I want to upgrade my computer, and my boyfriend's needs a complete overhaul. Basically, I am giving him my parts and getting myself better ones.
my main problem is knowing what [part] goes with this [part]. Can anyone guide me?
Puttin it together
- Thread starter SwissSmiss
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Smiss, why don't you call over here one evening and let C walk you thru it...
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"I suspect that many an ailurophobe hates cats only because he feels they are better people than he is; more honest, more secure, more loved, more whatever he is not."
--Winifred Carriere
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"I suspect that many an ailurophobe hates cats only because he feels they are better people than he is; more honest, more secure, more loved, more whatever he is not."
--Winifred Carriere
silly, i can't get out there just now. but there isn't anything i need c to "walk" me through. I just dont understand some of the terminology and stuff. kinda like this kind of thing: i am thinking about a P4 or a Thunderbird. What do I need to have/look for in the way of mobos, and what affects what kind of RAM i get, and do any of these things affect the video and audio card? i mean, at least putting them in the box...
I didn't say come over, goofball, I said CALL.
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"I suspect that many an ailurophobe hates cats only because he feels they are better people than he is; more honest, more secure, more loved, more whatever he is not."
--Winifred Carriere
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"I suspect that many an ailurophobe hates cats only because he feels they are better people than he is; more honest, more secure, more loved, more whatever he is not."
--Winifred Carriere
Smiss> While I can't help with the terminology if I don't know where you're confused, I can help with some recommendations.
I would go with an AMD-based machine before I went near a P4. Performance is still lagging with the P4 since there aren't many optimized applications written for it just yet, and it's a dog in performance with non-optimized applications.
In addition, you're currently bound to RAMBUS with the P4 which, aside from being ridiculously expensive, has the technical dilema of having a ton of bandwidth being held back by high latency.
With either a Thunderbird or Duron, you have the choice of either SDRAM or DDR. The CPU costs less, the memory costs less, and at the same clock speed, they're usually faster than a P4.
I would tend to think that, unless you're playing 3D games with very high power requirements, doing software development, or rendering 3D images or video, you may not realize that a Duron will be more than fast enough for your needs and will cost you a fraction of what a T-bird costs you. And a year down the road, if you need a CPU upgrade, you can probably just pop in the T-bird you need, if they're still around then.
The motherboard you would select depends on your needs. Do you just need a simple, stable board with no bells and whistles, or do you need a board with features handy for overclockers?
What motherboard you choose will determine what kind of RAM you need. If you can, I would go for a board that supports DDR, since it's faster for about the same price as SDRAM, and it seems to be the direction the industry is heading in.
As for your video and sound card, it only depends on what kind of card they are. Chances are that, if you have a relatively recent video card, it's either PCI or AGP, and you shouldn't have a problem with either. The sound card depends on whether it's ISA or PCI. If it's PCI, you're in the clear. If it's ISA, you may have to change your motherboard choice, or upgrade to a PCI sound card. ISA is being phased out across the industry, so motherboards are coming with fewer and fewer ISA slots, sometimes not including them at all.
If you have any questions about the above, or if I've raised new questions, let me know. I tend to get more technical than I should sometimes.
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I would go with an AMD-based machine before I went near a P4. Performance is still lagging with the P4 since there aren't many optimized applications written for it just yet, and it's a dog in performance with non-optimized applications.
In addition, you're currently bound to RAMBUS with the P4 which, aside from being ridiculously expensive, has the technical dilema of having a ton of bandwidth being held back by high latency.
With either a Thunderbird or Duron, you have the choice of either SDRAM or DDR. The CPU costs less, the memory costs less, and at the same clock speed, they're usually faster than a P4.
I would tend to think that, unless you're playing 3D games with very high power requirements, doing software development, or rendering 3D images or video, you may not realize that a Duron will be more than fast enough for your needs and will cost you a fraction of what a T-bird costs you. And a year down the road, if you need a CPU upgrade, you can probably just pop in the T-bird you need, if they're still around then.
The motherboard you would select depends on your needs. Do you just need a simple, stable board with no bells and whistles, or do you need a board with features handy for overclockers?
What motherboard you choose will determine what kind of RAM you need. If you can, I would go for a board that supports DDR, since it's faster for about the same price as SDRAM, and it seems to be the direction the industry is heading in.
As for your video and sound card, it only depends on what kind of card they are. Chances are that, if you have a relatively recent video card, it's either PCI or AGP, and you shouldn't have a problem with either. The sound card depends on whether it's ISA or PCI. If it's PCI, you're in the clear. If it's ISA, you may have to change your motherboard choice, or upgrade to a PCI sound card. ISA is being phased out across the industry, so motherboards are coming with fewer and fewer ISA slots, sometimes not including them at all.
