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SomethingClever
12-06-2005, 08:15 PM
Ok, it only took me about 2 years to finally upgrade. My old CPU is literally held together by duct tape at this point. Here's what I got.

ASRock 939 Dual SATA2 mobo - $68

I went with this mobo because it supports both PCI-E and AGP. I have a 9800 Pro AGP card right now that I want to keep using instead of paying to upgrade. In the future I want a PCI-E, so this seemed like the right way to go.

Athlon 64 3700+ - $233

It was between this and the 3200. I thought, hell, I'm going to keep this system for a while... might as well spend the $70 extra to get the faster chip and bigger L2 cache.

Antec Sonata Case - $99

Comes with 450W power supply, which I'm told is solid.

1 gig Corsair Value Select RAM - $74

The mobo only accepts PC3200 ram, and this seemed OK.

37 gig Raptor HD - $104

This should speed up PT.

320 gig WD Caviar 7200 rpm - $130

Needed more space than just the system drive.

How'd I do?

Total cost was around $700 before shipping.

wonderwes
12-06-2005, 09:07 PM
I give you a 9.0. Buy a cheap pci slot fan to go right next to your video card for exhaust. You will start to fall in love with your Antec Sonata case. They are great.

SomethingClever
12-06-2005, 09:35 PM
Sweet! What's holding me back from 10, though? Is it just that fan?

wonderwes
12-07-2005, 12:35 AM
I think for gaming, a p4 produces better than an athlon 64. Now I have owned many AMD chips, but I always just like to stick with intel. I am not big on benchmark scores. If it runs clockwork, then it runs fine for me. Like I said, you love your new Sonata case. Its so quiet.

Sean D
12-07-2005, 01:33 AM
Nice setup. Looks like you had a reason for what you bought, and you did your research. Good system for the money. Do you plan on overclocking?

For spending under $700, I give it a 10/10

Nomad84
12-07-2005, 02:23 AM
[ QUOTE ]
Like I said, you love your new Sonata case. Its so quiet.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yup. I just built an Athlon X2 3800+ system with a Sonata II case. It's great to work with and super super quiet. Even with everything else in my apartment off, I can't even hear it running. Looks nice too. I've heard the doors are a bit fragile on the original Sonatas. I guess people would bump them when they were open and knock them past 180 degrees and break them. The Sonata II allows it to swing all the way open. Other than that and the air duct to the processor, I can't remember what the differences were.

SomethingClever
12-07-2005, 12:55 PM
[ QUOTE ]
Do you plan on overclocking?


[/ QUOTE ]

Not sure, but I kind of doubt it. I need the system to be extremely stable.

This will already be so much faster than what I'm running that I don't think I'll need to worry about OCing.

Rick Nebiolo
12-07-2005, 01:42 PM
[ QUOTE ]
37 gig Raptor HD - $104

This should speed up PT.

320 gig WD Caviar 7200 rpm - $130

Needed more space than just the system drive.

[/ QUOTE ]

This combo of small, fast (it's SCSI whatever right?) primary drive combined with a slower big secondary drive makes lots of sense. I'd move most normal data (e.g. My Documents, perhaps a dedicated music/photo/video partition) to a partition or partitions in the big slow drive. In this drive I'd also keep a partition for Norton Ghost Images of the C: drive. With Pokertracker it's a pain in the neck to move/set up needed data files out of C:.

Some people keep the Swapfile in a dedicated partition at the beginning of the second drive. With the first drive being much faster I'm not sure this is a good idea.

Keep enough room to always have two weekly backups of C: in the Ghost Image partition (Ghost only compresses to about 70%, e.g. C: drive is 20 gigs of actual op/program/settings/PT data image file(s) will be about 14gigs). I got lazy and only had one image because my partition wasn't big enough. This killed me when I suspected the one image may have had a hidden trojan that possibly caused my ever increasing and ultimately fatal shutdown problems so I ended up rebuilding from scratch when I had this and other problems.

The upside of Ghost Images is you can get back every setting after a hard disk crash or for other reasons (e.g. I maintain someone elses machine and had it clean of all poker programs, so when getting the old rakeback for Empire/Coral etc I was able to always get back to a clean machine after loading and signing up for the poker sites).

Google "radified norton ghost" for a very good guide. Radified also has IMHO great tips on building a fast, stable system, something you appear to value.


[ QUOTE ]
Total cost was around $700 before shipping.

[/ QUOTE ]


Are you building this yourself or is there a vendor who will build this nice a rig for you?

~ Rick

SomethingClever
12-07-2005, 02:08 PM
Thanks for the tip. My current backup plan consists of burning DVDs of all my important data every few months, which is probably not ideal.

I'll be building this myself as much as possible, although I have a friend who does this sort of thing for a living who can help out if I get in a jam.

I've built several Frankenstein systems in the past, so I'm hoping this one goes as smoothly as most have.

The worst problem I had to deal with was on my current rig. The chip was DOA when I built it. Took forever to figure out what the problem was.

Also, this would obviously cost more than $700 if I had to buy everything, but I'm saving on the video card and other peripherals (monitor, printer, keyboard, mouse, etc) because I've already got them.

Rick Nebiolo
12-07-2005, 03:21 PM
[ QUOTE ]
Thanks for the tip. My current backup plan consists of burning DVDs of all my important data every few months, which is probably not ideal.

[/ QUOTE ]

Burning DVDs is fine for data (but a pain compared to an external HD or partition on second internal disk) but no good for WinXP and Progams on the C: Drive (keep in mind putting My Documents, Address Book, Favorites, and saved Emails on another disk isn't a problem).

The beauty of DOS based Ghost 2003 is that it takes a perfect snapshot of a known good setup. If you lose your drive you can get EVERY last program setting on the day you made the last image.


[ QUOTE ]
I'll be building this myself as much as possible, although I have a friend who does this sort of thing for a living who can help out if I get in a jam.

I've built several Frankenstein systems in the past, so I'm hoping this one goes as smoothly as most have.

The worst problem I had to deal with was on my current rig. The chip was DOA when I built it. Took forever to figure out what the problem was.

[/ QUOTE ]

The main building issue that scares me is seating the processor correctly (especially after recent shutdown problems). I might go with a tested MB/processor combo if I build myself in a few years.

~ Rick

Nomad84
12-07-2005, 09:29 PM
[ QUOTE ]
The main building issue that scares me is seating the processor correctly (especially after recent shutdown problems). I might go with a tested MB/processor combo if I build myself in a few years.

~ Rick

[/ QUOTE ]

This was my biggest concern about putting together my computer also, especially since it was my first build. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was. No force was required to seat the processor. I just set it in place and pushed a lever to lock it down. Attaching the heatsink was a bit difficult due to lack of space in the case, but it wasn't really bad at all. Everything went smoothly with the provided instructions. This was with a retail box AMD socket 939 processor.