Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Need new computer

That's the only real thing that I'm working on at the moment. My computer has issues and I want to get something faster as mine is completely maxed out and the components are starting to show their age. My Barton has spent at least 95% of its life overclocked and most of that time running Seti@Home or some similar distributed computing program. I am now getting weird fatal errors on a regular basis that are hardware related; I reclocked my CPU to a much lower speed and most of them have gone away but they still happen. A windows reinstall didn't help much either. So I am building a new machine this week.

Here are the components that will be in it:
DFI LANparty UT SLI-DR mobo
$135.50 on ebay
I like the DFI's performance and the tons of extra features that it has, and it was a really good price with tons of accessories
AMD Venice 3000+ CPU
Price negligible
I've had one for months hoping to build a system and finally have a good excuse now.
ATI Radeon X600 Pro Video Card
$75 on ebay
I like ATI stuff, it interfaces with my HD card, I needed a PCI-express card, wanted at least 256MB of RAM, and the price was right
Maxtor 200GB HD (ATA133 with 16MB cache)
Pulling it from my Barton system, its performance isn't bad and it's available
Generic 1GB RAM (2x512)
Pulled from my old system, stressed tested it in another machine to make sure it's good, overclocks well
ATI HD Wonder card
Isn't going to be available for long as it does its job too well and studios are suing to make it extinct
LiteOn 12x DVD/RW drive
Pulled from Barton, works well

Out of pocket this transitional system is fairly cheap and should perform well. The first components to be upgraded will be the RAM, followed by the harddrive, then the Vid card. That should hold me over until I need dual layer DVD burning capabilities or a dual core CPU. It will be running WinXP Pro w/i SP2 and Office2003 Pro.

I'll have Florida updates up within the week but I've been kinda busy lately and start my new job on Sunday.

4 comments:

Matt said...

Sounds cool. Similar to my system except I have a cheaper Mobo, better Proc and different Vid card.

Neemund said...

I've already established that I can run the FSB @ 250 without any problem @ default multiplier. If I reset the multiplier to 12 instead of 9 it says that I have an Athlon 3800+ proc in my BIOS. Actually I lied, my next addition to my system will me a Thermalright XP-90c heatsink with a 120mm fan for better overclocking potential.

Unknown said...

And now everyone officially has a better computer then me...

This must change.

No! Must... resist... urge... to... spend... money...

Neemund said...

One feature that the DFI lacks that I really wish it didn't is a manual CPU multiplier setting on the board, either with dip switches or jumpers since all but the FX Athlons have locked multipliers. So right now the best I can do with my CPU is 250x9 or a 25% overclock. I'm not going to push it past that (or probably to that point) until I get a good HSF since I only have my Barton cooler at the moment. Robbie's motherboard allows for a multiplier override but the rest of the board sucks, being an nForce3 chipset without the cool toys like 7.1 sound, T1000 ethernet, or the voltage regulators needed for heavy overclocking (like in the 300mhz FSB range). If I can run 333mhz then I've essentially got my $100 3ghz processor.