upgrading time!

[Daz]

hey guys wondering if anyone can give me any advice as to the following spec i am currently about to buy

asus A7V8X-X socket A motherboard
Athlon XP3200+
512Mb DDR (PC3200) 400
128MB XFX TI4200 8X AGP Turbo
36GB IBM SCSI Drive - Ultra 320

is it worth

[Ivan]

err what does the pound against the euro?

Dump the SCSI HD if you don't have a controller for it as the mobo doesn't have one. you can get almost twice the size for the same money if buying a IDE HD

Are you planning to upgrade it in the future? if so, buy a single 512MB DDR strip. if not, buy 2 256MB DDR strips.

[Daz]

cheers ivan i will plan to upgrade that in future so i will stick to 512......i dont realy need anything more than 40 gig anyways so i want the fastest one out

[Ivan]

Your onboard ATA-133 is almost equal in speed to the SCSI adaptor...

It's not the protocol, it's the drive hardware itself that makes the speed, and IDE still delivers a good (if not better) performance for a lot less money.

And most important: you need a PCI-64 slot (twice as long, often other way around because of the voltage position gap) to get the maximum speed (320MBps) out of those cards, and as the normal consumer motherboards don't have those, you will only get problems with it not fitting (last half of the connector sticks out at the end) and less speed (160MBps, which is awfully close to the rated 133MBps of the onboard IDE)

The trick with the DDR modules is this one: if you have 2 modules of the same type (capacity, per-chip capacity, CAS latency) in the special marked slots, it will give 5-10% more performance in memory-intensive applications (Gaming etc.)
But if you are planning to upgrade the memory amount just stick to one, and buy an IDENTICAL one (capacity, CAS and per-chip capacity) when you upgrade

[Daz]

cheers ivan much appreciated after looking at what u say IDE does sound more tempting now and will only cost fraction of the price.. thanks again

[Chi_San]

SCSI is more effective when you have an array of drives, as in, a RAID array with 4 drives in it. One SCSI drive alone will be much slower than an IDE drive of similar capacity. If you get several small SCSI drives and put them in a RAID array, you'll have one loud, hot, fast data storage media. If you have one ATA 100 or ATA 133 IDE drive, you will have quiet, cooler, fast data storage media.

[4_Series_Scania]

[quote]hey guys wondering if anyone can give me any advice as to the following spec i am currently about to buy

asus A7V8X-X socket A motherboard
Athlon XP3200+
512Mb DDR (PC3200) 400
128MB XFX TI4200 8X AGP Turbo
36GB IBM SCSI Drive - Ultra 320

is it worth

[Daz]

yeah but the ti4200 turbo can be tweaked on par with standard ti4600 plus i get a joypad and 2 full games with it for

[AndyG]

I'd definitely back the comments about the graphics card, and can recommend the FX5200 128mb ram from experience.  Also go for as much ram as you can afford, it seems to be relatively cheap again at the moment; I'm running an Athlon 2600+, FX5200 and 1 gb of ram, and it pretty much deals with whatever I throw at it, including more addon scenery than I care to think about.  With some tweaked settings I'm getting 40 fps in CFS3 now!