Board/CPU/Memory upgrade choices - what do you think?

pealy

Hi. I've spent many a confusing hour trying to understand cpu's and motherboards so I could find a good value upgrade for my system. I really don't want to spend much but would like something reasonably state-of-the-art. The following is what I think is the best option so far. Any comments? Could I do better?

Athlon 64 bit 2800+ 754pin 512 L2cache OEM CPU (£65)
ASUS K8N-E Deluxe - mainboard - ATX - nForce3 250Gb (£52)
512MB PC3200 184pin DDR400 RAM OEM (£28)
Arctic Cooling Silencer 64 Ultra Tc (to keep it quiet) (£8)

All except cooler are from Savastore and it comes to only £162 with delivery in total.

Seems a pretty decent collection to me, particularly the Athlon 64 for only £65. The things I don't know are (a) the latency of the memory but it's cheap and I wanted to avoid buying from multiple stores to save postage; (b) the kind of graphics card I'll need - cheap I hope as it rarely has a monitor attached if it's all working.

Let's not turn this into another Intel v AMD war. If I'd gone for a Sempron then the Celeron D 330j may have been a good alternative but a bona fide pentium is out of my price range so the AMD looks like a no brainer.

It's for a home pc which acts as a file server and intranet web server so there's no gaming or 3d involved but a bit of jpeg resizing and lame encoding does go on.

Thanks in advance!

Reluctant_spender

Just a quick thought are you going to upgrade you PSU too?

Have a look here, it is a socket 939 so a little more future and only a few quid more

Rave

Yeah, there's nowt wrong with any of that. For the money it'll be very fast. To a large extent having the memory controller on the CPU compensates for RAM with high latency- although cheapy stuff often performs fine if you pump extra voltage through it. In the same vein you should be able to OC the processor a bit too.

Edit: sorry, graphics card. Any old AGP card will be fine- or any AGP 4x or later card at least.

pealy

Reluctant_spender wrote:

Have a look here, it is a socket 939 so a little more future and only a few quid more

Yeah - I looked at that, it's another £40 and I've never heard of EPoX and wanted to stay with a motherboard brand I know.

I very nearly ordered from Komplett, I was going for a Celeron set-up before I found the Athlon 64 at savastore.

Reluctant_spender wrote:

Just a quick thought are you going to upgrade you PSU too?

Power Supply - I'm going for 2, one dedicated to running the hard disks and one for the mainboard and fans, 2 x 350W should be enough I think?

pealy

Rave wrote:

Edit: sorry, graphics card. Any old AGP card will be fine- or any AGP 4x or later card at least.

Cheers - i was starting to fret a bit, thinking I might have to spend the same again on some daft 3D card..

wolfman

Personally I'd spend another £30-40 and get a 939 Athlon 64, a 3000+ maybe for around £96. They run cooler and much faster. You can run the stock fan that comes with it, it's pretty quiet and keeps the cpu cool.

Rave

pealy wrote:

I very nearly ordered from Komplett, I was going for a Celeron set-up before I found the Athlon 64 at savastore.

Epox are a fine brand, in fact the computer I'm using right now is based around an Epox board. However- that setup is 20% more expensive but won't be 20% faster. It'll be a bit more upgradeable 2 years down the line but that's about it.

Power Supply - I'm going for 2, one dedicated to running the hard disks and one for the mainboard and fans, 2 x 350W should be enough I think?

Unless you have 6+ hard disks, 1 x 350w will be plenty. Blimey, I'm running a dual Athlon XP system with a 5 year old 250w PSU here.....

boogiemaster

Buy a decent power supply because cheap ones can take out your whole system!!!!


Unless you have 6+ hard disks, 1 x 350w will be plenty. Blimey, I'm running a dual Athlon XP system with a 5 year old 250w PSU here.....

Personally I would be scared daft having a power supply that old? I wouldn’t want my whole dual system going bang because of an old power supply.

My power supply cost £60 and it’s a quality power supply, I noticed the difference in quality straight away.
I don’t want my 64 3800+ going up in smoke because of a cheap power supply? Not at £467 I don’t.

Hintza

Try buying your memory in the USA (ebay) that will save you a bit of money. You will pay in £ what it would cost in £.

pealy

Rave wrote:

Unless you have 6+ hard disks, 1 x 350w will be plenty. Blimey, I'm running a dual Athlon XP system with a 5 year old 250w PSU here.....

Seriously? 350W is enough? So who buys these monstrous big power supplies I see in the psu sections?

I have 4 Hard Disks, A DVD writer and lots of fans (7 in total) so I'm concerned that 350w will be struggling.

wolfman

A 350W power supply can easily be enough. It's not quite as simple as that though. It'd need to be a well made power supply, and balanced with regards to the number of amps it applies to each rail, the 12v rail is usually the one to check up on as I think it supplies power to the cpu, graphics and hard drives.

For example, ThermalTake do a 480W psu (sounds like a lot, but it isn't), but it only supplies 18A on the 12V rail. For modern day systems this isn't enough and may cause your system to become unstable. You need to be looking at 25-30A on the 12V rail. Some even have seperate 12V rails to supply the cpu and mobo seperately.

I was running a 380W Tagan PSU, on a system with an AMD64 3500+, 1gb Ram, 2 SATA drives, DVD Writer, DVD-Rom, Radeon 9700 Pro, and 4 fans. The rails were all stable, although the psu was approaching it's limit as I only had 22A on the 12V rail.

I've since bought a GeForce 6800GT so upgraded to a 530W Tagan psu to allow for future upgrading. I'll probably never need anywhere near that, but the psu won't be pushed as hard so will last longer, run more quietly, and cooler. It's always worth getting a quality psu.