Everything query

Computer Forum New Build / Upgrade Advice
1

This thread will likely follow a similar path of my last one about HDDs (please don’t sigh too loudly), only this time I’m talking about everything. I am getting ready to purchase my MB, processor, HDD, and case. For now, I’ll just transfer over everything else like vid card and RAM from my current comp until I can afford to upgrade those later. But I wanna get the big stuff done now. That said, I’m completely lost. Don’t worry, I know the basic procedure, but I have a crap load of questions. Ready?

  1. I currently have 256MB of PC-1600 RAM. I’d hate to throw away all that good RAM just to upgrade to PC-2700 or higher, so I figured I could keep that 256MB and buy another 256MB stick, also PC-1600 (it’d be cheaper, too). However, I won’t do this if it will be signifcantly slower than 2100 or 2700. So is the speed difference really all that great?

  2. I know when it comes to installing the MB that you must first put in the risers, and then the MB screws into them. How are the risers anchored exactly to the case? Will I get the risers and screws with my MB or my case or both or neither?

  3. Is $60 for an MB ridiculously cheap, or average? Should I be worried about AGP 8x support?

  4. I’m rather nervous about installing the processor and heatsink myself, so I was considering purchasing an MB combo. Is this worth the extra money?

  5. Is installing a heatsink difficult? Do you recommend a standard fan or paying extra for one of those Volcanoes?

  6. There are so many MBs available! Can anyone give me sort of a priority list of what I shoud look for FIRST in an MB, then second, etc?

  7. Do all MBs have a place somwhere to plug in front USB ports?

That’s all I can think of for now, but trust me, there’s more. Thanks!

2

I can tell everyone is real excited about this thread.

3

1.)PC1600 is fine…but if you plan to overclock or use any system with anything greater than a 200MHz front side bus, you’ll choke the performance.

2.)The mounting in the chassis comes with the case—if purchased new. Typically, you’ll have at least 6 of the mounting studs for any ATX-sized motherboard, although 9 is certainly a possibility.

3.)Depends on the company. IMO, there is a good reason why you pay good money for an expensive board: better compatibility.
Basically, some of the cheaper brands have been pieces of crap, specifically ECS and FIC. Asus, Abit, Iwill, and AOpen are companies that will cost a bit more, but are much better quality.

4.)If you can get it done locally, go ahead. Otherwise, if there’s an issue during shipping, you could end up with a CPU that’s DOA.
This is more of an issue with the AMD chips currently, but that doesn’t rule out the P4’s either.

5.)The best thing to do when installing the heatsink is to install it with the motherboard outside the case. It’s not particularly difficult to do, but do be careful with the Athlon and Duron chips.
What kinda heatsink you have depends on what you want to do. If you’re planning to overclock, then getting the CPU and heatsink separately is a good idea. In this case, get something with a copper base for better heat transfer. With the P4, the stock heatsink is really pretty good, but if the price difference on the same chip between the retail packaging (includes the heatsink) and just the CPU itself is much more than 20, it’s fine to buy a separate heatsink. If you’re really nervous about a heatsink installation, the Intel stock cooling is a cinch to put on, as you don’t need any tools to install it.

6.)Well, that really depends on what you want. Personally, I look for extra IDE controllers that can be used as an extra controller, not just RAID only. I’m also more keen about on-board LAN, though that’s not entirely necessary. The motherboards with more features cost more, but ultimately save you in the long run by eliminating parts to buy and saving you expansion slots. Right now the Soyo Dragon boards, any nForce/nForce 2 boards, Asus, and MSI boards usually have pretty good onboard stuff.

7.)In general, pretty much all of them do anymore, but that’s not a hard and fast rule. Find out as much info as you can about an extra USB header for your board.

4

  1. Well I think I may be getting an Athlon XP 2100+, which I read has a 200/266MHz front side bus. So is it both? Should I stick to a higher speed RAM simply because of that?

  2. I’m sorry, but what does DOA mean?

  3. How exactly does this Intel stock cooling differ from AMD heatsinks?

New question: 8) How do CPU shims help protect the CPU when installing a heatsink? Is it worth the ten bucks?

5

Should only have a 266MHz bus flavor. It can be run at a 200MHz bus, but it won’t be running at it’s maximum potential.

