Ok, help this newb with his first build

[OcellotJenkins]

ASUS Deluxe suck.
That comes from my very own experience.
It have loads of extra bling,  but core functionality suck. BSOD, mysterious hdd detection problems and PC restarts, etc...

Unfortunately for you I deleted all links about this board when I got rid of it, so you'll have to google for it yourself.
You'll be amazed by results...

Heat.  Asus boards are really really sickened by the heat.  Mine was going very strange until I stuck more fans on and now it's a dream.  Unfortunately, it's a noisy jet engine motherfucker of a dream.

Using 120mm fans and a Zalmon flower cooler you can make them virtually silent.  See http://silentpcreview.com/ for more silent tips.

[Pococurante]

Anandtech as their top choice recommends the DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 SLI-DR.  They cite a list of around $177; mwave's current price is $176.  This board gives you a clear upgrade path of both cpu and video for years to come.

I recently picked this up with the San Diego AMD 64 4000.

[penfold]

I have a Asus A8N deluxe NForce 4 SLI

A good board, but a couple of problems. The northbridge cooler fan runs at 8500 RPM. Its a harrier jump jet in disguise. The new model of my board uses some form of water/liquid metal cooling heatpipe thing instead.

BIOS updates arent brilliant. Updates can bring more issues. It doesnt like my memory, i can get the odd error. It took a while to find the right timings, voltage etc. The very latest mem modules can be problematic, mine wont reboot occasionally. My m8 had the same probs with his DFI, he couldnt get the 1gb of CAS 2 dual channel mem to run until installing 512, doing update of BIOS, some fiddling, then installing 1gb, then more fiddling.

[Strazos]

This is why I am usually not an early adopter of top-end hardware.

[Murgos]

You guys inspired me.  After about two years with the same components I've started swapping things out.  Finally getting a DVD RW, a UPS, wireless keyboard & mouse, and most importantly 2 gigs of ram and a Zalman flower cooler.  The Zalman is crucial because lately my CPU has been overheating at irregular times so I think the fan I have isn't blowing as much air as it should.

About the RAM, for some reason I always seem to buy ram at the ~200 price point.  I remember back to early 90's and picking up 4 megs for my 486SX for 180ish and as far as I can recall it always seems that when the next gen requirements hit $200 is when I'm looking at picking some up.  Either thats really clever on the part of the RAM manufacturers or there is a natural market there that should be exploited.

One good thing about my piece-meal approach to system building (My 1.44 floppy is more than 12 years old) is that it never costs a huge amount to get back into the upper edges of gaming goodness and at the same time I'm never too far behind the curve.

Next month?  new socket 939 MB, new processor and probably an Ati X800

[Yegolev]

I'm stalling right now.  Maybe I can hold off until 64-bit is a good idea.

[Pococurante]

I'm still having driver issues with x64 over the NVidia board/video.  I've stripped down to just the basics but the system still locks up when it has been running for awhile (say 14+ hours).  I can't start WoW more than once in a row without locking up either.  I started having problems after installing the NEForce drivers for x64 but that was the only way to get the onboard audio going.

I ran NTune but that was a bad idea so I reset the bios cmos to "optimized defaults".  System ran way too hot for my tastes.

So yeah while there may be user stupidity on my part I'd say x64 is not entirely stable yet.

[Sky]

The current Maximum PC has a pretty nifty system. Dual dual-core procs, each dual proc gets it's own bank of dual-channel RAM, plus SLI? I think I wet myself, and it's rare for me to drool over tech stuff these days.

Of course, the dual gpus alone cost $1200...

On ASUS - I used to be an Abit man, but after two boards died in a row on me, I was in the market for something new. There still aren't many good alternatives to my ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe. Hardware onboard DD5.1 ftw, in a big way. I'm a big fan of ASUS...going by that one product, anyway.

[Strazos]

I have that exact same board.

It's a winner.

[stray]

Same here. No problems for me. I'll probably stick with Asus from now on.

[MrHat]

The current Maximum PC has a..

What's the best way to get a Maximum PC, and PC Gamer subscription?

[Pococurante]

Maybe soon the winds will shift.

But go with the DFI board.

[Murgos]

Note for the uninitiated - Zalmann 90 mm Flower Cooler will not fit in the highly popular Abit NF7 V2 board.  There happens to be a capacitor right under where the end of a bolt down retaining clip goes.

Taking my MB apart though let me see how clogged my previous fan/heatsink was with dirt and after a good cleaning it seems to be working fine again.  I guess I'll hang onto the Zalmann untill I get a new MB, which will be fairly soon.

Edit:  I have a question, what would be the preferable setup?

2 gigs of DDR ram (400 mhz but the processor is 333) matched one gig sticks OR

2 gigs DDR 400 plus 512MB PC2700 (333mhz)?  Is the extra 512MB of addresses worth the loss of the bidirectional data flow?

As pertains to gaming of course.  I'm sure a few tests with a benchmark will net me the answer but I don't want to spend half a day benchmarking and swapping crap.

