This is a thread to talk about your computer hardware and troubles...


Like mine

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My own machine I used for Windows Home Server seems to have died. The P4 in it works fine in another system, but that one does not have all the ports to support my hard drives.

My requirements for a motherboard

- Has Windows Server 2003 drivers for Windows Home Server
- Supports Pentium 4 LGA 775 (Core 2 Duo support is a plus)
- Has TWO IDE slots (ala support for 4 ATA drives)
- Has FOUR SATA slots (more is obviously a plus)
- Integrated graphics is a plus
- eSATA port is a plus

Something that I can that is available at Newegg or Fry's is preferred... at a good price. Hard to search for one with the two IDE slots, but that's a requirement for me because I'm running 4x500 GB ATA drives.

Any suggestions?

Not really. I'm surprisingly ignorant on such areas. I'm getting a friend to build me a pc.

I have a budget of about £300, i suppose that works out as around, what, $750?

Any suggestions on what i should do? Doesn't need anything too special, just to be able to run games decently.

TechReport's system guide is a good place to start - recommendations for any budget.
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/13660

You may not find the exact parts where you are (Newegg only ships in the US I believe), but you should be able to find something similar where you are.

I'm planning to buy a 8800 card early this year, but I'm not really sure WHEN.
I've heard, that gpu prices will go down rather fast, because of some new models. Anyone has info on this?

I'm also planning to replace it's cooler with this baby:
Zalman VF1000 LED
http://www.zalman.co.kr/eng/product/vie ... 9&code=013
with this:
http://www.zalman.co.kr/eng/product/vie ... 8&code=013

Pretty neat stuff. But I'm still not sure, when this should happen

As far as I know, Zalmann coolers are pretty good. But there´s one thing you got to keep in mind when changing the cooler, you will loose the guarantee.

That'd be the 8800 GT, which is pretty damn cheap and thought to get cheaper. It's also pretty damn good as a graphics card, and for the price you cant go wrong (from what I've read).
I've got a review somewhere ...
Ah, here. Also of note, is that there's a new 8800 ... GTS coming out ... at least I think its the GTS. It's one of nVidia's top of the line cards being re-released with the new GPU core of the GT.

Zalman are the best. But you have to be careful with changing the ventilator since it involves a great deal of fiddling about with the card itself.

That´s easy. Just choose the cooler which fits to your card.

Nice little add-on for the PC gamers:
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/speak ... 9&cl=us,en

Hi guys,

My roommate just got this for <$300 less than a week ago:
AMD Athlon X2 5000+
MSI Motherboard
2GB RAM DDR800

Seeing as how I read RSS feeds for FatWallet/SlickDeals and spent the last week also looking up benchmarks, prices, etc, I am have updated my information so I am pretty knowledgeable about all this.

Evaders, what is your budget?

ElvisMiggell, are you rebuilding a full PC from scratch? What parts are you keeping? You might be able to squeeze in the following into $750: AMD Athlon X2 5000+, 2GB DDR2 800, motherboard, PSU, case, 8800GT 512MB, 1x500GB SATA.

Lord_La_forge, wait until the Nvidia 9800 GX2 card comes out (in about a month) !! The ATI 3870 X2 came out yesterday I think and so far it has beat all 8800 cards (it is $450) or tied in all benchmarks. When the 9800 GX2 comes out it is supposed to be even faster and also for $450, which means prices all around will have to go down. 8800GT is as low as $230 AR so it can only get lower.

Krytos, I believe you are referring to the 9800 GX2. It is supposed to have two 8800GT cores on the same PCB.


Some general notes:
AMD Athlon X2 5000+ is only $99. It has the best bang for the buck out of any other CPUs out there. If you can spare more though, get the Core 2 Duo E8400, it's only $180, faster than any other CPU except Q9xxx series, and can be overclocked to 4GHz on air. Do not buy Quad core under any circumstances since they are way overpriced for their performance, unless you are planning to be running a server on your workstation (???).

500GB SATA harddrives are usually $100, rarely $90. 750GB SATA harddrives lowest I found was $150, usually $159. I got a 500GB SATA HDD from Fry's about 4 months ago for $100, so prices have not moved at all. I doubt they will either.

DDR2 800 RAM is dirt cheap right now. 2x1GB is $25 AR easily on sites like NewEgg. I highly highly suggest buying up as much of this RAM as possible if you have DDR2. Unfortunately I only have 4 slots and already have 4x1GB RAM, so I can't get more (and 2x2GB RAM is far more expensive, close to $100 for a good brand, and OCZ sucks).

Laptop DDR2 667 MHz is just as cheap, I've seen 2x2GB go for like $60. Now is a very good time to buy laptop RAM if your laptop can support more RAM (unfortunately my laptop is 1.5GB max and I already have 1.5GB).

Well I bought whatever they had at Fry's. The only one they still sell with 2 IDE cables actually - the Asus P5N-E. It's an nForce 650i chipset (not the top 680i) that's pretty similar in design to my previous Asus nForce4 board. But I don't need top-of-the-line for my Windows Home Server machine. It's just a big box full of hard drives.

I guess no harm showing this off...
http://www.swrebellion.com/evaders99/whs.jpg

It's stocked with 3 of those 750 GB WD drives from Newegg at $150. I got them over holiday deals (esp one with the Paypal 20% cashback for a day).

If you're looking for a backup solution and have a free computer to spare (or just want to buy a prebuilt solution), Windows Home Server may be good for you. It's a kind-of software RAID 1 - file duplication on two seperate drives, but you can place any amount of hard drives in different capacities.

That's a formidable server Evaders, any reason why you need so many hard drives? Also when you say software RAID 1, is it on the same computer or across many computers?

I have acquired a lot of stuff

It has a backup of all my Windows machines and acts a media server for videos, music, and photos. It's all in one computer, so yea.. it's catastrophe if the system explodes or something. But its designed to handle the failure of one disk. Even if its the system disk, you can do a server reinstall and it will rebuild the entire database through the rest of the data on the other hard drives.

The only thing is it is slow. Much slower than any hardware controller. But hardware controllers are expensive and not really expandable the way I'd want. (I have a mix of various sized drives in the system)

Really impressive Evaders!

You don't want to know how many asian sitcoms there are ...