If you have any questions about the above, or if I've raised new questions, let me know. I tend to get more technical than I should sometimes.
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DD: i just recently heard about the AMD outperforming the intel chips. i just wanted to gather as much information as i can. i was considering the thunderbird over the duron because a friend of mine has found a small price difference between the two. why not go for more? i dont play ANY games really, but i am the assistant programmer for a (very small) software company. But that isn't an issue with my machine, since what i currently have is much better than the ones at work.
so right now i have a celeron, 128 ram (sdram if i am not mistaken), voodoo3 with tv out (thats all i know about it), diamond monster sound card, and a tyan motherboard but i cant remember the model right about now.
i guess i just don't know what questions to ask.
so right now i have a celeron, 128 ram (sdram if i am not mistaken), voodoo3 with tv out (thats all i know about it), diamond monster sound card, and a tyan motherboard but i cant remember the model right about now.
i guess i just don't know what questions to ask.
Smiss> Because for most tasks that home users typically perform (Word, e-mail, web surfing, occasional games), the performance difference between a Duron and same speed T-bird is less than the price difference.
IOW, you're paying a little extra for what will likely be no performance gain.
Now, the fastest Duron available is only 900MHz, but that's way faster than 90% of the population actually needs. Anything above that is just for bragging rights. Unless you're compiling massive amounts of code, or rendering 3D scenes that have render times in the hours, then the extra speed is wasted.
You would be much better off taking the $30 you save on a Duron, and investing it in an extra 128MB of RAM, or putting it towards a better video card, because you'll end up with much better overall system performance.
With CPU speeds where they are now, the CPU is not the bottleneck for most tasks. Usually, the disk and memory systems are what choke while the CPU sits waiting for things to come it's way.
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IOW, you're paying a little extra for what will likely be no performance gain.
Now, the fastest Duron available is only 900MHz, but that's way faster than 90% of the population actually needs. Anything above that is just for bragging rights. Unless you're compiling massive amounts of code, or rendering 3D scenes that have render times in the hours, then the extra speed is wasted.
You would be much better off taking the $30 you save on a Duron, and investing it in an extra 128MB of RAM, or putting it towards a better video card, because you'll end up with much better overall system performance.
With CPU speeds where they are now, the CPU is not the bottleneck for most tasks. Usually, the disk and memory systems are what choke while the CPU sits waiting for things to come it's way.
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DieselDan
$30 is worth that.
hehe
i do already intend to get a 256 stick of ram. bf gets the 128. i didnt ever really consider a new video card... so that would help with my dvd player performance? (even a little) and then i want a bigger hard drive. what do i look for regarding one that isn't all slow-like?
WaterB> I'm just looking for picking the parts. Putting them in is zero problem for me.
$30 is worth that.
i do already intend to get a 256 stick of ram. bf gets the 128. i didnt ever really consider a new video card... so that would help with my dvd player performance? (even a little) and then i want a bigger hard drive. what do i look for regarding one that isn't all slow-like?
WaterB> I'm just looking for picking the parts. Putting them in is zero problem for me.
Depends.
Some video cards have hardware-assisted DVD decoding features, so yes, it would help your DVD performance.
However, with that speed a CPU, a software-decoder would play movies with more than adequate performance, unless you're planning on playing 3D games in a window while watching a movie at the same time.
If you can get away with software decoding, the $30 would definitely get you a step up on your hard drive. $30 would be the difference between a 5400RPM drive and a 7200RPM drive, which is a significant performance difference. Or $30 could be a 10GB difference in storage capacity.
At this point, I think you'd see more of an overall performance boost going with a slower CPU and a 7200RPM drive than a faster CPU and a 5400RPM drive.
Since 7200RPM drives have become more affordable, I haven't put a 5400RPM drive into anyone's system. Even if they're on a tight budget, I'll usually recommend that they step down on CPU speed in order to afford the faster drive. I haven't had a complaint yet.
Of all of the applications out there, maybe 2% are CPU bound, meaning that the CPU will sit there waiting for data to calculate. OTOH, 95% of things that access the hard drive, which probably account for 98% of your daily computing needs, would see a benefit from a drive with a faster spindle rotational speed.
If $30 is going to make that much of a difference in your system budget, drop down to an 800MHz or 700MHz machine, and use the savings on things that will give you the best overall system performance increase, like extra RAM or faster drives.
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Some video cards have hardware-assisted DVD decoding features, so yes, it would help your DVD performance.
