I'm being presented with a deal I almost can't pass up, pretty much for free I'm able to pick up a rather new HP Media Center PC to gut for parts (long story so I won’t get into it). I planned on taking the mother board, processor (X2 4200), 300GB hard drive, and the Lightscribe DVD burner. Now I wanted to put it into this case (http://www.xoxide.com/aerocool-extremengine-3t-black.html). Now I'm quite new to building my own PCs so I'm not sure what I should be looking out for in size restrictments or anything else, especially when it comes to using proprietory HP hardware. I wanted to know if there was any major downfall on a hardware level to this upgrade as oppose to other options I may have if I look a little harder and a spend a bit more money then I’ll have to in this case. Right now I have a Gigabyte K8NS Pro mobo, AMD Athlon 64 3400, and an ATI 9800Pro 256MB video card, so to go to the HP's setup its quite a decent jump in performance regardless (or so I’m thinking). I will have to buy a new video card to keep it a gaming machine because my card now is an AGP, so I was thinking the XFX GeForce 7800 GTX OC from tigerdirect.ca would be my new one. The video card is really the only thing I'd have to pay for besides the case (so why not go for it right?). But if mounting the mother board into any case but the HP case is going to be really that much of a pain in my arse (for what ever reason HP might end up being difficult to work with), or if HP hardware is going to be just crap to run on I'll go a different direction with things. But I’m curious as to what kind of advice or warnings or encouragements you guys/girls might have. Thanks in advance. Kingpin
Well, HP is not known to use anything proprietary, so I'd say you're pretty safe. Judging by your flag, if you're from the UK, TigerDirect and Xoxide only ship in the US and Canada. Outside of that, I'd say you're good to go.
Didn't notice the flag until you pointed it out, I'm Canadian so no worries there. But I've been told by my lead tech at work that HP uses preprietory mobos from Asus so getting drivers is none existant other then through HP. Thats fine though I don't really see myself needing any other drivers then what is included with the machine on the restore partition, or w/e its called if I'm using the wrong term. But I was wondering if there was any way to isolate drivers for my mother board from the restore data on the hard drive and toss it on a floppy or my flash drive for when I go to format my system I'm not reloading all that crap from HP affilated companies. Actually, I've been looking to pick up a copy of Ghost for a wile now, I figure I could do the install of all the drivers and programs I'd want as a default on my system anyway after I remove the crap I don't want then ghost the drive and call it a day and not have to worry about it anymore right? The mother board driver are really the only thing I'd need from the setup as far as that goes I guess, video card has nothing to do with it, sound card the same... anything else? But I'm probably also looking to just use my XP Home copy rather then the Media Center edition, all that crap is just clutter to me.
I'd be a little cautious about the motherboard as if you don't have the origional driver disks and anything else that it came with it's not super convienient to boot up and surf the net to download drivers for a driverless motherboard but you could do it in a pinch. The proc, HDD, and optical drive will be great features though. Just one suggestion, get a 7900GT instead of the 7800GTX, the 7900GT is cheaper and a bit faster. Good luck.
I don't see how a faster newer card is cheaper, but if you want to post me a URL I'll buy it if thats teh case . But like I said, my lead tech at work was telling me the mother boards HP uses in their systems are preprietory Asus boards, you can call Asus about it... but they won't have any information at all about drivers or support because your to go through HP 100%. So downloading the drivers isn't an option unless someone has posted them from their machine I dunno.... I am very curious to see the prices on the 7900.
I have to disagree with that tech. While HP does use Asus produced motherboards, they're pretty much an altered version of something they already have. If you can get the motherboard model, Asus might not list it, but you should be able to track down what series it's under and snag the drivers for it. The only thing you'd want to watch out for would be doing a BIOS update. There may be somethings on that motherboard that are different from others in the series, and that's where Asus may have a different BIOS than other motherboards. HP may only want to have certain drivers, but if you run a certain chipset, HP cannot make it so that you can only use a certain driver. Being an Athlon64 CPU, there's a handful of chipsets you're limited to. The nForce 4, ATi Radeon XPress 200, ULi M1675, and whatever SiS has out right now. My guess is that it's either an nForce 4 or SiS-based motherboard.
Well I have to thank you guys for getting back so quickly, sounds like I will be doing my little upgrade I just don't know when. Obviously I don't know enough about these things so I can only go by what I've been told. Thanks for the info thus far guys.
It's always a good idea to do your research first hand. To my knowledge and some personal experience, HP doesn't do anything 'weird' with their PC's. I don't know what the HP tech knew or was told to say, but he's wrong on that you can only get the motherboard's drivers from HP. Would it be easier to get from HP? Probably, but certainly not impossible, especially since this hardware is going to be pretty new, to find elsewhere. The motherboard model should be printed somewhere between the PCI slots...at least that's the usual place.
Here's are some 7900GT's http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...TR14=&ATTR15=&ATTR16=&ATTR17=&ATTR18=&ATTR19= ---------- Here are some 7800GTX's http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...TR14=&ATTR15=&ATTR16=&ATTR17=&ATTR18=&ATTR19= The gap is pretty large still. Hope this helps.
Thats quite surprising to see that kind of price differance on a clearly superior card. Core clock speed is faster, memory clock is faster, everything is either the exact same or faster and you pay less... thats great. But whats eVGA like as far as brand, havn't really heard anything on them.
Evga is one of the finest distributers of nVidia's products, they have great cards, good software bundles, and fine tech support.
