For Those Of You Thinking About

[stumonster]

A very informative article over on arstechnica

http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/system-guide-200608.ars

to guide you.

speccing out a low , mid and high range box with reasoning for their choices.

[Gary A]

A little over two years ago I decided I wanted a good reliable machine to bring to Thailand. This is what I had built;

Intel 3.0 GHZ/256/800 CPU

ASUS P4P800E Deluxe Motherboard

Seagate ST380013AS Serial STS/720 Hard Disk Drive

1 Gb PC2700 DDR Memory (Nanya)

ATI 9600SE 128M DDR V/D/VO Video Card

Mitsumi FX5411W 54X CDR

Mitsumi 1.44 FDD

Antec CA-3700BQE 350 Mid-Tower Case

Foxconn 3.2GCPU Fan

It lasted a year and worked very well. During the second year it has been a headache. The CPU crapped out and I couldn't find the same replacement. I ended up with 2.66 Celeron because that's all I could find locally to fit the board. The video card also went bad. The worst part of the whole thing is that I gave my old HP Vectra to a friend of mine and it is still running well. To tell the truth, I can't see much difference between the original CPU and the cheap Celeron. For the average user and for someone who uses the computer mainly for the Internet I think a cheaper off the shelf box is fine. A lot of RAM, high speed USB 2 ports and a SATA hard drive would be my minimum requirements. The troubleshooting was the worst thing. The computer would reboot itself about every other day and finally got to the point that it would only run for a half hour or so.

[Crushdepth]

Thanks Stu...I didn't know it was possible to spend that much on a PC!

Do you have any idea if the 'hotrod' would be buildable in LOS, ie. would it be possible to get all the parts?

[Firefoxx]

Strange, Gary, I got nearly the same config (But 2.4Ghz P4HT CPU), and got the same problem (bluescreens/random restarts). I couldn't figure out for the life of me which component was broken, but at last it turned out to be the CPU. Too bad I found out too late for the warranty had expired.

Usually the CPU shouldn't be the culprit, as they're very robust, but...

Like you, I couldn't find a replacement CPU, so I got a Celeron instead and now it's used for playback of HD movies.

[The Coder]

Nice link, I've bookmarked it. The hot rod is the type of machine I like to build. I'm still running a "hot rod" type system I built in 2002 using high end components available at that time (2.8GHz Pentium, ATI 9700 Pro at the core). Now 4 years on it's only now getting to where I can't play the latest games at the quality I want, other things are slow, and the hard drive is about full. Probably early next year I'll build my next hot rod.

I usually watch the sharkyextreme.com build your own which specs out a low, medium, and extreme gaming system, but they don't update them frequently enough and they tend to waffle on choices. I like how this site you brought up chooses the *best* cpu period instead of saying "if you want amd then this one, if intel this one".

The god box, nice name! That's pretty extravegent--dual opterons and 8gb ram! But bang for the buck may not be the best way to go. Curious they equip it with a 160GB tape drive when they have a 900GB raid. Since the data doesn't fit on a cartridge anyway, probably wiser and cheaper to just sign up for a internet based backup rather than doing local backups feeding a bunch of tapes.

[Khun Jack]

A little over two years ago I decided I wanted a good reliable machine to bring to Thailand. This is what I had built;

Intel 3.0 GHZ/256/800 CPU

ASUS P4P800E Deluxe Motherboard

Seagate ST380013AS Serial STS/720 Hard Disk Drive

1 Gb PC2700 DDR Memory (Nanya)

ATI 9600SE 128M DDR V/D/VO Video Card

Mitsumi FX5411W 54X CDR

Mitsumi 1.44 FDD

Antec CA-3700BQE 350 Mid-Tower Case

Foxconn 3.2GCPU Fan

It lasted a year and worked very well. During the second year it has been a headache. The CPU crapped out and I couldn't find the same replacement. I ended up with 2.66 Celeron because that's all I could find locally to fit the board. The video card also went bad. The worst part of the whole thing is that I gave my old HP Vectra to a friend of mine and it is still running well. To tell the truth, I can't see much difference between the original CPU and the cheap Celeron. For the average user and for someone who uses the computer mainly for the Internet I think a cheaper off the shelf box is fine. A lot of RAM, high speed USB 2 ports and a SATA hard drive would be my minimum requirements. The troubleshooting was the worst thing. The computer would reboot itself about every other day and finally got to the point that it would only run for a half hour or so.

Did you ever removed the dust from the CPU cooler fan and block, videocard etc?.

The processor was maybe not cool enough by dirt on the fan/coolblock or the connection between coolblock and CPU was not perfect.

My FX5700 videocard started to malfunction and I had to remove the gpu cooler for cleaning the pcb.

A stupid design because the cooler fan blows the dust particles under the cooler so cleaning without removing the cooler is not possible.

An inspection with a loop showed a lot of corrosion on the parts around the GPU.

After cleaning with isopropyl alcohol the videocard works fine again.

I have the same MB P4P800E and a 3 GHZ P4 and it works after 2 years intens use fine.

[Gary A]

Did you ever removed the dust from the CPU cooler fan and block, videocard etc?.

The processor was maybe not cool enough by dirt on the fan/coolblock or the connection between coolblock and CPU was not perfect.

My FX5700 videocard started to malfunction and I had to remove the gpu cooler for cleaning the pcb.

A stupid design because the cooler fan blows the dust particles under the cooler so cleaning without removing the cooler is not possible.

An inspection with a loop showed a lot of corrosion on the parts around the GPU.

After cleaning with isopropyl alcohol the videocard works fine again.

I have the same MB P4P800E and a 3 GHZ P4 and it works after 2 years intens use fine.

Actually my UPS went bad and I plugged the computer in direct. Whether that caused the problems or not I have no idea but I do know that I won't be using a computer with out a UPS again. I do have an air compressor so I do keep it pretty clean and dust free.