4.)DOA=Dead On Arrival

5.)They have a motherboard-mounted bracket surrounding the CPU socket. The heatsink simply clips on to the bracket and a couple of levers are switched to keep it firmly in place.
Athlon and any non-Pentium 4 chip (P3’s, Celeron’s—anything below 1.7GHz) have some clips on the front and back of the CPU socket. Heatsinks for these have a piece of metal with a hole or set of holes at 2 ends of the heatsink. You have to hook one side first then do the other side—and this usually requires a flat-head screwdriver. Depending on the heatsink–and a lot of them have this, is a very small place to put the screwdriver head to help push down. This makes it alot easier to push too hard and potentially stab your motherboard. The problem can be lessed by installing the heatsink with the motherboard outside the case since you’ll have more room to work with. The big thing is to look at the clips on the heatsink before you buy it because some have a thumb operated mechanism that makes it easier to install and doesn’t require a tool to do it.
Basically, pay attention to what you’re doing and use some caution and you’ll be fine.

8.)If you have a huge heatsink that’s fairly heavy, products from Thermalright and Alpha are mostly of concern here—though some of the Thermaltake Volcanoes can be grouped here too—this gives a more even surface to keep the 'sink from cracking the core. I personally don’t use one because I had one screw up the multipliers while I had it installed, and couldn’t use them in overclocking. If you do decide to get a shim, make sure it’s anodized so it won’t short out any contacts it touches.

6

Okay, so I guess I’ll take the dive, buy them separately, and put it all together. I’ll opt out for the shim since I probably won’t be getting an especially big heatsink anyway. And although the clamp-style heatsink sounds nice, I don’t think that makes getting an Intel board and processor worth it, as they’re a great deal more expensive than their AMD equivalents.

7

I do hope companies get something for AMD’s chips when the Hammer hits—something like the P4 coolers. So much easier and less dangerous to the motherboard.
Have fun.

Also, you might wanna look into a thermal compound like Arctic Silver as a very thin coat will transfer better than the thermal interface pad that comes on most heatsinks. If you don’t want to do it, that’s fine—and it only makes a few degree’s difference. Just something to consider.

Good luck. :slight_smile:

8

Okay, thanks.

I was planning on getting an AMD Athlon XP 2100+ processor, with this motherboard. Any problems with it? Do you recommend something different?

9

For an AMD platform I’d advise going for a nForce based solution, nForce 1 based solutions should be around that price range and as I’m sure Big B will attest to the boards are rock solid.

10

nForce 2 boards are coming out, so they might be a little better choice. They’ll be pricey, but you won’t have to buy a lot of addon cards. At least besides a graphics card (unless you’ll be fine with GeForce 4 MX graphics). That’s not a bad price on that MSI board, but it’s got the slightly older KT333 chipset instead of the KT400 one, and it’s the basic version of it.
Abit’s NF7-S is their nForce 2 board, and it’s running around $150 last I checked. That’s fairly steep for a motherboard online, but you’ll just need to add a CPU, memory and a video card of your choice. If you do go the nForce 1/2 route, It’s highly advisable to buy 2 sticks of memory to make the most out of the bandwidth available.

11

Hmm, nForce is just onboard graphics, isn’t it? So what’s the point of paying for a board that has it if I’m just going to get another video card anyway?

And I heard elsewhere that KT400 has very few improvements over the KT333 chipset - is this true?

12

The nForce 2 boards are about the $200-$235CDN range here, so probably about your looking at $175-200US.

I picked up the Asus A7N8X Deluxe a few weeks ago and it performs well above what I was expecting.

Most of the nForce 2 cards don’t include onboard video (has anyone released one that does yet?). A few nForce 1 based boards included a GeForce 2 MX on board but it wasn’t required. The boards just provide the best performance on the AMD platform while offering a unified driver architecture, Dolby 5.1 encoding and decoding on board.

For around the price range of the MSI card you should be able to pick up an nForce 1 or if price isn’t really that much of a deterrent i’d go with the A7N8X, it’s a loaded card and performs like a champ and will provide you with 333Mhz FSB support if you decide someday to upgrade to the new Athlons.

For the KT400 benchmarks are showing that it doesn’t add a significant advantage over the KT333, so if you decide to go the Via route save a bit of money and go with a KT333.

13

Hmm…$175 for a mainboard is a bit steep for me. Are there any real advantages of getting this nForce chipset? I am not concerned with onboard video or LAN.

Also, I found this mainboard by Asus for only $59 at sofistic.com! What do you think of this board?

