Right mother board

S

spaceghostctoc

Geek Trainee
I love my games and graphic and im getting ready to start building the new pc, YEA!!!

K i wanted to stick w/ the 2's

2.0 GHZ processor, not sure which one yet
200mb raided hard drives
2. gig of ram, depends on board, ddr or rambus...


what is a good board w/ onboard raid?? and usb2 if possible.

Thanks

This is mainly for gaming and graphics, getting a xtasy g4 ti4600 also.
 
Questions for you:

Do you need 2GB of RAM?
Which RAID are you planning to do? RAID 0 or RAID 1?
What types of graphics do you do?
What OS do you plan to run?
How much are you willing to spend?
 
money no problem!!!

well im over running low on ram and i figured might was well get a shit load and have it out of the way, graphics i want it to run fast, i mean i play all kinds of games online, rtcw, moh, got the ut2k3 demo, and im getting like 20fps, which is crappy, so i know its time to upgrade, im know im going w/ the g4 ti4600, and i got all my cd rom drives covered...im stuck on athlon or p4....which mean either ddr or rambus?? and my board....im not sure in the difference in the raids? i would like onboard, but i can use a card if possible...my major question is which is better for me athlon or p4 and if so which chip sent and mother board...

thanks for all ur help...i havent built a pc for 4 years, so im kind of behind but i know what i want, i just knwo the motherboard is the most important part of the pc, and i dotn want to go cheap on that.


thanks
joel
 
For what you're doing, 2GB of RAM is still overkill. 512MB will be fine to start with. If you feel you need more, you can always buy more stuff later. You can also buy DDR of the P4. However, if you want the best performance from it, you'll want to get RDRAM.

I made a sticky with a lot of information regarding everything you wanted and didn't want to know about PC's.http://forums.zone365.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=492

Assuming you use 2 hard drives and get a board with on-board RAID, I'll go over the functions.

RAID 0: Striping: this makes the hard drives appear as double the smallest sized hard drive (good reason to buy the same ones). If the data is like this: 123456789; it's written like this: [Disk1:13579], [Disk2:2468].
The main advantage is speed, with no redundancy. If any disk in a RAID 0 array fails, everything is toast.

RAID 1: Mirroring: if you have 2 40GB hard drives, as an example, you will only have 40GB of space with RAID 1.
It writes the data [123456789] to both drives at once: Drive1:123456789], [Drive2:123456789], making it redundant. If one drive goes, you'll only be down a hard drive, not your data.

Personally, I've used a RAID 0 setup and it's not all that in the on-board stuff. It's not worth it, in my opinion. I do look for on-board RAID however, as they can still be used as an extra IDE controller.

There are 2 different companies you'll run into: Promise and Highpoint. I like Highpoint because the controllers are very flexible and you can use them as extra IDE controllers w/o issue.

For the motherboards (finally)
if you're looking into a P4 box, check out the i845 (DDR) boards or the i850 (RDRAM). You cannot go wrong with an Intel chipset.
For Athlon boxes, one of the most stable chipsets is the nForce. On your end of

Abit's TH7-II RAID would be right up you're alley for the P4/RDRAM combo.
The other one to consider would be the Asus P4T-E. Both use the i850 chipset and are widely hailed as the best out their. The Asus does not have RAID however. Abit does and uses a HighPoint chip.
 
woh 2gb ram thats way to much for normal gaming but if you have a fast connection and gonna built a deticated server for online gaming it its good to have much ram.
And for ure cpu I would say go with a Athlon if you only do gaming on the pc, they are alot cheaper so u can spend that money on other things like a good surround system ;)
 
I'll finish what I started (monitor started going bad all of a sudden:().

The Abit NV7-133R is a very good Athlon motherboard, and it uses the nForce 415 chipset. If you buy this, or any nForce board, make sure to buy 2 sticks of RAM, as this chipset is designed with dual- DDR controllers. I can recommend this board as I've had it for nearly 4 months and went for a whole month without rebooting (and then only for service updates). As the 2GHz Athlon chips are coming out (2600+) with a 333MHz front side bus, you may want to wait for the nForce 2 and KT400 boards that are supposed to come out soon.

A couple other boards that seem to be pretty good are the MSI KT3 Ultra ARU---which has all of what you want, or the Abit KX7-333R---which has the RAID. These both use the Via KT333 chipset.
 
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