However, with that speed a CPU, a software-decoder would play movies with more than adequate performance, unless you're planning on playing 3D games in a window while watching a movie at the same time.
If you can get away with software decoding, the $30 would definitely get you a step up on your hard drive. $30 would be the difference between a 5400RPM drive and a 7200RPM drive, which is a significant performance difference. Or $30 could be a 10GB difference in storage capacity.
At this point, I think you'd see more of an overall performance boost going with a slower CPU and a 7200RPM drive than a faster CPU and a 5400RPM drive.
Since 7200RPM drives have become more affordable, I haven't put a 5400RPM drive into anyone's system. Even if they're on a tight budget, I'll usually recommend that they step down on CPU speed in order to afford the faster drive. I haven't had a complaint yet.
Of all of the applications out there, maybe 2% are CPU bound, meaning that the CPU will sit there waiting for data to calculate. OTOH, 95% of things that access the hard drive, which probably account for 98% of your daily computing needs, would see a benefit from a drive with a faster spindle rotational speed.
If $30 is going to make that much of a difference in your system budget, drop down to an 800MHz or 700MHz machine, and use the savings on things that will give you the best overall system performance increase, like extra RAM or faster drives.
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As for hard-drives, if you want speed, go for a nice 7200rpm drive. Most of the drives provide an ATA100 interface. They're fairly cheap. The new IBM 60GXP series seem to be good performers.
Depending on what sort of development you do, I'd even suggest going for 512Meg memory. I know I use more than 384M, but I work with a full plate: Oracle Database Server, Secant Enterprise Application Server, TomCat JSP-Server, Apache Web Server, Together ControlCenter, Java 1.3 JDK, Rational Rose Enterprise Edition, Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0, and the Cygwin environment with Emacs.
--|BRiT|
Depending on what sort of development you do, I'd even suggest going for 512Meg memory. I know I use more than 384M, but I work with a full plate: Oracle Database Server, Secant Enterprise Application Server, TomCat JSP-Server, Apache Web Server, Together ControlCenter, Java 1.3 JDK, Rational Rose Enterprise Edition, Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0, and the Cygwin environment with Emacs.
--|BRiT|
Like BRiT said, the IBM's are great. They're currently the fastest IDE drives on the market.
If you can't find a good deal on the 60GXP, look for the 75GXP series. They're only marginally slower (as in barely), but have been out longer so there might be better deals on them.
Also, the Maxtor Diamond Max Plus line is nice. Fast performers, and sometimes cheaper than the IBMs. When you don't need to have the absolute fastest thing on the market, they're a very close 2nd.
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If you can't find a good deal on the 60GXP, look for the 75GXP series. They're only marginally slower (as in barely), but have been out longer so there might be better deals on them.
Also, the Maxtor Diamond Max Plus line is nice. Fast performers, and sometimes cheaper than the IBMs. When you don't need to have the absolute fastest thing on the market, they're a very close 2nd.
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Dan is right on the Diamond Max drives. I have a 30G Maxtor Diamond Max drive, and it rocks. Hard drive performance on my machine is astounding, and it's certainly worth the investment to have the fastest drive available when it, in fact, is the slowest component in your computer.
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thank you guys. you rock.
have have found the hard drive i want now: a Maxtor DiamondMax 40 Ultra DMA 66; 7200RPM, 2Mb cache, blah blah blah. But! what's with this EIDE and udma stuff? i am thinking that EIDE (which this hd is) is what I want. but not like i understand it.
have have found the hard drive i want now: a Maxtor DiamondMax 40 Ultra DMA 66; 7200RPM, 2Mb cache, blah blah blah. But! what's with this EIDE and udma stuff? i am thinking that EIDE (which this hd is) is what I want. but not like i understand it.
EIDE is the interface, with UDMA## being the protocol-speed. The EIDE drives support various transfer speeds. The UDMA100 protocol-speed specifies a maximum burst peak of 100MBps, with UDMA66 having peak of 66MBps, and likewise for UDMA33 having peak of 33MBps. There's rarely a difference between UDMA66 and UDMA100 drives, since most drives can barely peak past UDMA33 speeds.
A UDMA100 drive is backwards compat with UDMA66 and UDMA33 based controllers. A UDMA66 drive is backwards compat with UDMA33 controllers. The newer motherboards have UDMA100 controllers.
When you want to run above UDMA33 speeds, you can no longer use the 40pin-40wire ribbon. You must use a 40pin-80wire ribbon. They're cheap and are easy to find. Most new motherboards come with them as well.
Where the faster UDMA## come in handy is when running multiple drives in a RAID setup. Or when they move up to 10K RPM or even 15K RPM in the EIDE drives.
