PC Upgrade

U

urb1972

Geek Trainee
How does this sound:

Intel D865PERL mobo
4gb DDR 400
P4 3.0
Nvidia 6600 256
Creative Labs Audigy 2
Seagate Barracuda 400gb HD
Aspire ATX-AS500W PSU (when I can get my hands on a 240V version)

and some nice fans and round IDE cables

p'raps in a Coolermaster case :eek:
 
Pretty cool. What are you planning on using this computer for mainly? I would suggest 2gigs over the 4 pretty much no matter what you're doing as 4gigs offers virtually no performance boost over 2 in pretty much all apps...when you concider the price. I would also recommend 2 250gig drives from Western digital over the one 400gig drive. This way you can put then in a raid array and get a major speed increase in search and load times.
Being an AMD boy I can't help but suggest going with a Athlon 3000+ and an ASUS AV8 SLI for instance over the Pentium but it's your choice. A dual-core pentium would be pretty cool, they're very cheap for what you get.
 
yea get the 3200+ and new motherboard from overclockers.co.uk, from the time i orderd my new graphics card, 15 hours later it was in my house :D, i think i will but a processor off there, even tho i dont have the right motherboard for an amd processor, but hey i can save up.

there is no were better than overclockers.co.uk

pentium 4's are pretty dear still, and lga775 3.0ghz pentium 4 is nearly £200 at some shops :eek: i have seen it for nearly £400 :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
 
totally agree, its an awesome place i totally trust them, and urb1972 i've posted in the other thread about the PSU...
willhub i have to say 15 hours is impressive...was it sent by ninja or something?
 
cheers guys,

but mobo was kinda the starting block, I've just got it you see.

If I was building from scratch, it WOULD be AMD, believe me.

Dunno about RAID Array (heard of it)...so two hd better than one?

Are WD almost as good as seagate then?

Thanks for the RAM advice too, will prob just take it up to 2 gig then.

Processor, 3.0 or worth going 'extreme'?
 
For what the extreme edition runs, it's not worth paying that much of a premium.

The RAID array would offer you two forms of RAID: RAID 0 and 1. RAID 0 is also known as striping. This takes the number of hard drives in the array times the smallest size hard drive to give you one big disk. It can increase speed, but that depends on the controller and if you actually can notice that, which you may not seeing as that it's not a proper hardware RAID controller. The main downside is that if one drive fails, you've just lost all your data since part of the data of anything is on the drive that died.
RAID 1 is also called mirroring. It takes and mirrors the smallest sized drive in the array. If one drive dies, you've got a complete backup ready to go. The downsides are the hard drive space required and that you can take a performance hit.

Before going with 2GB, I'd see how 1GB works for you. Most people are going to have hit diminishing returns before 2GB, and if you need more, you can buy more later. I mean, I don't see why you need to that out yet.
 
Cheers

memory is quite urgent though, as I have mismatched PC2100 and 3200 so I'm not sure if I'm quite 'feeling' the gig I've actually got anyway.
 
What are you going to be using it for? 4GB is still too much for what most people would need. 2GB if you're into huge design apps etc.

Your PC3200 is being held back by the 2100 module.
 
Purely for games, (but had originally bought the PERL for someone else who no longer needs it, so wouldn't be surprised if it's not a gaming board. The PCB is green not the funkier blue after all :cool: )

As its for games then, does anyone have a better (for similar or less cost) suggesting of how to optimise my system? (ideally keeping the mobo unless its REALLY a bad move, games-wise)???

Oh and a quick question, if my 2100 (512 of) is holding back my 3200 (2 x 256 of) would I be better off going down to just the 512 of 3200? Would it actually run faster (stupid question I know) on LESS, FASTER mem than on MORE, SLOWER mem (or both as I have in now)

cheers all
:confused:
 
i'm not completely sure about speed, it would run faster as PC3200 but having more RAM does have its advantages....see if you can pick up another identical 512MB P3200 and see if it will run dual channel okay, usually they do but they have to be matched pairs...
 
If that CPU has an 800MHz FSB like I think it might, then you'll want PC3200. If it's got a 533MHz FSB, then PC2100 will match up with that just fine.
 
if the cpu had 533mhz fsb, and pc3200 ddr 400 ram, it limits the ram, as thats what it did when i had the celeron d 2.8ghz, it limits it to 333mhz or somthing doesent it?
 
yeah my crappy celeron has a FSB of 100MHz...and my DDR333 ram was being held back to DDR266, so to get it up to the full 333 i have to overclock my CPU to 3.25GHz by raising my FSB to 125MHz, so far i've got it at 3.14GHz and have noticed a big difference, i would raise it more but its fine as it is, plus there's stability issues which may mean i have to raise the voltage, not a problem but i'd rather just leave it as it is.
 
willhub said:
if the cpu had 533mhz fsb, and pc3200 ddr 400 ram, it limits the ram, as thats what it did when i had the celeron d 2.8ghz, it limits it to 333mhz or somthing doesent it?
Click to expand...

Okay, this is gonna be kinda long, but bear with me.

The P4's and all Celeron's based off of it use a quad-pumped FSB. In otherwords, the base FSB frequency is multiplied by four. The CPU's clock speed is also multiplied by the base FSB frequency, not by the quad-pumped frequency (although that would kick major ass).

DDR and DDR2 are Double Data Rate, the frequency is a multiple of 2.

PC1600 or DDR200 operates off a 100MHz base frequency, resulting in 1.6GB/s bandwith. PC2100 or DDR 266 uses a 133MHz base frequency, resulting in a 2.1GB/s bandwith. PC2700 or DDR 333 starts with a 166MHz frequency; PC3200 or DDR400 starts off with a 200MHz frequency...you get the idea.

As stated before the P4 architecture uses a quad-pumped bus. The base frequency of that would be 100, 133, or 200 in most cases. This results in 400, 533 or 800MHz.

Given the same base frequency at the lowest level, you can see that a 400MHz FSB P4-based CPU requires only PC1600 if there is no overclocking, the 533MHz requires PC2100, and the 800MHz FSB only requires PC3200.
 
That's also why you'll see RAM:FSB ratios in many motherboard BIOSes. It's useful for overclocking, but it can allow you to run your RAM and FSB asynchronously. Some chipsets, like the nForce 1 and nForce 2 had a quirk in that you would take a performance hit running anything but a 1:1 ratio, even if it had the RAM running faster than the FSB. Like if you had a CPU with a 266MHz FSB, you were better off to run your PC3200 at PC2100 speeds than at full throttle.
 
urb1972 said:
Purely for games, (but had originally bought the PERL for someone else who no longer needs it, so wouldn't be surprised if it's not a gaming board. The PCB is green not the funkier blue after all :cool: )

As its for games then, does anyone have a better (for similar or less cost) suggesting of how to optimise my system? (ideally keeping the mobo unless its REALLY a bad move, games-wise)???

Oh and a quick question, if my 2100 (512 of) is holding back my 3200 (2 x 256 of) would I be better off going down to just the 512 of 3200? Would it actually run faster (stupid question I know) on LESS, FASTER mem than on MORE, SLOWER mem (or both as I have in now)

cheers all
:confused:
Click to expand...

What kind of graphics card are you currently using? Generally to enhance gaming performance one would look at 1.)CPU 2.)Memory 3.)Graphics card

As far as your memory is concerned you should try putting your 2 X 256MB(3200) sticks in the 0 and 1 memory slots and the slower 512MB(2100) in slot 2. let me know if this works or if you already had it this way.
 
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