Actually I guess the answer depends mostly on how much the VMM is swapping crap out to disk during any particular session.  Basically if there is any writing to the swap file you would want to increase the RAM size.  Otherwise speed of transfer would be the critical point.

[Sky]

What's the best way to get a Maximum PC, and PC Gamer subscription?

Go to their websites?

I have a sub to both, but I donated it to the library because I read them so fast. Might as well benefit the entire community, and I still get to read them on break. Win/win.

The new MaxPC also has a nice cpu hs/fan roundup, I like the new design they are going to, with the fan blowing out the rear outflow direction, rather than against the side of the case.

2 gigs DDR 400 plus 512MB PC2700 (333mhz)?  Is the extra 512MB of addresses worth the loss of the bidirectional data flow?

I wouldn't do it. You've already got 2GB, fer crissake ;) Remember, you'll also be slowing that PC3200 down to 333 to match the PC2700 speeds, in addition to losing the dual-channel setup (you don't lose bidirection, they're both DDR).

With 2GB RAM, couldn't you turn off VM entirely?

I'm still thinking about the two banks of 4GB in that MaxPC rig. Hoo boy.

[Trippy]

Edit:  I have a question, what would be the preferable setup?

2 gigs of DDR ram (400 mhz but the processor is 333) matched one gig sticks OR

2 gigs DDR 400 plus 512MB PC2700 (333mhz)?  Is the extra 512MB of addresses worth the loss of the bidirectional data flow?

Bidirectional data flow? It would be bad if data to or from your RAM only went in one direction. :-D

For Athlon XPs dual channel memory makes a big difference in performance. I would not recommend giving that up unless you really really need that extra 512 MB RAM. On Athlon 64s dual channel memory only gives a small improvement in performance so it's not as crucial.

Edit: fixed typo

[Murgos]

Bidriectional = 2 channels = can send and recieve on one clock rise or fall.  I have actually designed DRAM at the MOSFET level (for a college course) not Dual Channel but still, I'm not clueless.

[Trippy]

Bidriectional = 2 channels = can send and recieve on one clock rise or fall.  I have actually designed DRAM at the MOSFET level (for a college course) not Dual Channel but still, I'm not clueless.

Yeesh, you youngins and your newfangled technologies. Back in my day "bidirectional" referred to the directionality of the data bus and we put diodes in our RAM to make sure you couldn't read and write at the same time. And we liked it that way!

[Murgos]

With 2GB RAM, couldn't you turn off VM entirely?

I'm going to try it and find out :)

Win 98 (2k also?) had a problem of not freeing memory after a program terminated.  I think I recall they fixed that though.  If not I will find out fairly soon...

[Roac]

Win 98 (2k also?) had a problem of not freeing memory after a program terminated.  I think I recall they fixed that though.  If not I will find out fairly soon...

Win 9x has a different architecture from 2k/XP.  Memory management is vastly superior in the 2k architecture than it ever was in 9x.  In 9x, you pretty much had to reboot if an app had a memory leak.  Not really the case in 2k, but it can still occur.  There is a multi-process (200+ processes) enterprise app that I maintain (2k), and I've yet to see noticable memory issues at the OS level.  On occation one of the processes on the app will go off the deep end, but I just kill it without problems, and it hums right along.  I know the OS isn't bullet proof, but it's pretty damn resilient.  My laptop (XP) has crashed maybe twice, and hasn't had memory issues either, in years of using it.  Same thing - I can trash misbehaving processes without incident, and have yet to see memory leaks that persist outside the app. 

[Sky]

My favorite OS for memory management:  Mac OS9 (and probably the earlier versions, but I started on OS9 here)

[stray]

My favorite OS for memory management:  Mac OS9 (and probably the earlier versions, but I started on OS9 here)

In other words, NO memory management.

I still liked Classic Mac OS though. Hell, I've still got a machine running ProTools with it (and ProTools is all it runs, so the memory issues aren't as bad as they could be).

[Sky]

Yeah, it's actually pretty nice for some things, and runs good on the old hardware.

I was hired with zero experience on macs, and at the time I think there was 3 pcs in the entire place :) Crash course in Mac OS9, which was pretty easy to maintain...but I was shocked when I learned about how it (doesn't) manage memory, and the funky way you allocate how much memory each program reserves...odd stuff.

I like OSX just fine these days.

[Samwise]

My favorite thing about Mac Classics was how when you networked them, you could freeze every machine on the network by holding down your mouse button.

[Astorax]

The Asus board mentioned is very nice (and no, it's not that hot, the fan is just overzealous, but you can tone that down in the BIOS as long as you run two 120mm fans in the case).  BUT, and I say this emphatically, BUT, don't try to run it out of the box with a Plextor 716A DVD RW.  It has known compatability issues.

There's a patch on the ASUS site for their BIOS which fixes it, so just be sure if you want to do that, start with another drive, update BIOS, THEN install the Plextor...I ran around in circles for a couple hours when I built my current machine (which ROCKS now btw, definitely go with dual channel if you can, even with the 64-bit processor, it's a boost in performance).

[Murgos]

Update 2 gigs is

If you have the means I highly recommend it.

Save Ferris!