14

Like I said earlier, you’ve got integrated 5.1 sound–something like the Audigy can cost as much as $100. You’ve got the advantage of the psudeo dual channel DDR, stability, LAN, firewire…but, that motherboard uses the KT266A chipset—which really isn’t that much slower than the KT333 and KT400 chipsets. There could be an issue supporting some of the newest Athlons with the Thoroughbred core, but that’s not bad. I do remember some tech telling me something about the CPU socket having something that could be fatal when trying to remove it however.

nForce is just more than on-board graphics, it ultimately can save you money by offering a load of integrated features that would cost more to buy a similar stripped KT400 board and your audio, LAN, etc for it. Obviously, if you already have a lot of this, it may not be worth the money. Also, you can find other boards with extra IDE (with RAID abilities) ports on other boards. For me that’s something that is a big deal.

Also, if you plan on ordering stuff online, it’d be worth the time to look up companies you plan to buy from at Reseller Ratings.

If you’d like to upgrade to a something beyond the XP2100+, since the faster Athlons use a newer core, some KT266A boards may not cut it, and that would be worth your money to get a KT333 or KT400 board or nForce 2 board since they will have support for the faster CPU’s.

15

Ah, that’s a very nice site. Thank you.

The only things I’m really concerned about are the following: 5.1 or 6.1 onboard sound, ATA/133 support, support for PC-1600 DDR memory (since I don’t want to get rid of what I already have), at least 5 PCI, and support for the highest Athlon XP possible so maybe I could upgrade processors in the future without getting a new mainboard. Onboard video, LAN, firewire, and probably a lot of other things I’m not concerned with. I’m also not concerned with having too many USB ports since I plan on buying a 5 USB PCI card. I do, however, want to make sure that it has a connect for front USB ports. Considering all of that, I would say I should try to get a KT333 or 400 for the processor upgradibility, however I shoudn’t be too concerned with nForce stuff. Agree? Can you think of any other nForce stuff that could appeal to me that I haven’t listed? For my purposes, what do you think of that mainboard from sofistic?

Also, as far as IDE goes, as long as it supports 133 and has at least two channels I should be fine. What exactly is RAID, however? I’ve never really been able to clear that up.

16

One thing if you plan on going with a KT XXX based board, do you plan on upgrading to a Radeon 9700 at anytime?

To the best of my knowledge the via boards are still having problems with the card, so if you are planning an upgrade of your video as well you may want to look at that issue as well.

As for which board to get I’d look at the various product pages and see which board fills the needs you have.

Here’s links to the three boards, I chose Asus only because that’s what I use and haven’t had any issues with them. MSI, EPOX, CHAINTECH and maybe ABIT should be fine and offer similar features.

Asus A7V8X: KT400

Asus A7V333: KT333

Asus A7N8X: nForce 2

17

Hmm, a lot to consider there. Well, AGP 8x is not a concern of mine, as I don’t think it’ll make too much difference for at least six months or so from now. Six USB 2.0 ports is nice, however I was planning on getting a PCI card that provides 5 USB 2.0 ports for only $40 or so. 6.1 audio is also on the boards I was looking at (maybe 5.1, but still good enough). LAN, Firewire - nah. The problem here is from the specs I’m reading these cheap boards I’m seeing seem to be good enough, but you guys seem to be pushing otherwise.

18

I tend to stay away from via only because of the problems they’ve had compatibility wise on some of their boards.

But as long as you go with one of the manufacturers either me or Big B has listed, if it has the features you want it should be fine no matter what board you choose.

19

Ahh, that’s a bit reassuring. Well let’s just do this little check then to make sure the board I’m going for is okay. I’m still not sure if I’ll get the MSI KT3 Ultra-2C or the Asus board, but either way they both have: ATA/133 support, 5 or 6.1 onboard sound, two rear USB 2.0 ports, capable up to at least an Athlon XP 2400+, at least 5 PCI slots, and AGP 4x. As far as I know, that’s fine for both boards. Is there anything that I didn’t list that may be of importance to me? Something I haven’t listed? I’ve already listed in previous posts the things with which I’m not concerned.

Also, if I get a mainboard with 5 or 6.1 support, is there much advantage to buying an extra PCI sound card?

20

You might want to take a look at this Epox board it’s in the same price range and Epox are solid boards and overclock well.

For onboard sound, you usually take a nice little hit with most onboard sound systems, which an external card will help minimize.