Web Hosting Talk : Other Forums : Web Hosting Lounge : PC Upgrade!

[guyellis1988]

Hey Guys, I wondered if you could reccomend a setup for me to look at. as its an upgrade I wont need everything. My budget is £1000 more or less

Items I need:

• Motherboard
• CPU
• Graphics Card(s)
• Ram
• 10,000rpm Sata Disk

For the hard drive I will probably purchase a 36gb raptor - I dont need more space than that, nor redundancy - my home server will look after file storage

CPU I'm looking at an AMD X2 64bit 5000+

Ram - I want some reasonable spec ram - can someone explain memory timings - whats good, whats bad? I presume I will need DDR2? I want 2GB ram in the form 2 x 1gb

Motherboard - Clueless as to what im looking for, I need onboard Sound/sata/ide/sli compatible probably. Also need 2 x PCI slots

Graphics cards: Im thinking of going SLI, how would 2 x BFG GeForce 7900 GT OC 256MB cards perform with the above setup? Am i best getting one more expensive card? or two of these?

Feel free to suggest a completely different setup - will 10k rpm make much difference?

One of the most important things i will say is the following - please take this into consideration:

I want the PC to be as quiet as possible when Idle. Passive cooling on the motherboard would be good, how loud are the graphics card fans?

I dont mind about a lot of noise when the pc is in use but when its ticking over quieter is better.

on a side question how good is AMD cool n quiet technology?

I look forward to hearing answers!

[neXolt]

Wait before buying a processor or graphics card, with core2duo and dx10 around the corner spending that much money now would be a waste, as for ram and a hard drie id go for 2gb dual channel ocz and id go with the raptor.

[guyellis1988]

I'm more of an AMD person so i'd rather not wait for conroe chips - when are the DX10 graphics cards coming out?

Cheers for the reply

[effusionx1]

You could wait for Intel quad core chips....

[guyellis1988]

EDIT: I'm going to eat my words here, just looked at the benchmarks on toms hardware for the new conroe chips - all i can say is wow!

Budget boosted to £1500 for the extreme edition conroe chip - sounds like thats the only one which isnt locked down to overclocking.

Still unsure about what to do with graphics cards - not sure when DX10/SM4 cards will be out & if it will be worth the wait.

[Neil V]

What exactly is conroe? Never heard of them before. Is there that much of a difference between Intel and AMD? My current AMD is 3500+.

I'm looking to build Small Form Factor Computer sometime in October. I'll sell my Dell machine down the shore, or just donate it to their recycle program, minus HD of course. I can carry my main computer back and forth from the shore, to home, and have the same features both places....

The only thing I'll need to upgrade is the motherboard, chipset, and DVD drive to Blue Ray when they get past the 2X.

[guyellis1988]

Its the new intel technology, read here it should explain it a bit better!

Looks like its wiping the floor with AMD at the moment though - will be nice to see if AMD pull something out of the hat in return.

Unfortunately im too impatiant to play the waiting game - plus you can never win!