My new rig

[david cummings]

okay, so on Saturday my faithful Amd Athlon 1600 died. (okay stop laughing)

so I needed a upgrade pretty quick to this is what I have gone for-

AMD 64 Athlon 3500+ venice core
MSI K8N Neo4
512mb 3200 memory (from the old PC)
250gb Hitachi HDD (from old PC) ata 133
2x WD800 disks (from old PC) ata 100
XFX 256mb 7300gs PCIe
Sony DVD RW DW-G120a Dual Layer writer.
1x80mm case fan - side panel mounted
350w pwr supply with 120mm fan

I have 2 x 120mm fan slot available - one at the front and one at the back

I have however a few questions -
1 - what do you guys think?

2 - is it worth o/c ' ing this pc?

3 - What way would you set up this pc? (hdd's etc)

4 - What if you had this, would be your next upgrade?

5 - How do I quieten down the extras fans!!

6 - would buy some 120mm fans and install them?

 

[semi-pro waster]

Welcome to the forums.

1) It is a good upgrade from what you had although as I'm sure you are aware nowhere near cutting edge.

2) See how it runs first before overclocking would be my suggestion, you should notice a big difference even at stock speeds.

3) The Hitachi is probably the fastest drive of the three so I'd use that as the boot drive, maybe partition it if you feel like it so that if Windows needs reformatted it isn't such a hassle. You could stick the page file onto one of the other drives also possibly.

4) First upgrade for me would be an extra 512mb Ram and see if you can run them in dual channel mode, second might be a new graphics card but I suppose it depends how much of a gamer you are.

5) You could undervolt the fans or run a fan controller if they are too noisy.

6) No idea at all I'm afraid.

 

[david cummings]

Yes I can run them in dual channel mode, I havent done much in years -building pc's I mean (although I work in IT support, but mainly printers)

I kinow its far from top spec but I only had £250 quid to spend seeing as it is coming up to xmas, so maybe in the new year a few upgrades!

My PC case is black, only a basic one albeit, so what fan controller would you recommend?