Should I Build Or Buy?

Gary
Im sorry but you have piqued my interest you cant stop there. You will now have to explain all till I am satisfied I can do whatever your sugestions meen
Stitch


James
Hows it going with the building work. You decided to go that rout?
Stitch

 

Okay Stitch, I'll give it a go...

Tasks:
1. Converting your PC to water-cooling is an expensive and fairly difficult task in which you put tubes in your PC and pump water through them to cool your components.
2. You can spend alot of money and put UV, neon or colored lights, fans and cables inside your PC.
3. A fan bay bus controller is a component that goes into a spare 5.25" bay with knobs to control fan speeds and a LCD temperature readout for your cpu and case temps.
4. You can change the settings for your cpu and system bus speed to make them run at a much higher speed than "normal ".
5. Air brushing pictures on your case - self-explanatory.

Benefits:
1. a. When done correctly, system cooling is much better than with air which allows you to do more of task #4.
b. Impress all your friends!
2. a. Your case will look incredibly cool if your case has a see-through panel. If not, at least you know it looks cool inside!
b. Impress all your friends!
3. a. Lets you balance system cooling with fan noise. Let's you know at every moment what your cpu and case temps are. The perfect accessory for the PC control freak!
b. Impress your friends!
4. a. Can significantly enhance the performance of your PC.
b. Impress your friends! "My cpu runs faster than yours! "
5. No benefit really except for greatly impressing your friends - but I suppose you could have guessed that! Demonic themes are always in vogue if you don't wish to paint a loved one.

All of these tasks are optional but just think how'll proud you'll be when your son tells all his friends, "my mom oc's her rig on water to a 230Mhz FSB and she's got it rigged to flash lights in sync with sound!" (and yes, that's possible). Now get busy!
Gary

 

James,
The 235W power supply will be enough for a small(ish) system as long as you don't use a full complement of PCI cards and are not using a high end (power hungry) graphics card. But I would recommend a 300W+ supply though. If you go pentium IV and want to use your existing supply then make sure it has the "square" P 4 power connector for the CPU supply. This M/B socket will be near where the CPU is. You can get an adaptor if the supply doesn't have this 12v plug. I got caught, but ended up getting a new case and supply for added cooling. Look at getting a case with a couple of case fans in it. You will probably need the extra cooling, as I found out, particularly if you go SATA hard drive.

 

Hi Stitch,
It's looking more & more like I will build my own system...But I need to read up some more before ordering any parts...Thanks for the list...


I guess I might as well order me a case and a new power supply...I might be draining my current power supply as is?...When the ambient temperatures go up a little, I have to open the case and use a small floor fan to cool things off (Gasp!). Better get more cooling as Paul says!

I have a modem, USB card, Sound card, & video card in the PCI slots...BTW, when I buy a new MB, will these PCI cards work in the new board, or do the newer boards use a different BUS system? (Never thought about that till now)

 

Bump

 

James,
Your previous post suggests you are using a PCI Video Card?
If so dump it and go AGP. You won't do a new fast system justice with an old PCI video card. No point in going cutting edge in purchasing a video card, but select a "middle ground" card with 128MB RAM onboard.

Yes your exsisting PCI cards will work OK in a new M/B.

Further to my suggestion regarding cooling. If you go SATA hard drive which is probably recommended, even if the improvement over ATA100/133 is only marginal in general use (Sisoft Sandra/AIDA32 excepted) I would suggest you mount a 80mm fan at the front of the case (internally in front of the hard drive) to blow air across the HD towards the back of the case. This will reduce the temp of the HD by 10-15 degrees C ( whatever in F?).

 

Thanks Paul....I never thought of that! (AGP)

What exactly is a SATA hard drive?...Is it a brand like Maxtor, or Western Digital?

 

SATA (Serial ATA) efectively replaces the old Parallel ATA drives, and are manufactured by most of the major brands as you mention.

The PATA drives run at 100 or 133 MB transfer rate, (maximum, not expected) earlier PATA drives ran at 16, 33 and 66MBs and the new SATA drives have a maximum transfer rate of 150 MBs. In reality though there is only a little difference as stated earlier.

SATA drives run hotter (like SCSI drives) hence the need for better case cooling.

SATA drives don't use the M/B's IDE BUS quite like the PATA drives do, but they efectively remap themselves to an IDE BUS whilst using the new Serial connection on motherboards which I have no idea why except it may be related to a requirement in the current BIOS technology still used in Motherboards?

If you go SATA make sure the M/B also supports it, 'else you will have to use a converter and loose the added transfer speed benefit.

 

Thanks for the nugget Paul....I thought I had most of this figured out, but I will do more research.

I would presume that the HD's available today are of the SATA type?

 

James - SATA and PATA drives are all quite available. SATA is kinda new and I don't know all the ins and outs of the subject but check out this article and don't think you should worry about SATA vs. PATA at this point. SATA vs. PATA

 

Thanks Bob,
I printed the article for reference.

 

Interesting article Bob, even if the reviewer is sitting on the fence regarding which way to go.

All I need now is an article to explain why SATA is remapped to an IDE (or virtual IDE) port in BIOS.

James, even if you decide to stay with PATA I would get a SATA capable M/B though. If SATA-2 is better, then hopefully all the M/B will need is a BIOS flash upgrade to support SATA-2 (if any?), and that's easy and free to do.