New Pc

[Maz]

Been thinking about of building a new PC for the new house, been looking through, and thing a bit different from the last time i builded 1, what is NVIDIA® GeForce™ 7800 like, its very expensive, but its any good? (SLI sound interesting, it seem like going back to days with the Voodoo graphic cards where u link 2 together for better performance), also which CPU will people go for nowaday? i been using the AMD cpu for a while now, what is the new AMD - Athlon 64 (Socket 939) - Single Core compare to the Intel Pentium® 4 LGA 775 (500 & 600 series)? any ideas from our club computer experts?????

btw it will be mainly for gaming and surfing internet....

[Brettster]

Whatever you buy, will be out of date in 6 months anyway lol

but the AMD 64 chips seem to be very good at the moment, duel core cpu's will be the norm in 2 years time but for now, i doubt they will get much support, the gfx card is very nice, as is the new upcoming ATI card which also has built in hardware support for hi def video playback too.

if you want to play games at their very best then you can have 2 cards together, but unless you have a huge monitor and want to run at the highest res then i think 1 card is all you need right now.

also dont forget to get a decent sound card. the built in ones seem flakey at best when it comes to compatibility with all games, Id go for the new creative X-fi card, supports hardware hi def sound and will take some of the strain off the main CPU.

I would say AMD 64 cpu, 2 gig ram, ATI 520 based gfx card (you can link 2 of these) creative x-fi, 8 meg ADSL net connection.

[Maz]

can u recommand any place i can get those bits cheap Brett?

and cheer for the informs matey... :) :) :) :)

[Kremmen]

If I was going to build right now I would probably go with the new AMD Dual Core processor (for future proofing).

I would also agree with above and stick with a single GPU although I am tempted by the new NVidia 7800 myself.

They reckon that at the mo SLI can actually cause some applications to work slower.

[Maz]

just 1 thing guys, isnt the AMD single core is faster than the dual core?

[Brettster]

for the most part the dual core will be unused, until things catch up and the new version of windows vista comes out in oct 06, there wont be much that will make use of 2 cores, and by then what ever cpu you get now will be out of date. I guess it really depends on the type of games you want to play too, Im more than happy to play games on a console and use my PC for everything else.

as for places to buy the bits hmmm really got to use more than one place for the best deals but i like to use

www.ebuyer.com

www.scan.co.uk

www.cclcomputers.co.uk

[Maz]

here are some link of the single and dual core AMD cpu Brett, can u see the different bewteen them?

dual core X2

single core

[Brettster]

they both have a silly price tag !! and the dual core one runs at 2 ghz and the single core one runs at 2.6 ghz, but that speed is not the same as how intel rate their cpu's

an intel 3.6 ghz P4 runs at that speed, but the AMD chips run slower but perform more like a 4.8 ghz pentium 4 in the case of the dual core chip. but I would guess you would really need software to take full advantage of the dual cores to get that kind of speed.

the bottom line is at the moment the single core AMD chip would outperform the dual core one with todays OS and Games etc.

[Maz]

I know they are silly money, so i may just build the rest of the system up and go for a cheaper single core for now, does single and dual core use the same type of motherboard? or they use different type?

may go for this...

[Ryo]

was just going to say cclcomputers, but u bet me too it , bloody cheap stuff there, plus they got a sale on at the mo, (stuff not on their web site)

Steve

[Maz]

ok, ordered the CPU,MB,Case,Graphic card, now i need hard drives, can u guys recommand 1 that is good? looking for a 160-200gb SATA drive, (IBM, Samsung, Seagate, Maxtor DiamondMax, Western Digital????), and what about network card, im using Netgear atm, may carry on with them again as they are pretty good (bit expensive)

[stevenage_saint]

I built mine earlier this year with an athlon 64 have to say this the 3rd AMD processor i have had and been impressed with it. WOrks really well. It could be worth trying

http://www.komplett.co.uk

or

http://www.lowestonweb.com

as they do some good bundles, I got my athlon64, Abit motherboard and 1GB DDR duel channel memory for something like £320, and it was branded memory too. I saved about £40 on it

[Maz]

Thank matey, got most of the bits i needed now, just waiting for the motherboard and cpu to come, already got some ram from last year, just need to find out what ASDL modem/router to go for then im all set....hehe :) :) :) :) :)

[Brettster]

Tony

Ive always had no problems with Netgear stuff

I use it myself

get a nice ADSL Wireless Router and your sorted for using a PSP or anything else wireless with your net connection.

[stevenage_saint]

I would agree with Brettster on netgear. I orignally went for Linksys as it is Cisco and just had nothing but problems and I am not the only one a few people in work have had similar faults, we have now switched to netgear now and have not had the same problems