn't cool very well.

[wedge]

this is expensive for what it is?

i have yet to see another 19" lcd with 700:1 contrast and SXGA resolution for $475.

The case and psu together are only $48.

in the price range nothing can beat the sapphire 9800pro. the only nvidia card that comes close in the price range is the 5900xt, but thats a stripped down value card and only competes with the 9600xt. plus, i am currently running Maya on a Radeon Mobility 9000 and it runs smoothly.

A DVD Writer would be more expensive than both drives combined, plus i don't need to write dvd's, plus i like having 2 drives.

i've heard the arctic cooler is better than stock, and it's quiet. thats all i need, really.

now, other than these issues, am i missing anything?

[Rabid pitbull]

dont forget the os! Also you may want to get another stick of ram, depending on what your planning to do with it 512M may not be enough.

[Luddy]

Maybe a sound card. I consider myself an audiophile and can't live with dull mobo audio. Maybe a Turtlebeach SC or CL Live or Audigy2?

[wedge]

i have an OS already. i will be using my existing XPPro. I'm selling the computer it's currently on, but with a blank HD.

i'll probably get another stick of ram at the beginning of july or august, when i have extra cash.

[ThePrintMaster]

yeah ive got a sceptre monitor as well and i love it.

http://www.sceptre.com/products/LCD/Specifications/spec_x7svnagaplus.htm

i would definitely step into 1gb of ram and drop the two drives in favor of a DVD burner

and yes, get an "educational" copy of the OS...save yourself some money

also dont just buy from new egg...shop around...i did and saved a ton of money on various items...

[mayakindaguy]

Oooh, swap that mobo out for an enthusiast board (Abit or ASUS) and go for a Zalman hsf, then crank that 3.0 up. Some people are getting 3.9 on air with that chip absolutely solid and stable. You could probably do fine at 3.6-3.7. Hopefully it's not a dud though.

Probably shouldn't be recommending overclocking in a 3d forum, but o well.

Defintely worth the extra $100 for the 1gb of RAM instead of 512(if overclcoking will probably wan Mushkin over Geil).
If you're concerned about gaming the Radeon should be fine for the most part and obviously nvidia equals less glitches (in Maya), but eh...depends on your own personal preference.

[wedge]

i like the reviews on this board. good sata speed and good memory performance compared to other p4 chipsets.

and i ain't overclocking!

[Beamtracer]

Originally posted by wgeddes
Building P4 system, am i missing anything? Yeah, you're missing something. 64-bit computing!

[wedge]

for my 64 bit OS?

[Valkyrien]

yes and all your other 64-bit applications...they'll be out any time now, I swear!;)

[imashination]

it all comes to $1350 shipped

is there anything i'm missing? or is this everything i need to get up and running from scratch? [/B]

That list is 100% fine go for it. I will offer a couple of bits of advice though :)

1) as others have said, consider a single decent drive. Another ten bucks will get you a quality branded dvd-rw drive. Cheap drives are noisey and DVD video will often skip. Just yesterday I swapped out some tacky Ricoh drive for a Sony because it refused to read certain discs and the badly made drivers would lockup the system until it had finished reading the content table.

2) Really consider more ram. You will hit that 512 meg limit very quickly. A gig is a decent and cheap amount to go for, plus it allows the system to run with dual channel.

In answer to the other guy, no one is getting solid 3.9GHz overclocks from a 3 gig chip, expecially not with air cooling. With air cooling you will get a few 100 MHz at most.

[status quo]

drivers?

for a dvd rom drive?

:hmm: - are you sure?

you wont hit the 512mb limit depending on what your doing. but you should be wasteful of money and buy more ram.

u cannot get a 3.9ghz overclock. even with water cooling.

even if you could. the performance is not worth it.

[imashination]

Originally posted by status quo
drivers?

for a dvd rom drive?

:hmm: - are you sure?

you wont hit the 512mb limit depending on what your doing. but you should be wasteful of money and buy more ram.

u cannot get a 3.9ghz overclock. even with water cooling.

even if you could. the performance is not worth it.

1) Everything has drivers, most are included with the OS though.

2) Anyone who works with CG will hit the 512 meg limit very very quickly.

3) You can overclock to 3.9 with water cooling, but its very rare that it works.

4) Who's to say what the performace is worth. If I could spend a day installing water cooling for a 30% speed bump I would say its worth it.

[mayakindaguy]

can't give u the thread as Hardforum.com cleaned out some old posts as it seems, but 3.0 doing 3.9 stable @ 1.65 vcore voltage does happen. It's definitely not the status quo and you aren't going to get there without enthusiast RAM, but again quite a few lucky people have had 3.0C chips get that high on air. These are also not MO chips either. If you have a decent self-built/assembled water cooling rig 3.9 from a 3.0C should be a breeze. You would be looking to push past the 4.0 mark with any water rig. If this is of interest go look over at overclockers.com and they'll probably have some posts about it.
Regarding the standard overlclockability of the P4 3.0C while nowhere near the performance of the 2.4, if you get anything less than 3.6 on basically stock voltage you were one of the few unlucky people. But a few 100mhz...not quite.
As to whether it's the best thing to overclock a workstation, arguably no, because u want 100% stability right? Well, imo most people have been running 2.4s clocked to 3.3+ for about 2 years rock solid, but I mean your cpu isn't just going to crap out on u. The possibility is minute, simply look into SNDS and how many actualy cases have been seen with the current cpus. Either way though overclocking is still a risk and personally it is imo a personal preference. If I remember correctly, Digital Domain at least used to have overclocked water or vapo rigs...can't remember, but generally you're not going to see much of this in a professional field, but rather with the enthusiast. Personally, 600mhz+ practically for free ain't bad at all.

Lastly, I don't understand the comment against non-name brand drives for ones like Sony, because Lite-On makes Sony drives and there are many other great DVD writers out there. Just wondering why you think your old drive had driver problems? and what brand and model was it? You didn't screw up flashing you're firmware did u and need it to be reset? Also, each writer has a preferred type of media as well as brand...so it may have been that you didn't use the proper media for your optical drive. ie. Lite-Ons like DVD+R not -R, preferablly RICOH Memorex, Fujifilm, or TDK and there are different versions of quality for each brand and type of media. For more info look into cdrlabs.com.

At any rate, this is not a flame but a correction of what I felt was misinformation. But, I guess for your preference and purposes your rig looks decent.

[imashination]

Originally posted by mayakindaguy
Lastly, I don't understand the comment against non-name brand drives for ones like Sony, because Lite-On makes Sony drives and there are many other great DVD writers out there. Just wondering why you think your old drive had driver problems? and what brand and model was it? You didn't screw up flashing you're firmware did u and need it to be reset? Also, each writer has a preferred type of media as well as brand...so it may have been that you didn't use the proper media for your optical drive. ie. Lite-Ons like DVD+R not -R, preferablly RICOH Memorex, Fujifilm, or TDK and there are different versions of quality for each brand and type of media. For more info look into cdrlabs.com.


Many drives have badly made drivers. A common problem is that that the entire system will lockup whilst windows tries to access and spin up the drive.

Regarding the media type, well, I can't really choose which brand they use for making pre-recorded DVDs can I? Many cheap and crappy drives will just skip because they're so badly made.

Ultimately you get what you pay for, and personally I wouldn't buy 2 DVD drives for £15 when I could get a single quallity unit instead.

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