Yeah, but after I spend all that time swapping between slots and it
still doesn't work...(I've had a lot of bad luck).
Apparently you have had a lot of bad luck. For the most part you could
just throw the cards in without a care in the world and they'd work,
though in some cases there were issues like sound or video cards hogging
the bus or chipsets with flaky/slow PCI bus (Via 686 southbridge in
particular). Of course there are other possibilities, but for the most
part you are taking a gamble either way, moreso if you don't do the
researching of parts first, but most people do set up (both, integrated or
non-integrated) without significant problems.
I have RAID hardware, but it appears to be a pain in the butt. My
overiding goal is to be able to manually copy my entire "C" drive to
an equal sized drive/partition. And use siad drive in place of the "C"
if something goes wrong. That sounds simple, but in six years I've yet
to find an *easy* way to do this.
Huh? The software that comes with the retail packaged drives should do
so. You don't mention your RAID config though. Popular cloning programs
like DriveImage or Ghost are also widely used.
I've spent over 100 hours already "researching". So I don't think I'm
rushing.
This is why Dell, Compaq, ect. make so much money. People
just don't want to be, or can't be bothered with the perils of
building their own systems. The day that everything is *really* easy
to install, and "plug and play" is the norm, is the day companies like
Dell go out of business.
Not necessarily, some people don't want to do it themselves... two kinds
of people in the world: hands-on and, not.
There are a lot of other reasons to pick homebuild or OEM besides
configuration "issues". Price, part selection, features, expandability,
customization, out-of-warranty repair costs, no need for OEM-bundled
software (added cost of it), desire to overclock, the overall feeling that
OEMs build systems out of polished mid-grade parts for the most part, not
really GOOD parts except with very limited selection and at a price
premium.
Yeah, there's that compatability thing again.
Let me put it like this-
I have drawers full of hardware, and enough systems that I lost count long
ago. For the most part I can just throw any combination of parts together
and expect it to work, it's unusual for any problems to arise, and even
more unusual to have problems that aren't well-known issues with the
particular hardware (where the research comes into play beforehand).
I don't think building systems is "too easy". Questions like mine on
the newsgroups prove that.
But you're not really asking a specific question regarding a problem,
you're expecting a problem with no specific reason to yet (jumping into
the great black hole of "what if" abyss).
Nevertheless, I'm basically looking for a mobo that will support The
Pentium Extreme Edition, which I plan to get when the price comes
down.
Why? It'll always be disproportionately priced, horrible value, and given
your apprehension of the whole build-a-system process, you'll probably
wait too long before upgrading again so you'd be paying premium price for
just a moment's worth of great performance instead of upgrading again on a
regular interval.
But in the meantime I want to use a cheaper CPU on the board. This is
just me attempting to be a little "future-proof". I don't want to
spend a lot initially, but don't want to have to upgrade the
motherboard anytime soon.
But this doesn't really have much to do with whether you get a board with
a lot of integrated features. Any decent board will allow disabling any
integrated features if you don't want to use them. Just don't lock
yourself into a system with limited expansion capability (too few PCI
slots and/or no AGP slot) unless reducing the size of the system case is
the most important factor.
I'm looking at getting and cannabalizing a barebones system for
this(See below). But the chipset may cause problems, because I don't
think Dual Chanel ram is supported.:
DOF PCPC-533V Intel Celeron (400FSB/DDR/32V/S/L/USB2.0) Tested Value
Barebone Systems
• Boxed Intel Celeron Socket 478 2.4GHz (400FSB) CPU w/128K L2 Cache
• U8668D P4 Socket 478 P4M266A/8235 (400FSB/ATA133/USB2.0) uATX
Motherboard
• Integrated S3 SavagePro Graphics upto 32MB Video
• In-Win V500 Mini Tower Micro ATX Case w/250Watts Power Supply P4 &
USB2.0
• Integrated AC 97 6Ch Digital Audio
• Integrated 10/100BaseT Network Lan
It looks cheap. Biostar.
Did your last system have these low-end parts? If so, no wonder you had
problems. Testing and followup support, bios upgrades, etc, cost the
manufacturer $, and so the buyer as well.
Don't buy junk. Don't buy a barebones assembled to be very cheap else
you're asking for more problems. That's more likely to give you grief
than whether things are integrated onto a board or not.
Buy a decent foundation for a system. Intel or Asus motherboard, 300+W
name-brand power supply, decent heatsink, memory, etc.
Prosavage video is poor performance but IS ok if you don't need to do
gaming or anything else demanding... would be fine for 4 year old games or
DVD/video, median sized image editing, office/'net/email/etc.
