pc building

[McBunny]

right its been years since i looked at pc hardware but im thinking of building a htpc or normal

what would people recomend me going for with cpu's, mother boards, grafix cards, cases, fans psu's and all that jazz

i dont need it to run games at silly resolutions at 90fps or anything like that

my current pc is a shuttle sn41g with athlon xp 2000 cpu 512 mb ram and some form of geforce 4 card in there 6800 sounds familiar


not sure on budget really but what would you gus recomend ?

 

[David]

well mate lots of variables in there.

all depends on ur budget and what u want to do with it?....

i'd recommend nvidia graphics over an ati and a pentium over an athlon but i say that to everyone. answer the above and i'll point you in the right direction. I'm surprised you don't know more about it that i do dogmaul!

 

[McBunny]

erm i will do mate but as i said i havent built a pc or looked at hardware for about 3 years now.

so im not up on what grafix card is the best etc etc

you dont need to know all that for looking after 5 servers and 180 users all by your self lol

 

[David]

the nividia 6800 range are excellent for the money. i have a gt and it's awesome. Runs doom3 on max everthing and hl2. it's a lot cheaper than when i bought it as well. not an awful lot has changed really. i'd say if ur on a low budget get an athlon with a gig of ram and make sure u get a motherboard with SATA (serial ata) compatilibility, then get urself a SATA drive (try and get a 10000rpm one). High budget should just chage the g card you get and possibly move over to a pentium, although i've heard good things about the high end athlon 64 chips...

www.tomshardware.com is greta review site on all of the latest hardware etc.

www.dabs.com/uk and overclockers.co.uk are good for buying stuff from.

 

[Rasclart]

Id go for a Athlon 64 CPU run cooler and IMO are better all round performers FOR THE MONEY compared to P4 Chips.

Graphics wise if your not going for playing games on it, then dont bother splashing out on a 6800 go for the 6600gt. Excellent mid range card.

 

[McBunny]

ok good things to start on there

least i will have something to do this afternoon lol

 

[Saner]

Personally I would go with a AMD motherboard by:

Gigabyte
Asus
ABit

An nVidia Graphics card by:

Leadtek
Gainward

 

[wozzaa]

Get yourself an Athlon 64 939 based cpu. There cheaper run cooler and do in nearly all aspects out perform the intel chips. The P4 is getting on a bit architecture wise now and frankly its using old technology.

The ATI and Nvidia argument is gonna continue forever but both manufacturers make good cards if your wanting an HTPC i would say get an ATI all in wonder card. As you will make use of the features on it such as tv tuner ability to capture video and the like. If you just want a plain graphics cards theres a fair few you can pick from but basically there all pretty much equal ati do better in directx based games usually and nvidia do better in opengl based games. Generally though ATI cards do have better image quality when the eye candy gets turned up. Unless its turned right up though very little in it.

If your on a low budget or high budget id seriously get an Athlon 64. Keeping in mind the athlon 64 3500+ is only running at a little over 2ghz yet easily beats the pentium 4 3.4ghz in all gaming benchmarks and a lot of other software benchmarks. And is also cheaper. In other words im saying dont buy a pentium. They run stupidly hot have flawed architecture and the 64bit instruction set that there using....its AMD's instruction set basically so must tell you something.

Built a massive amount of systems for myself and various other people. What i did for a job for a bit. So if you want a system parts prices etc adding up and giving the best for your budget send me a pm with what you require from the computer and i'll sort it out for once i get it cause all depends on what you want to how much you wanna spend if you just want an HTPC it'll be relatively cheap just a large hard drive cheapish graphics card and a half decent cpu and memory.

 

[McBunny]

i wonder if this one will fit under my tv

 

[McBunny]

oops

just need to rebuild this for a bit of a laugh this afternoon