Getting ready to buy new CPU. Please help!

[Daedelus]

Well i am finally getting tyred of running slow CPU and the wife whants to take it over so i guese its time to buy a new one.well i havnt done this in awhile and am not sure all the goodies out there
so i thought i would post this and see if i can get any help.

Below ill list the things i think i want and feel free to tell me if they suck and if you guys that make CPU's can help with prices ETC.

Athlon XP: 1700-1900
Mother board: Not sure? something that supports athlon lol
Ram:atleast 512 right but DDR or Raid all this cunfusses me?
Hard drive: 60gig (Not sure what brands are best)(dont think i need more than 60 gig or do I?)
Video Card: Geforce 4 4600?
Sound card:Audiology gamer? something with dolby 5.1
CASE: not sure will i need 350 or 400 MGH(something with alot of cooling?
Speakers:some kind of 5 point system for dolby 5.1
Moniter: would like atleast 17' but the flat ones would be good.they dont get the high resolution should i still get this?
Operating system: Should i get Windows XP home?

I know i forgot some stuff like power suply etc.so any help on the little stuff would be helpfull too.

on a side note how can i hook up 2 cpu's to use my DSL connection can they share it? Thanks alot guys Big Poppa!

[LA_MERC_Cowboy_From_Hell]

Well I can answer your leats question anyway....lol. Just buy a router. They have some as small as 2 port but I'd suggest a 3 or 4 just in case. They are about $100 and easy to set up. Linksys makes good routers.

Scott

[Cypher]

I'll answer your OS question and let someone else handle your hardware questions... it's been a while since I've seriously shopped for hardware. Definitely get WinXP Professional. It's not that much more money than XP Home, and it'll be worth it for the more advanced networking features. It'll be a bit easier to set up for LANs and stuff like that. Hope this helps.

[Disorder]

if you get linksys and have problems talk to me or my associate Mr. Reign cause we both have the 4-port method and have had to basically figure the whole thing out ourselves cause their customer support sux0rs.

[Daedelus]

Thanks for the info guys does mark and jay sell computers?

[LA_MERC_MadMAX]

Never had a bit of trouble with my Linksys...Had a heck of a time with a home portal though! whew!

As far as adivice, if you want AMD, I would at least get a 1900 if you can find one in your price range...the best boards out there are based on the VIA KT400 chipset...such as the Abit AT7-MAX2, Asus A7V8X, Gigabyte GA-7VAXP, and the MSI KT4 Ultra...I love MSI BTW, I build computers all day, and I think that has the best bang for the buck...good qualitiy boards, good prices, generally...in fact I built a pc for a buddy of mine friday with the KT4 Ultra with a Duron 1200 chip!!! He had some price issues naturally...lol

Also, I never really try to change anyones mind, BUT think hard about AMD...They were super great in the past...I love my 850 Athlon - it lasted me 2 years. We had always built and sold AMD based PC's where I work up until here recently when Intel started dropping prices and you could get decent speed chips at prices comparable to AMD's prices...I just went Intel, and build a Celeron, actually - a P4 based 1.7 GHz, and it flat rocks...I still say I have the baddest Celeron system ever built...LOL! I had built a AMD XP 1900 system right before this one, and due to a bad mobo choice ( a freakin ECS K7S5A, trying to save money) I was never satisfied with the system...never seemed much better than my 850 on most things. I'm a musician and lots of software that I use is optimized for Intel's SSE2 extention in P4 based chips, so I saw a new mobo as an excuse to go Intel, especially since I sold my 1900 for what I paid for the 1.7 Intel. Just fyi, I have a MSI 854 Ultra (Intel 845 Chipset). I DO plan to pop an actual P4 on there when I can afford to get one...but who knows when that will be...it's still faster than my 1900 was.

If you need help, or advice on pricing, just let me know...

Laterz...:d:

[Daedelus]

yeah thanks alot i did look at the prices all day and there wasn't that much of a diffrence between the 1600 and up to 1900 i think ill stay with Amd though.I told my wife the price range i am looking for is around 1400 and she whants me to try and come down to 1100 so maybe ill do the sound cards and speakers(high end later)it seems when i looked at dell and gateway the big cost is the monitors and the g-force 4600 around 300 each. well yeah i would appreciate any help on prices lol and thanks alot guys for the help

[LA_MERC_MadMAX]

Like I said, never try to change anyones mind at all...AMD makes killer chips...The guy I work with has a 2000+ and his is crippled by the same cheap ECS board, but it still runs pretty doggone good...bighead has a 2200, and "you can't touch it"...lol.

I do know that AMD may be phasing the Duron line out and replacing it with the lower speed XP's...don't know what that's going to do with prices, but as it stands now, the 1900 is still the best value...wish you'd done this a month ago--i sold my 2 week old 1900 for $100! w00t.

If you have any questions about mobo's for you new chip drop a line...just stay away from ECS! lol...

