One mean machine (custom made computer)

[velious]

I have never built my own computer before (for gaming) , but i've done some looking around (comp USA), so please tell me what you think of these specs, and any recomendations that u have.

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these specs can be found at http://www.compusa.com

Hard drive - Maxtor 300GB, 5400RPM, Internal Ultra ATA/133 Hard Drive

Motherboard - intel 865PE ATX Motherboard, Socket PGA478 for Pentium 4 Processors

Video card - Radeon X800 XT Platinum Video Card, 8x AGP, 256MB DDR3

Sound card - Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro Sound Card

processor - Pentium 4, 3.00cGHz, 800MHz Bus, Socket 478 Processor with Hyper-Threading

memory - kingston 1GB PC2100 184pin DDR DIMM Memory Module

cooling - Premium Copper Pentium 4 CPU Heatsink and Fan (Socket 423/478)

zip drive (are these still popular?) - Zip 750MB ATAPI Internal Drive

power unit - UltraPower 550W Max Internal Power Supply

total = about 2700.00 ... is this too much?


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[Ultragames]

your looking like you want a good fast computer.

Your Harddrives dont fit this too well. 5400 RPM is slow. and 300GBs are espensive.

Buy a RAID card, and two 150GB 7200RPM Maxtors. This will make it MUCH faster. If youdont know what RAID is, let us know.

I personaly dont like Pentiums, and therefor cant coment on the motherboard you have, because it is an Intel Board. I suggest AMD.

Great video card!

Great sound card!

Decent Memory. For such a great video card, it is kind of lacking.

As long as your not over clocking, that power supply should be just fine! The only reason i say that, is because if you are overclocking, your going to want to be able to control each rail voltage seperatly, and that power supply cant do that.

Cool computer. Beats mine. But then again, i dont have $2700.

[velious]

"Buy a RAID card, and two 150GB 7200RPM Maxtors. "

... what? lol..whats a RAID card?

[oracleguy]

your looking like you want a good fast computer.

Your Harddrives dont fit this too well. 5400 RPM is slow. and 300GBs are espensive.

Buy a RAID card, and two 150GB 7200RPM Maxtors. This will make it MUCH faster. If youdont know what RAID is, let us know.

This is a very common mis-conception with desktops/workstations. Read: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101 But I also agree that that HD isn't worth it. Go with something slightly smaller and faster.
I personaly dont like Pentiums, and therefor cant coment on the motherboard you have, because it is an Intel Board. I suggest AMD.

It's an okay board, if you want a little more performance go with a board with an 875 chipset. I'd also recommend looking at going up to a 3.0eGHZ CPU as well.
Decent Memory. For such a great video card, it is kind of lacking.

I disagree, go with dual channel memory, you'll get a bit more performance for little or no extra cost. What that means is, for 1GB get 2 512MB modules that are matched.
As long as your not over clocking, that power supply should be just fine! The only reason i say that, is because if you are overclocking, your going to want to be able to control each rail voltage seperatly, and that power supply cant do that.
3,000Mhz isn't fast enough? lol My first computer was 1/375ths that speed

I'd recommend you do some comparision shopping before buying. Make sure to checkout www.newegg.com Oh and unless you really need it, I'd lose the ZIP drive. And I noticed you didn't mention a CD and/or a DVD burner?

And if your interested you can see the machine I recently purchased for myself: http://www.oracleguy.ws/entry.php?entryid=12 & http://www.oracleguy.ws/entry.php?entryid=17

[Roy Sinclair]

I'll second or third the criticism on that hard drive, big is nice and I've had mixed luck with the Maxtor drives (lost a 100GB drive recently). Maxtor led the drive from 3 year warranties to 1 year warranties while Seagate just announced they're moving to 5 year warranties so if a Seagate drive is a possibility, look into it. The key criticism about that drive with 5400rpm (vs 7200rpm or 10,000rpm) once the heads are over the right track on your disk you've still got as much as 25% to 50% longer time to wait for the data on the disk to move under the head where it can be read AND you've also got a slower physical data transfer rate because the disk is moving so much slower.

For higher performance drives look at the RPM and the size of the onboard cache. Faster spinning drives and larger caches equate to faster drives.

Forget the Zip drive, unless you've got a real need to work with older systems that don't have CD or DVD burners. Personally, when I see Iomega I think of it as flashy junk hardware. A DVD/CD burner would be a much better choice and allow you to share via sneakernet with a lot more people, if you're just thinking of backups then a DVD/CD burner gives you a lot more capacity with a lot lower media cost.

[oracleguy]

Yeah, Seagate hard drives are good, so are Western Digital; I've had good experiences with both brands.

[Antoniohawk]

This is a very common mis-conception with desktops/workstations. Read: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101 But I also agree that that HD isn't worth it. Go with something slightly smaller and faster.
I was under the impression that that article only pertained to the Raptors and how a Raid 0 configuration wouldn't actually increase performance. I guess that I had better reread it. :)

[oracleguy]

No, they are talking in general, it is just that they used Raptors as their test drives.