Kylilin Posted March 17, 2003 Share Posted March 17, 2003 My brother and I have decided to take my old comuter and give it the six million dollar man treatment. For those of you who are not acquainted with the bionic man or Lee Majors, basically, we're going to scrap whatever parts we can from it a rebuild a whole new one. The parts we are scrapping are these: - motherboard & CPU (If anyone wants to buy a Pentium 3 550 Mhz) - CD-Rom drive - RAM - in favor of some DDR-DRAM - video card Which leaves us with a few things to buy. I was wondering if anyone had some suggestions as to what can give me the best bang for the buck. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cmdr. Cracken Posted March 17, 2003 Share Posted March 17, 2003 Depends on what you want the system to do. Super Gaming Rig: Asus Mother boards haven't given me and my family any trouble. get one that can take a .... Pentium 4 1.6+ Ghz Processor Radeon 9700 Pro/9800 48x CD-Rom drive i think that's all you need to get. 512 MB RAM should do you fine. Also, make sure your power supply can pump out teh voltage to run such things. ^_^ as always, if you don't intend to run like, Doom III this fall, always shoot lower. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jabba The Hunt Posted March 17, 2003 Share Posted March 17, 2003 My KT4 Ultra (MSI) motherboard is great, has a 100-333 FSB which is completely variable from within the bios. Supports all XP processors and somesort of interface giving 400Mbps rate to ur hard drive (if the HDD supports it) (could be firewire or ATA) (i think ) has 5.1 sound DDR support bluetooth technology... anyway lets say its very good. If you have loads of money get the GeforceFX (effectively Geforce 5), if ur on a budget then a Geforce4 will do everything u need atm and probably for the next two years. I've found my XP2000 processor to be a little unstable, but that could be just a one of flaw, eitherway I perfer to underclock than overclock . (or it could not be the processor ) CD drive - if you want to get a burner dont get a combo drive, I had that and its terrible really difficult to copy cds. Oh and if you have a 52 speed cd drive and you put a cd in it with a small (even smaller than 1mm) then it could quite likely shatter the disk, so yeah 48x is much safer. DDR ram is sweet (if u have Win 9x or ME dont get more than 512meg it wont support it). sorry if i told u any stuff you already know, I've made some mistakes with hardware upgrades which are usually very costly (actually that reminds me make sure ur power supply unit supports ur new motherboard ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gold leader Posted March 17, 2003 Share Posted March 17, 2003 My opinion on bang for the buck (minimum prices indicated as found on http://www.tweakers.net/pricewatch: Epox EP8-KHA+: € 113,- Athlon XP 1800+: € 84,- 256 MB DDR SDRAM (Kingston is a nice brand): € 37,- Lite-on CD burner 48x: € 54,- Leadtek WinFast A280 LE TD 128MB (GeForce4 Ti4200-8X): € 165,- Total of € 453,- Just to get an idea. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GUNNER Posted March 18, 2003 Share Posted March 18, 2003 I'm assuming you want the best so I'll give you some tips for a kick ass P4 system. Get an Asus P4PE board A P4 1.8A chip. It's a Northwood core and has 512 cache, not the 256 like some P4 chips so make sure it says "A". Leadtek GF 4 card will do great Get some Corsair XMS ram, great stuff and fast as hell. I have this set-up and it runs awesome. The 1.8A chip is a great over clocker and I have had mine at 2.7ghz with no problems. That's a 900mhz increase, wont get that from no XP chip. I have scored 14,000 on 3Dmarks and still have more tweaks I can do to get higher. Any more questions ,just let me know. Not like any one else doesn't know but I do like to think I know something about this one little thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GUNNER Posted March 18, 2003 Share Posted March 18, 2003 Prices... DDR 3500, a 512mg stick of XMS is $165 P4 1.8A is $143 GF4 Ti4400 is $185 and a P4PE board is $112 so for around $600 you will have a kick ass set-up Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keyan Farlander Posted March 18, 2003 Share Posted March 18, 2003 GUNNER is an Intel man, hmm... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Admiral Odin Posted March 18, 2003 Share Posted March 18, 2003 yes he is. Any one remember the glory days of the 286s? Or those that came before? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GUNNER Posted March 18, 2003 Share Posted March 18, 2003 Originally posted by Keyan Farlander GUNNER is an Intel man, hmm... Is there any other? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keyan Farlander Posted March 18, 2003 Share Posted March 18, 2003 Originally posted by GUNNER Is there any other? Certainly. But I'm feeling quite good about Intel today, since I just finished soldering together a P14X board, including a beautiful Intel 186 CPU. And it works! Hooray \o/ Actually, I conned two other guys into doing it for me ("group work" ). But I guess that's only fair since I've written every single program for that lab so far. (I have teh L33T assembly language skillz.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GUNNER Posted March 18, 2003 Share Posted March 18, 2003 I have never actually had a AMD so I can't say for sure but of all the Intels I have had everyone of them ran awesome. My PIII 550 was great, it O/Ced to 624 or something. My PIII 700 O/Ced to 933 and was a great unit. My P4 1.6A O/Ced to 2.1 with no problem and was a solid chip All of which I still have, plus I have another 1.8A, besides mine< that is going to go in the wifes rig. I also built my wifes old rig with a Celeron 466 and it ran good, slow ,but good. I built one mom in law a Celeron 400, still running. The step mom in law has a P4 1.6A that she loves. I built my partents a PIII 600 that ran great, and I now have , and their new P4 1.6A runs like a champ. So 10 Intels and all ran/running great. Plus they all either have an Asus or abit mobo. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keyan Farlander Posted March 18, 2003 Share Posted March 18, 2003 I have never in my life found it helpful to overclock anything. Even my 1.4 GHz Athlon is insanely overpowered for anything that I do. All my games require less than that, and Microsoft Office is just fine at that speed Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GUNNER Posted March 18, 2003 Share Posted March 18, 2003 It's all about bragging right big fella. But Unreal II does take a nice chip to run it at a nice frame rate as will the new Doom when it arives. The only difference I can "see" between my 1.8 when I run it at stock speed or O/C it to 2.7 is in a bench mark. It is nice to know that my chip will be able to keep up with the demand when the time comes though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keyan Farlander Posted March 18, 2003 Share Posted March 18, 2003 That reminds me, I would just like to give a shout out of "screw you" to Intel for multiplexing a single bus for address and data. My logic designs now have to look at more of your bastard signals and be sure to get them before you put something else on there and screw me over. I hate you. ...that felt good. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zargon Posted March 18, 2003 Share Posted March 18, 2003 what kind of ram are you getting rid of, how much, and whacha want for it? I btw would NEVER buy kingston value crap ram, my dad had a bunch of it die on him after a matter of weeks........Crucial is high quality and generally cheaper(same as Micron), Corsair and Viking are good as well..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fondas Posted April 4, 2003 Share Posted April 4, 2003 I hope I'm not too late .... Some General tips : 1. Although I'm a nvidia fan , ATI's Radeon 9500/9700 pro are better cards in all aspects so you should check them out 2. I've always supported AMD athlon but it seems that the newest P4's are powerfull and more stable with no overheating problems... 3. Do not buy no name RAM 4. Look for mobos with the new SIS chipset, it's a lot better than the i845/i850 from Intel 5. Determine how much are you willing to pay for your system. Slight changes can launch the final ammount to unbearable heights ! 6. Asus products are first quality BUT the tend to overcharge. There are other companies which offer the same with less mone (MSI for example) 7. New PC components require more power so make sure you get a decent power supply (>=400 W) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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