Advice Please

  • Thread starter Thread starter Brian
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Brian

I'm about to build a small form factor PC for gaming and am looking for
some advice. So far the parts I've selected are as follows:

-Shuttle SN25P Barebones Case/MB (socket 939; Nforce4 Chipset)
-Athlon 64 3500+ (which I hope to overclock to around 2.5 GHz)
-2 x 512MB PC 3200 Corsair XMS Extreme Ram
-ATI Radeon X800 XL 256 MB Graphics Card
-Hitachi 160GB 7200 RPM SATA hard drive
-Keyboard, mouse, speakers, DVD drive, etc.

I've never built an AMD system before, and haven't build any system in
about 2 years, so I feel a bit like a fish out of water. Any
advice/comments will be much appreciated!

P.S. Will the above system be noticeably faster than my current P4
3GHz (overclocked from 2.4 GHz), 1GB Ram, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro system?
 
I'm about to build a small form factor PC for gaming and am looking for
some advice. So far the parts I've selected are as follows:

-Shuttle SN25P Barebones Case/MB (socket 939; Nforce4 Chipset)
-Athlon 64 3500+ (which I hope to overclock to around 2.5 GHz)
-2 x 512MB PC 3200 Corsair XMS Extreme Ram
-ATI Radeon X800 XL 256 MB Graphics Card
-Hitachi 160GB 7200 RPM SATA hard drive
-Keyboard, mouse, speakers, DVD drive, etc.

I've never built an AMD system before, and haven't build any system in
about 2 years, so I feel a bit like a fish out of water. Any
advice/comments will be much appreciated!
Click to expand...

You're packing a fair bit of a pretty high-end/high power consumption
components into a small case (the video card alone will pump out over
100W). The case has been designed with cooling in mind, but proper
airflow is going to be important to get this all working well. Be
sure that, for example, all your cables are neat and not blocking any
fans.
P.S. Will the above system be noticeably faster than my current P4
3GHz (overclocked from 2.4 GHz), 1GB Ram, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro system?
Click to expand...

For gaming, probably yes due to the faster video card. For most
everything else, probably not.
 
I'm about to build a small form factor PC for gaming and am looking for
some advice. So far the parts I've selected are as follows:

-Shuttle SN25P Barebones Case/MB (socket 939; Nforce4 Chipset)
-Athlon 64 3500+ (which I hope to overclock to around 2.5 GHz)
-2 x 512MB PC 3200 Corsair XMS Extreme Ram
-ATI Radeon X800 XL 256 MB Graphics Card
-Hitachi 160GB 7200 RPM SATA hard drive
-Keyboard, mouse, speakers, DVD drive, etc.
Click to expand...

The last time I bought a Shuttle mbrd, they pulled out of the U.S. market a
few months later - I'm not sure I'd trust them again and personally, I tend
to go with a mbrd mfr who has a good BIOS update policy, like Asus and more
recently, MSI is my preferred.
I've never built an AMD system before, and haven't build any system in
about 2 years, so I feel a bit like a fish out of water. Any
advice/comments will be much appreciated!
Click to expand...

There's not really much diffreence between assembling an Intel or AMD
system - the compatibility FUD is just that. The only difference of note
might be the different heatsink retention mechanisms and the Athlon64s are
no trouble at all - I've no experience with Intel's latest yet.
P.S. Will the above system be noticeably faster than my current P4
3GHz (overclocked from 2.4 GHz), 1GB Ram, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro system?
Click to expand...

I'd say you might see some improvement in some games -- check the benchmark
sites -- though I hear that the recent Athlon 64 3500+ Clawhammer core is a
good candidate for overclocking... basically FX cores which were binned
down. I have a Winchester 3500+ and appreciate the lower temps - don't
care for overclocking.

The only additional advice is to choose your memory carefully: check the
mbrd mfr's site for compatible DIMMs. I'd advise also getting the BIOS &
Kernel Developer's Guide from here
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_739_7203,00.html
and checking the supported clock/DIMM configs. Note that the less you load
the memory bus with chips the more likely you are to get 1T timing and it's
worth the most in terms of memory bandwidth. I got two 512MB Crucial DIMMs
made with 512Mbit chips so I have only one rank per channel - the timing
seems modest at 3-3-3-8 but with 1T timing I get 5.8GB/s on the Sandra
benchmark.
 
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