need help with deciding what to buy for my new pc. please!

T

tomstanley

Geek Trainee
Hi i am upgrading my Pc and want to buy the following:

ASUS A7N8X SKT A Nforce2 Chipset Motherboard - £87.64 - Samsung 512mb Pc2700 333mhz Original - £81.42
Inno3D GeForce4 Ti4200 128Mb DDR AGP DVI TV-Out - £94.18
AMD ATHLON XP2100+ Boxed Inc Heatsink & Fan with 3year Warranty - £77.70
Maxtor Diamondmax 80Gb 7200rpm UIDE133 Hard Drive - Retail Pack - £71.72

this is from www.ebuyer.com
I am living in england, and these parts are good value for money. This should do the job for me, spec wise, but i have a few questions.

I want a reliable PC, which doesnt crash every few hours. Does any1 have any tips on what is compatible wiht what?

Also, when buying a GF4 graphics card, what difference does the retailer of the card make. The one i listed is from Inno3D, and is is quite cheep. But there are similar ones from Gainward which are still Ti4200 128mb but are about £70 more. What is the difference.

Also what is OEM mean, and does it mean that it doesnt come with a retail packaging?

Could someone check this site for my componants (www.ebuyer.com - you can just enter the names of the thign i am buying into the product search box) and see if they come wiht proper packaging and manuals. This would be gretly appreciated. I am not that experienced in building pcs, as i ahve only built one, which i am using now. This one is quite old and is 128mb sdram with 500mhz pentium 3. It is quite unreliable as it crashes quite often. that is why i am looking for tips on reliablity.

Any help thankfully received.
 
OEM=Original Equipment Manufacturer. You're right on the money about it not coming in retail packaging---which is nice if you don't want the software for whatever reason. They typically ship with the drivers however.

From what you've listed, it looks good. I haven't used anything by Inno3D before, so I can't say how their quality is. I'm usually for Gainward, but this time it is a good idea to skip them. Their Ti4200 cards have had some serious issues and have resulted in bad cards. Last I checked Gainward hadn't fixed, nor offically addressed the issue. If you want my opinion on a solid company, I'd check out MSI. I've used a few of their video cards and motherboards before and they are solid. They're well priced and work great.

One thing I would suggest with the setup is getting 2 x 256MB sticks of DDR. The nForce 2 chipset has a dual-channel DDR configuration, and using 2 sticks of RAM is optimal with any nF2 board.

I don't know what OS you're using currently, but going to Windows 2000 or XP would help in the stability department.

Lastly, make sure to buy a good power supply. Don't get something cheap here. Buy something good, like ones from Antec or Sparkle. Typically 300W is the bare minimum you should go anymore, but I'd say 350W wouldn't hurt. 300W is fine as long as the power supply puts out at least 180W between the 3.3 and 5V rails (listed on the power supply sticker). Going cheap here is a bad idea, since a poor power supply can affect your stability.

Expect to pay $45-80USD (about 35-50 pounds I'm guessing over there).
 
thanx

yeah thanx BigB, just a few more questiosn though:

If it doesnt come in retail packaging then hwat does it come in and what software does it come with if it does. Also if it says nothgin about OEM or retail packagin then what sort of packaging does it come with?

Also i am not going to be overclocking, but will the heatsink and fan that comes wiht the AMD Athlon be good enough to stop it overheating?
 
It will come in an anti-static bag. They should ship it in a box when they send it to you however, so it will be protected.

If you're not overclocking, the retail heatsink will be fine.
 
I would suggest buying a Western Digital hard drive instead of a Maxtor, Western is the best hard drive manufacturer, period. They are stable, they are reliable, they last long, they are the best. They although use jumpers if you wanna have more than one plugged on the same channel. Maxtor is also the only company at the time that makes hard drives supporting ata133, but I don'T think ata133 will improve your pc's performance that much over ata100. also those 8mb of cache hard drives aren'T that much more expensive compared to the normal ones (2mb of cache). (a difference of about 10$ cad for a 40gb western caviar 7200 rpm)

I have a athlon xp 2000+ with the stock heatsink/fan, it keeps the cpu temperature around 50C when idle, add about 3 degrees when on use. One time I hasd to boot and reboot several times in a row and the temperature rose to 56C but my mainboard beeped at me so I waited a couple of minutes and it came back to a normal temperature, this is the only time the mianboard beeped at me.

The temperature will vary from 49C to 53C.

I don'T know if they all have this but certain psu have two fans, one blowing heat out of the case and one blowing air into the case, they have an integrated case fan. It does not take up space in your case so I would suggest buying one of those. again they may all have this feature, when I bought mine they didn't(mine is a antec pp-352x (350w)). I paid 100$ cad at least a year ago.
 
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