How's my new planned rig?

**MDesigner** · 07-06-2003, 02:29 PM

Looking for some opinions/input on some equipment I\'m planning to buy. I\'m trying to achieve a nice balance between value and performance, since money is VERY tight right now. But I just can\'t deal with these audio dropouts and poor performance.. not to mention my motherboard sucks (A7V133) and has a crappy IDE bus on it that keeps giving me hard disk errors. [img]images/icons/frown.gif[/img]

Anyway, what do you think? All prices include shipping.

ASUS A7N8X-X - $98 (replacing my A7V133)
Crucial 2x 512MB PC2100 - $138 (replacing 512MB of PC133)
Maxtor 80GB (for .gigs only) - $76 (adding on)
Athlon XP 2200 retail box - $74 (replacing my Thunderbird 900MHz)
Antec 400W Power Supply - $60 (replacing my 300W generic)

Grand Total: $446

**SOD213** · 07-06-2003, 04:33 PM

Originally posted by MDesigner:
Looking for some opinions/input on some equipment I\'m planning to buy. I\'m trying to achieve a nice balance between value and performance, since money is VERY tight right now. But I just can\'t deal with these audio dropouts and poor performance.. not to mention my motherboard sucks (A7V133) and has a crappy IDE bus on it that keeps giving me hard disk errors. [img]images/icons/frown.gif[/img]

Anyway, what do you think? All prices include shipping.

ASUS A7N8X-X - $98 (replacing my A7V133)
Crucial 2x 512MB PC2100 - $138 (replacing 512MB of PC133)
Maxtor 80GB (for .gigs only) - $76 (adding on)
Athlon XP 2200 retail box - $74 (replacing my Thunderbird 900MHz)
Antec 400W Power Supply - $60 (replacing my 300W generic)

Grand Total: $446

Newegg? [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

I just built my new system, very similar to yours.

A7N8X Deluxe (has SATA for future expansion, and I\'ll probably never use it. [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img] ) - $129
2x 512MB Kingston PC3200 - $174
WD 120GB JB (3 Yr warranty) 7200rpm - $107
Athlon XP 2500 Barton (OC\'d to 3200XP (200MHZ FSB) ) - $91
450W Power Supply - $78

Do yourself a favor, stay away from Maxtor. Even though I had a WD fail on me two weeks ago, I at least had warning enough to be able to pull all my data off except for 300MB of wallpaper that I had elsewhere. (Net loss, 0 Bytes.) I\'ve also had good luck with Seagates, and they\'re quieter.

System\'s running stable enough, even OC\'d. Still working out the kinks, I think I should have gone with better memory for OC\'ing, but other than that, I\'m happy. Just be sure that the soundcard you\'re running is compatible with the Nforce motherboard. My Echo Mia is, but I\'ve stuck with Intel chipsets (and CPU\'s) for compatibility with other cards.

**MDesigner** · 07-06-2003, 05:09 PM

I\'ve got an Audiophile 2496. Anyone know if this works ok with the nVidia chipset?

Also, I\'ve had no issues with Maxtor.. in fact, all the techies who build their own machines always rave about it. I get a bunch of disk errors, but that\'s always happened with all my HDs, so it\'s my IDE bus that\'s causing the issue.

**SOD213** · 07-06-2003, 07:26 PM

Originally posted by MDesigner:
I\'ve got an Audiophile 2496. Anyone know if this works ok with the nVidia chipset?

Also, I\'ve had no issues with Maxtor.. in fact, all the techies who build their own machines always rave about it. I get a bunch of disk errors, but that\'s always happened with all my HDs, so it\'s my IDE bus that\'s causing the issue.

According to what I\'ve been able to Google, it should work fine. (M-Audio just says to stay away from Via, isn\'t that what you have now? [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img] ) I\'ve had luck with Echo Audio\'s cards on Via, Intel, and now N-Force chipsets. I\'ve had a couple of Laylas, now I use Mias.

I don\'t know about the techies you know, but I\'ve been in the pc building business professionally for the last 6.5 years. Seagates and Western Digitals have been good for us. We tested Maxtor about a year ago, half the drives failed within a year. We get computers in that are 5-6 years old (sometimes I wonder if I built them originally) with the 1.6GB Western Digital still cranking away.

Besides, with Seagates being the quietest drives anyway, shouldn\'t you go with them? [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

**Haydn** · 07-06-2003, 08:35 PM

I\'ve never had problems with Maxtor drives in my systems at home and at work. Probably have about 50 of them running. Only bad one at work was caused by dropping the drive, oops! I\'ve had a few WD\'s fail though. The newer WD\'s appear to be better than the drives from a few years ago. Beware of the Quantum designed Maxtor drives. Remember that Maxtor took them over awhile ago. Always had problems with Quantum drives.

**Sovereign** · 07-07-2003, 04:34 AM

Sam, I recommend at least 1,5 GB of ram, you\'ll be able to load 50% more instruments that way with the XP tweak.

**MDesigner** · 07-07-2003, 03:47 PM

I\'ll consider a Seagate IDE drive if possible.. I do like Seagates.

So, is my price OK? If you think I can get that stuff for a lower price, please let me know.

**Simon Ravn** · 07-07-2003, 04:41 PM

Originally posted by Sovereign:
<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by MDesigner:
* Maxtor is very good quality IDE, and is quieter than WD.

Definitely not true, I could probably dig up some reviews from storagereview.com but WD is the quietest after Seagate.

My own experience with both brands confirms this, which is why the two new giga boxes I built recently both have WD drives. [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img] <hr /></blockquote>WD might be the quietest after Seagate, but they are A LOT noisier. Seagates are almost silent when inside a standard casing, WD\'s are very much audiable and also emit low frequency vibrations.

**MDesigner** · 07-07-2003, 11:01 PM

Here\'s what I know about hard drives (or what I\'ve been told by \"techies\"):

* Avoid Quantum.. complete crap.
* Maxtor is very good quality IDE, and is quieter than WD.
* Seagate is probably as good as Maxtor for IDE, but top-notch in their SCSI line of drives.

As far as the RAM, I\'ll probably get 1GB now and another 512MB later.

Actually, I just realized I don\'t really need a new machine just yet.. I\'ll get new parts once I land a new day job. [img]images/icons/frown.gif[/img] Heh..

**Sovereign** · 07-07-2003, 11:03 PM

Originally posted by Simon Ravn:
WD might be the quietest after Seagate, but they are A LOT noisier. Seagates are almost silent when inside a standard casing, WD\'s are very much audiable and also emit low frequency vibrations.

Hmm, so why don\'t I hear both of my WD800JBs? [img]images/icons/cool.gif[/img] I\'ve never encountered any \"vibrations\" with this drive. Here\'s a quote from the Storagereview article:

\"two-platter design, the WD800JB turns in a relatively low noise floor, shaving more than 2 dB/A off of the scores delivered by Western Digital\'s three-disk designs. The Caviar\'s objective idle-noise score is in line with the competition- only Seagate\'s Barracuda ATA IV delivers significantly lower acoustics. Subjectively speaking, the drive\'s seek noises are among the quietest we\'ve heard, something unsurprising given the drive\'s rather high average access times.\"

Obviously noise is going to differ per drive design, but all recent WD drives are pretty silent.