been using this system for a year - time to upgrade.

i want to use at least one of the same HDs (and buy an additional larger SATA II drive like 500 GB or so). so i'll need a new motherboard and processor/heatsink, but hopefully not memory though.

so i need recommendations for a new motherboard, proc/heatsink/fan, video card, and large hard drive.

i don't play games but i want to be able to do graphic design - mainly photoshop. i have a dual monitor setup so it needs to be able to do that. no other major specs.

i only need it to be a moderate system, not an ePenis flexing system.

Current System

2/4/2006 1:11:59 AM

G5 with dual processor and max RAM. You won't be sorry. $$$$$$$

-ZiP!-

2/4/2006 4:57:53 PM

if you give me all your programs i'm sure you've legally purchased, then i'd consider buying a MAC

2/4/2006 5:03:13 PM

wait on the next AMD socket spec to go retail.

2/4/2006 8:25:34 PM

As far as what you'd said about buying a 500 gig SATA II drive...I would suggest you price getting two 250s instead, possibly. Once you start getting up that high, the cost per gig kinda tends to go UP instead of down (its not quite like buying a 20 pack of underwear instead of 5 to get a lower cost ratio).

And, even if the price of one 500 is the same as two 250s, you can run a pair of 250s in RAID and improve read/write speeds. As long as you have enough case space to spare, you might give this a try.

Also, unless you are able to save a LOT of money going IDE instead of SATA, stick with SATA. Here's why: you will probably have 4 IDE spots (two for optical drives, two for hard drives) and anywhere from 4-8 spots for SATA (hard drives only, unless you want to spend a fortune on a SATA optical drive, which I don't see much of a point in anyway). This means that you have (essentially) 2 spots for IDE HDDs and a lot of spots for SATAs. IDE drives are more likely to go on crazy-sale than SATAs, so you should probably save the open IDE spots for sometime when you see those 200 gig IDE drives for 60 bucks on outpost.com every now and then.

That is, unless you find IDE drives on crazy-sale now, in which case you should go ahead and take advantage of it.

I picked up an 80 gig IDE on outpost for 30 bucks and a 160 gig IDE for 55 bucks. Just random sales. I don't think I've seen SATAs that low except day after thanksgiving. If you use up your IDE spots now, you won't be able to take advantage of such sales in the future.

Besides, SATA has a faster transfer rate anyways. I'm sure you knew that part.

Just a spaz on HDDs...

2/4/2006 8:40:15 PM

Quote :

"if you give me all your programs i'm sure you've legally purchased, then i'd consider buying a MAC"

ouch man, you're playin my life on here

-ZiP!-

2/4/2006 8:41:10 PM

BTW, I did see that you were planning on using SATA II, I'm just suggesting you stick with that instead of saving 10 bucks on an IDE drive of the same size.

2/4/2006 8:42:09 PM

AM2 still isn't coming out probably for more than a month, right?

how much will the prices drop (guesstimating) on the athlon64s when this comes out?

2/6/2006 8:12:50 PM

a little im sure, but id just wait till april-ish and buy a new system using whatever their new budget chip will be

2/6/2006 9:04:18 PM

^agreed, then he can get ddr2 as well, the new socket, and a good nforce4 board...

in terms of a well performing for price card go with an nvidia 6800gs

for hard drives either get a 150gb raptor or go with a barracuda 7200.9 with whatever capacity you need.

jdchapma you know about price points, but know nothing about performance, most of those ide drives on 'crazy' sales are low cache hard drives and don't come with NCQ, both major performance enhancements you'll need on a new hard drive (esp. for vista)

[Edited on February 6, 2006 at 11:35 PM. Reason : .]

2/6/2006 11:31:13 PM

^
Oh, I'm well versed on hard drives, and you don't need an insane drive to store music and videos on. You should run the OS from the fast HDD, and then it would be prudent to buy the cheaper hard drives for simple extra storage.

Note that I said NOT to buy the cheap drives for the primary drives he is looking at buying initially. I said NOT to start it out with the cheapos, and to just buy them when they come on sale later.

And, you are correct, the hard drives that go on crazy sale do not have NCQ, but both the HDDs I mentioned in my above rant have 8mb cache, and I paid around 35 cents a gig. Just storage drives. I run Windows off of my fastest SATA drive.

In my opinion, the price AND performance issues can be better dealt with by running RAID off of two decent SATA drives than to pay 300 friggin' dollars on a 150gig Raptor. In fact, I'll climb out on a limb and say that the price-to-performance ratio is far beyond optimal for a 150 gig raptor, period. You can get a decent SATA drive of the same size for around 100 dollars and put that 200 bucks into other aspects of the computer that need the boost more than that hard drive. You could go from your suggested 6800GS to a BFG 7800GT 256MB video card for an extra $115 (prices based on Newegg research) and put the other 85 into a better processor or better/more RAM.

Besides, and I quote,

Quote :

"i only need it to be a moderate system, not an ePenis flexing system. "

And I think that drives you are talking about fall into the "ePenis flexing" category mentioned.

Pull out the Raptor when somebody says "I want to build a badass system", only then, you'll be suggesting he spend 1,500 bucks on a 15k 146Gig Cheetah.

Seriously, don't insult my knowledge of computers because I make suggestions that fit what this guy asked for.

2/7/2006 2:43:02 PM

And did you even read what the guy initially posted?

LARGE HARD DRIVE

2/7/2006 2:44:38 PM

NCQ is not a "major performance enhancement" for a desktop system. I haven't seen a drive that didn't do worse with NCQ enabled on desktop drive benchmarks, although server benchmarks show improvement. Only concurrent non-local, or random access will benefit substantially from NCQ, and that is only found in a fileserver/database server workload.

[Edited on February 7, 2006 at 2:58 PM. Reason : personally, I'd settle for 250GB with 2x 250GB drives in RAID-1... 250GB is a lot to backup often]

2/7/2006 2:55:20 PM

Waiting for AM2 to drop prices on current 939 boards and chips might be a good idea, but it's going to be a while, something like july according to annadtech:

http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2688

Also, existing heatsinks/fans won't likely be compatable, so waiting for AM2 itself and wanting to use it, may take even longer if you care about non-standard cooling solutions.

[Edited on February 7, 2006 at 6:34 PM. Reason : ]

2/7/2006 6:23:54 PM

for vista, NCQ will be a performance enhancer, true it's limited, but still recommended over non-NCQ... just typically speaking those without NCQ have lower cache.

btw, i got a 74gb raptor for $129 and 2x160gb sataII hdd's for $30/40 a piece (.22/gb) running in raid0 and a 120g segate put in an external case for <$50 for backup, you don't have to have $texas to have a good system (even w/out a raptor).... w/out raptor & backup, that's 320gb (99MB/s avg. read, 220MB burst) for .22c/gb...

and in terms of cost, sct939, pci-e, ddr mobos will be cheap considering AM2 will be new and ddr2 prices have gone up recently... it's not a bad option

jdchapma i must have missed those first two paragraphs of your post about raid, sorry, it was late...

[Edited on February 7, 2006 at 6:47 PM. Reason : .]

2/7/2006 6:42:56 PM

if it's gonna be july, i need something before then

i think the 2 SATA 250's in RAID will be better than the 500

i want to be able to use my one 300 GB IDE HD and IDE dvd burner at least.

bttt

2/9/2006 2:55:39 PM

i think i'm going to get 2 of these this weekend for a RAID setup--
http://shop4.outpost.com/product/4227134

need recommendations for an SATA motherboard and the rest now

2/10/2006 11:26:08 AM