Later

[LA_MERC_LaTech]

AMD will be releaseing their Sledgehammer chips sometime early next year. This will mean new boards, new ram and new chips. Personally, I would wait till this happened because Athlon XP prices are going to drop alot once this new chip is released. When this happens, I will be upgrading to the new chip...woo hoo! (Note: This is assuming the Accounting Dept allows me)

You can't go wrong with AMD though...

Just my $.02

LaTech

[LA_MERC_MadMAX]

The "hammer" chips are going to be awesome, simply becuase they are supposed to integrate Intel's SSE2 instruction set, just as the Athlon XP integraded the SSE IS...AMD have ALWAYS, since the era of the 486, been more efficiant per clock cycle...

BTW, Big Poppa - forgot to address these questions, sorry:
Yes you definately want DDR - PC133 would be a bottleneck, and would not allow you system to perform optimally with an XP chip...

RAID is up to you, it can serve 1 of 2 funtions, Striping, which allows you to have to identical drives striped together, i.e, 2 40's that show up as 1 80...these have to be matching drives though, same brand, same model...VERY fast though...the other function of RAID is mirroring, where you can set up a drive (slave) to keep a duplicate copy of the Master...useful when yo are worried about crashes, ect...hardly usefull for the home user...

As for vid card, check out ATI's 8500 128 MB, that's what bighead, AUTO and me have (there may be others i don't know of, and Stratcat has a 7500 64M in his laptop and Maverick has a 7000 64 meg) but you can't beat the price on the 128MB 8500...they are like $199 at CircuitCity, and although an Nvidia 4600 would beat it at a benchmark like 3D mark, the ATI has Nvidia beat with image quality, with anti-aliasing features, ect...Also the ATI cards have built in hardware DVD encoding that looks much better than Power DVD, ect. if you have a DVD rom drive...ATI has new cards out, the 9000 pro and 9700 pro, so it's easy to get a deal on the 8500's and they are awesome cards...

60Gig HDD would prolly be plenty unless you are really into mp3's or movie editing...

Sound card, def. creative...either a Live or Audigy, whatever you can get the best deal on...honestly, the main difference between a Live 5.1 and an Audigy is the 24bit 96KHz capabilities of the Audigy...My cousin and I are both musicians, using our maching for editing, ect, and I don't think either one of us has used 24bit 96KHz yet...if fact, Windows Media player can't even play the files!

As far as monitors, get you a 19" you will enjoy that more than anything else in your system, and they don't cost that much more than 17 inchers...Don't get a LCD, I have one at work, and used it for a LAN party we had up there to save bringing my 19" CRT and I was not happy with the gaming performance at all...dark, images ghosted, ect...just get a good CRT 19" for about $30-40 more than a 17 inch....

As far as OS, run SOMETHING NT based, be it 2000 pro, XP Home or XP Pro...if you are running 98 now, whenever you go NT, you will never go back once you don't have to deal with the BSOD, Illegal Operations, System Resorce levels, ect...I'm runnin 2K pro at home and XP pro at work and like them both equally well...

Laterz
Jayson

[LA_MERC_LaTech]

Also, the new Hammer chips won't have Intel's new Multi-Threading...they will actually have multi-processing. That's the same as 2 chips on one board, instead of 1 chip doing twice the work.

At lease, that's the way I understand it.

Also, I agree with the sound card. I have an SB Audigy X-Gamer and it's great, if you have digital speakers (which I also recommend).

Video card: I am partial to NVidia, but...to each his own.

And I agree about both the monitor and OS. For the monitor, why go small when for just a few more dollars, you can get a nice monitor thats better for your eyes.

LaTech

[Omega_Prime]

to be honest heres what i run and i am very satisifed with it, amd 1900, a bit mobo kg7, 80gig maxtor hd at 5400rpm,256mb ddr going to up that soon but still not bad,geforce 4 4200 theres no sense in spending 280-300 when you can get this card for 160. i have a cheap sound card on some good speakers that seem to work fairly good. of course your gonna need a floppy,case w/300 watt powersupply,ethernet card,modem if ya need that. anyway i benchmark at 9600+ evertime i run 3dmark, and i keep 99fps on just about all games i run sometimes it drops below that but i am very pleased with my machine.

[-=C.O.P.S=-KOrruptED]

Never had an AMD chip so can't tell you, got a P4 2gig, pretty sufficient.
Get an ASUS motherboard, they are sweet.
60 gig is sufficient unless you are DL a lot of music.
Don't waste your money on the 4600 unless you get a great deal, just get the 4200. Man I wish my dad's gf would get her cuz to send me some; (he owns Nvidia :P).
Def need 5.1 speakers, need to hear people tryn to sneak up to knife you!!
Splurge get a 21" Monitor.
I never use any MS OS home editions, use 2000 or XP pro.
I hear the Linksys wireless routers are pretty kewl to hook up puters.