--|BRiT|
A UDMA100 drive is backwards compat with UDMA66 and UDMA33 based controllers. A UDMA66 drive is backwards compat with UDMA33 controllers. The newer motherboards have UDMA100 controllers.
When you want to run above UDMA33 speeds, you can no longer use the 40pin-40wire ribbon. You must use a 40pin-80wire ribbon. They're cheap and are easy to find. Most new motherboards come with them as well.
Where the faster UDMA## come in handy is when running multiple drives in a RAID setup. Or when they move up to 10K RPM or even 15K RPM in the EIDE drives.
--|BRiT|
Smiss> I have a few of those Maxtor's in a 40GB RAID array (2x 20GB), and it flies. Not quite as fast as my 60GB IBM 75GXP array, but nothing one would notice without doing DV work.
As BRiT said, there's not much of a performance difference with a single drive between a UDMA66 and UDMA100 drive. The only time I would tell someone to go out of their way to buy a UDMA100 drive is either if there little to no price difference, or they intended on RAIDing them.
One side note to what BRiT said so well...
In vendor-speak, EIDE and UDMA are interchangable terms. In technical terms, it's exactly the way BRiT described.
For all intents and purposes, one can either buy an IDE drive, or a SCSI drive. Since SCSI doesn't use UDMA as a protocol, if it says that, it goes without saying that it's an IDE drive. For that matter, there's no practical difference between IDE and EIDE anymore, since no one makes non-enhanced IDE devices anymore.
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As BRiT said, there's not much of a performance difference with a single drive between a UDMA66 and UDMA100 drive. The only time I would tell someone to go out of their way to buy a UDMA100 drive is either if there little to no price difference, or they intended on RAIDing them.
One side note to what BRiT said so well...
In vendor-speak, EIDE and UDMA are interchangable terms. In technical terms, it's exactly the way BRiT described.
For all intents and purposes, one can either buy an IDE drive, or a SCSI drive. Since SCSI doesn't use UDMA as a protocol, if it says that, it goes without saying that it's an IDE drive. For that matter, there's no practical difference between IDE and EIDE anymore, since no one makes non-enhanced IDE devices anymore.
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UDMA
ultra direct memory access
UDMA defines a new protocol for the interface between the hard drive and the computer. It improves upon the ATAPI/EIDE standard by doubling data transfer rates to 33MB/sec, which translates into faster disk reads and writes. For users to take advantage of UDMA, both their system and hard drive must support the protocol. UDMA retains backwards compatibility for previously existing hardware.
EIDE
enhanced integrated device (or drive) electronics
A second take on the PC platform's IDE drive interface that increases the previous maximum disk size from 504MB to more than 8GB, speeds up the data transfer rate to more than twice what IDE was capable of, and doubles the number of drives a PC can contain, bringing the number up to four. On the PC platform, EIDE gives SCSI-2 a run for its money, and while most people agree that SCSI-2 is technically superior, EIDE is cheaper to implement, which gained it widespread acceptance.
ultra direct memory access
UDMA defines a new protocol for the interface between the hard drive and the computer. It improves upon the ATAPI/EIDE standard by doubling data transfer rates to 33MB/sec, which translates into faster disk reads and writes. For users to take advantage of UDMA, both their system and hard drive must support the protocol. UDMA retains backwards compatibility for previously existing hardware.
EIDE
enhanced integrated device (or drive) electronics
A second take on the PC platform's IDE drive interface that increases the previous maximum disk size from 504MB to more than 8GB, speeds up the data transfer rate to more than twice what IDE was capable of, and doubles the number of drives a PC can contain, bringing the number up to four. On the PC platform, EIDE gives SCSI-2 a run for its money, and while most people agree that SCSI-2 is technically superior, EIDE is cheaper to implement, which gained it widespread acceptance.
JH> Slight correction to be technically correct.
In terms of slowest components in your computer, as far as drives are concerned, from fastest to slowest would look like:
hard drive
CD-ROM/DVD drive
Zip drive
floppy
Obviously, there are more drives than this, and some would fall in the middle, but since these are, by far, the most commonly used, I used these as an example.
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In terms of slowest components in your computer, as far as drives are concerned, from fastest to slowest would look like:
hard drive
CD-ROM/DVD drive
Zip drive
floppy
Obviously, there are more drives than this, and some would fall in the middle, but since these are, by far, the most commonly used, I used these as an example.
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And the controller card itself probably ran you well over $700, plus the added cost of those 5 hard drives at about $150-$300 each, depending on capacity.
That might be slight overkill for the average home user.
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That might be slight overkill for the average home user.
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