New system....opinions or last words?

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young&wild

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After a brief price watch of the Singaporean market.....i came out with this configuration slightly over US$1100.


all prices are quoted in Singapore Dollars (US$1.00 = S$1.85)

XP 2000+ - 80

Asus A7V8X - 285

Seagate Baraccuda IV - 187

Kingston 512MB PC3200 - 288

ATI Radeon 8500LE - 229 / GeForce3 Ti200 - 235

Audigy DE - 109

Yamaha CRW-F1E 44x24x448x - 230

Linksys Ethernet PCI 10/100 - 14

Altec Lansing 641 - 488

ASUStek CD-Rom 52x - 48

Keyboard & Mouse - 50

ENERMAX EG-351P-VE 350 watts P.S (2x Fan) ATX v2.03 - 105

Casing Full tower - 100

Grand Total = 2219 w/ GF3
2213 w/ Radeon 8500LE

Any last words or opinions or comments on this system?
 
Yes, I agree with Mic on the DVD drive replacement. You will be surprised with the rip speed of that Yamaha drive - my coworker has one and it's pretty decent. Also, when putting labels on the bottoms of your CDs you will be better off with blue bottomed CDRs. We tried them on silvers and they just don't show well. Just a heads up.

LNCPapa
 
Unless you are going to overclock your system, there is really no point in getting PC 3200 DDR since your Athlon is FSB limited. Might save you some $$$ if you went PC 2100 or PC 2700 DDR.
 
Heh - the system board he's getting supports DDR400/PC3200, Top Gun. The new A7V8x is a KT400 board. I love mine :D

Get the 8500LE. It blows the Ti200 out of the water :D

Be warned, that 44x burner is gonna sound like a jet taking off. I don't think anything above 24x is worth the performance gain if it's that loud. And, it's loud when it's doing anything. Don't even try to play a CD on it.

And again, you must get the 8500LE. It's cheaper and it outperforms it, what more could you ask? And ATi has gotten their act together on the drivers.
And yes, I'll throw in my reccomendation to ditch the CD-ROM and get a DVD.

Those speakers are awfully expensive.
 
Hi all,

I know you are a great fan of 8500LE, Veh, ever since you got your hands on them. But my main concern is driver issues with this Radeon card, current drivers are unable to unleash the full potential of the card(if i m not mistaken). Anyway, I'm still considerin' the 8500LE card.

Top gun, you got some point there, according to a benchmark ran by the people over in Anandtech, the mobo seems to perform better when paired with a PC2700 than when paired with PC3200 in all the benchmarks. This is a rather dissapointing matter, probably i need to flash the bios to get rid of the proble.

About the DVD, hmmm.... i m considering to get a Creative 16x/48x DVD Rom for S$84, any comments on this?

Even my current Yamaha burner gives out alot of noise when burning CDs still i like it, i m impressed pretty about its ability to read heavily scratched disc.
 
ATI drivers are as close, if not closer to perfection than nVidia's. They also release new drivers frequently now, including offering betas... And unofficial betas are relatively easy to find nowadays...
 
The KT400 chipset performance doesn't differ much between PC2700 and PC3200, partially due to there still not being an official agreed upon technical specification from Jedec on 400DDR memory. People are hoping that Via do a KT400a to rectify this. The KT400 chipset is performing on par with KT333 and other 333 solutions, at the moment opting for 400DDR isn't really worth it.
 
"current drivers are unable to unleash the full potential of the card"

"at the moment opting for 400DDR isn't really worth it"

Come on guys! I think it's smarter to build a system for the future instead of thinking what's good now. If the hardware has potential waiting for to be used (I think many of the cards do), wouldn't you get one instead of something that will be slow no matter what you do next year?
 
I agree on Mict's comment, if i were to opt for DDR333, it cost me only less than S$42, is gaining S$42 going to be worthwhile? I'm not going to get another rig for another 2 to 3 years. Durability of the new rig is a big concern on my part.

I'm just hoping a better BIOS update to come out in the near future so that the board is able to potential of the DDR400 memory.
 
Its more likely to need a chipset revision than a BIOS revision for that. But if the price difference isn't much then get the 400DDR ;)
 
Originally posted by Rick
ATI drivers are as close, if not closer to perfection than nVidia's. They also release new drivers frequently now, including offering betas... And unofficial betas are relatively easy to find nowadays...

Uh huh.

DDR333 only performed marginally better than DDR400, you won't notice the difference. DDR400 is probably better in the long run, if indeed ASUS releases a BIOS flash to solve the problem, and for the next time you upgrade.

Anyway, couldn't you just underclock the memory bus to 333MHz??? ;)
 
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