[Daedelus]

great idea guys i dont think i can wait for the new hammer chips and thell probable be out my price range any how. so ive been inter net hunting all day today and agree on going with the 19' mon with the higher resolutions for future games compared to LCD.i really appreciate the info on the G-Force 4600 i thought every one was runnin this. I am glad to her the 128 4200 is good and more in my price range. Also i guse i wont need to be looking into Raid it dosent sound like something i'll need.also glad to here people recommending the XP Pro i would have probable gotten XP home.On the sound card iafter looking today thought about going with the Sound Blaster with 5.1 if Audiology is over kill? on the hard drive maybe to save some moolaa i should go with a 40 gig, i saw some of them have 5200 or 7200 rpm any noticible diffrence same with the 8mb buffer is it neccessary? so i was thinking speed the majority of the money on fast cpu 1900-2000 gig probably 512 ddr pc2100/2700 266mgh/333mgh wich is better 333? and good quality asus mobo.
thanks alot this is good brain storming going on and i really appreciate all the input

[LA_MERC_LaTech]

7200 is a must for a gamer (imho). Also, the 8MB buffer is probably awesome...I can't afford the 120 GB drive yet...so, I don't know personally. (sigh)

[Cypher]

Well the general rule with hard drives is to get the largest size you can afford. Just compare prices carefully and don't do something crazy (like pay $200 for a 65 GB when you could get a 60 GB for $100). Even if 40 GB/5200 RPM will work fine for now, you never know what the standard will be in a year or two (no reason to have to buy a new HD every year). These newer games, programs, and operating systems keep requiring more and more (and more) hard disk space. And in the meantime, you can NEVER have too much free hard disk space. :) I've also heard that while 7200 rpm hard drives are faster, they tend to fail sooner than 5200 rpm drives (because of the heat and the work done) -- you may want to research this and see if it's true and decide if it'll matter to you. Personally, I think I'll end up buying a newer and bigger drive before mine dies... but it's something to think about.

If you're looking to cut back and save a bit of money, I'd personally suggest getting the SoundBlaster Live (with 5.1) instead of the Audigy... Like a couple of the other posters pointed out, you probably won't take advantage of the extra Audigy features that a Live doesn't have.

[Daedelus]

OK guys i whent to the local computer store and looked at parts and stuff see if any this stuff is any good and tell me what you think?

1)Case:Super case 400w Atx P4 w/usb2 (On sale 79.99)
2)Mother board: MSI Kt3 ultra kt-333 sa DDR usb2(didnt see any KT4)
3)CHIP: AMD Athlon XP 2100 OEM (ON SALE 105.99)
4)MEMORY: 256mb DDR400? corsair XMS
5)Hard drive: Maxtor 40 gig 7200Rpm ATA 133
6)Floppy: Teac 1.44m 3 1/2
7)CD/cdr/cdrw: MSI 48x16x48 Dragon IDE
8)Sound card:Sound blaster Live 5.1 ($35.99)
9)Speakers:Creative labs SB Inspire 4.1 4400
10)Video Card: MSI-Geforce-4 Ti4200/ti4600 128 DDR($169.99 or 269.99)
11)Monitor: 19" Realsync Flat .21 Model 996f (On Sale 209.99)
12)Router:Linksys Ether fast 4-Port DSl/CBL Router (79.99 any good?)
13)Operating System:Windows XP Home CD & Manual (95.99)

Well the price came out around 1100-1200 or something like that.
will i still need to get a net work card? Linksys 10/100 pci W/lan
And the guy at the store said the Windows XP-Pro was good for people who whant to tweak there systems and has a lot more options.But I dont know how to do any of this so it may be a waist of money?
I thought about going with the 512 ram but figure its something i can just pop in later(like a christmas present or something)just when i thought i figured out the DDR ram at 2100 & 2700 now i see a 3200 Could this be 400 bus speed?
Well take a look and tell me any comments you guys got and again thanks for all of your help

[bighead]

www.pricewatch.com

[-=C.O.P.S=-KOrruptED]

Originally posted by LA_MERC_bighead
www.pricewatch.com

Watch out for their S&H charges!!!

[LA_MERC_MadMAX]

Looks like good stuff -
I work in a computer store, and those prices are better than ours...Love that MOBO, MSI R0x0rs! I think you'll be happy with that...

[LA_MERC_Dirge]

Honestly, you can usually get free S&H if you look around. Try www.newegg.com as well. I got my GeForce Ti 4200 w/128 MB DDR for $140 back in Sept. I also got a cheaper price on my SB Live. If you look around, you can probably save 10-15% and get free FEDEX 3 day service.

[Daedelus]

yeah i thought alot about going to Price watch.com for the good prices and the shipping was i mind.but then i remembered haha i Oregon you dont have no tax every thing is exatly what the price tag is. so i figured the tax on the expensive items i might as well just shop here thanks though guys. i let you know how it goes when i get it this weekend.

[LA_MERC_Heater]

Aye,This is some very good info.I am in the market for a new puter too.I have help build acouple of them in the past,and it is nice to get read up on some of this before i make any decisions.To me trying to find the perfect parts,for the price range your looking for is all the fun!!Like a kid in a candy store.

Heater

"Maybe now,Maybe later...But soon im going to get ya!!!"