Grandad needs help with upgrade

ALienBC

ALienBC

ALienBC

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16 Jan 2003
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170
Ok, not grandad. But you young whippersnappers prolly know a lot more than me about the current newfangled pop beat combo puter thingers. And this is a bit complicated :) Right, so:

PC1:

shuttle sn41g2
barton 2500
1 gb so-so RAM
onboard gfx
geforce 6600gt that won't run now cos I don't have enough power (it's killed 2 psus already, though I did manage to finish HL2 before it died :)
hdd, etc

Current usage: games (well, not since the 6600 stopped behaving); office productivity for work; sound (soundforge/sound creation, occasional recording); 3d modelling & texturing

PC2:

asus a7v
athlon tbird 1100 (but only runs at 800 cos i chipped the core a couple of years ag0)
768mb pc133 cas 2
geforce 2 (irrelevant though, see below)
maxi studio isis (this used to be my main sound recording PC)
330w enermax psu
coolermaster case thing, the one that isn't particularly cool or quiet
hdd, etc

Current usage: this was my "music" PC - used for multitracking with the isis. Today it just sits hosting a game server, and making a lot of noise.


PC3: "the other half's"

Abit
Duron 600
512mb PC133
300w psu that's incredibly generic, and prolly dead thanks to the 6600 above
hdd, etc


PC4: "totally dead"

Shuttle sn25
Celery D 900
Some RAM
Some drives
Onboard gfx

Current usage: Hope. As in, it oughta ******* work but it always borks during any kind of OS install. It'll sit at a DOS prompt for days on end, but it now hates Windows. Used to be a NAT server. Now it Guards The Wardrobe Full Of Spare And Dead Bits.


So (apologies for the rambling)... I need a work PC - I work from home, and it's mostly Word and Powerpoint and the usual office rubbish. I need a powerful machine for 3d and 2d art. I need something I can play games on, if only for a day or so until I go "oh jesus, they're all the same, what's the point". I need something I can use for multitrack sound recording. And I need something that can host the game server 24x7.

And... most important... I need SILENCE. I'm fed up of working in a wind tunnel :)

I know it's all a bit vague, but with all this conroe stuff and particularly the offer on the Titan this week, I got all excited. And then realised I don't have the first clue about PC hardware any more. Ahh, I remember the celery 300a. Now that was overclocking :)

Anyway - sound cards and gfx cards and that I can prolly sort out. I'm more interested in recommendations for a) the number of PCs and b) the basic platform they run on... any ideas?

abc
 
Errrm, you can get that all in one rig. Conroe E6600 (for overclocking) or higher if you have the money/don't want to clock. 2Gb Ram, X1900XT-X, 150Gb Raptor for apps/games/systems and 2x300Gb HDs in RAID 1.

Thats a rather decent system, but It will set you back abit. The X1900XT-X can get noisey but if you get the HIS version with the custom cooler all is good :)

You only need one rig tbh. If you do multiple work then Kentsfield in December/Jan will sort that issue.

But Conroe should suit your needs.

CR.
 
It's a good point. I come from the "one PC for one job" kinda school of thought. Even though they're supposed to be multifunctional devices. As in, I'm hosting an entire galaxy (http://theuniversal.net) fulltime, and nothing I do should impact the performance of that system. On the other hand, it doesn't need much power... maybe I should be looking at one tiny, low-powered PC using whatever I can cobble together to do that. And then splurge on something stupid for everything else...

abc
 
Well, get a PCI/AGP card for the PC1 that won't make it blow up :p A 7000 Pro or a X300 or something equally passivly cooled will do.


Then spend LOADS on a Conroe/Kentsfield rig. (Then i can come round :p)

Job done :D

CR.
 
True, true. Let's say £1500 tops :)

Actually... do we know if OC are planning to make full systems available with Conroe? I'd assume so... I used to be into system building and overclocking; these days I just want something that's stable, fast and quiet.

abc
 
Ok so you need a machine for your wife. You can cobble one out of what you have there currently.

You also need a machine for work and hosting the game server.

For £1500 you can buy an absolute monster. Is this budget for just a base unit or for a monitor as well? I'll assume its for just the base unit.

CP-128-IN Intel Core 2 DUO E6600 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail (CP-128-IN)
£214.95 £214.95
MB-010-IN Intel Extreme D975bx-304 975X (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard - OEM (MB-010-IN)
£129.95 £129.95
MY-012-GS G.Skill 2GB DDR2 LA PC2-5400 (2x1GB) CAS4 Dual Channel Kit (F2-5400PHU2-2GBLA) (MY-012-GS)
£91.95 £183.90
GX-053-HT HIS Excalibur ATI Radeon X1900 XT ICEQ 3 SILENT Heatpipe 512MB GDDR3 AVIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-053-HT)
£229.95 £229.95
HD-078-SE Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB ST3320620AS SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (HD-078-SE)
£62.95 £125.90
CD-053-LO Liteon SHW-16H5S-05C 16x Lightscribe DVD±RW (Black) - OEM (CD-053-LO)
£25.95 £25.95
CA-058-AN Antec Solo Quiet Mini Tower Case - No PSU (CA-058-AN)
£55.30 £55.30
CA-025-EN Enermax Liberty 500W ELT500AWT ATX2.2 Modular SLI Compliant PSU (CA-025-EN)
£59.95 £59.95
SC-031-CL Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro - Retail (SC-031-CL)
£163.95 £163.95
Subtotal £1,189.80
VAT £208.22
Total £1,398.02

Way under budget but it would be way more than enough for what you want to do.
 
mm, nice. Thanks for that. I'd scrap the Creative soundcard... unless they've finally made a proper recording card that can handle more than one stereo input at once (my old Isis was 4/2, which is a minimum really).

I've got DVD RW (though not litescribe, but who cares). Another small saving :)

Monitor, hmm.... I'm using a 20 inch Hitachi LCD that's a few years old now. Response time is something woeful like 25ms but I've got used to it...
 
4Gig of ram will only help if you have a 64bit version of windows, and an AMD64 or EM64T compatible processor.

32bit processors are limited to 4meg, unless you use a hack like PAE which hurts performance, and introduces a bunch of compatibility problems.

If you put 4gig in a system running a 32bit edition of Windows XP, then your programs will always be trapped in a 2gig userspace anyway. There is a 'hack' which can force XP to allow 3gig to be used by 'userspace' programs, but unfortunatly the programs have to be compiled with this in mind. Very few applications are designed with this hack in mind. MS SQL server being the most 'well known' example.

It's virtually pointless to have more than 2GB ram in a Windows XP 32bit system.
 
Though it might be limited to 2 GiB per process if he runs a multi-threaded application each thread can use up to 2 GiB. It depends on what one is doing with the machine.

He could run XP or Vista in a 64 bit environment.
 
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