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Building A Better PC 2.0

post #1 of 24
7/6/04 at 9:32pm
Thread Starter 
Couldn't find the original thread, it was an informative mother.

Here's some awesomeness worth sharing:

from Tom's Hardware

Quote:
SLI, that magical formula from bygone days, is back. In the future, when you find your system lacking the necessary 3D punch, simply stick in a second card. This formula already worked for the Voodoo 2, making it a bestseller. As a feature, it is aimed at the enthusiast, at least where high-end cards are concerned.

Hypothetically, you would shell out $499 for a GeForce 6800 Ultra or spend an extra $100 and get two standard 6800 processors with SLI. Of course, you could just as well buy only the motherboard and one standard 6800, and then buy a second card later after your credit card is no longer maxed out.

Things will get even more interesting if NVIDIA should decide to offer SLI in its mainstream cards as well. That would make us wonder whether such a step wouldn't make the top models rather unattractive. In the end, neither NVIDIA nor the card makers will really care how the consumer decides, as either choice will be good for their bottom line.
Jesus, I cannot wait for that day to come.
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post #2 of 24
7/6/04 at 9:42pm
Yikes. I'm wondering about the potential HEAT problems. One high-end graphics card is bad enough.
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post #3 of 24
7/6/04 at 10:01pm
Just toss one or two of these in and it'd be fine.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/pcmods/cooling/6937/
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post #4 of 24
7/6/04 at 11:55pm
That does sound pretty sweet but only if the high end cards get involved. At this point the 9800 XT I picked up to play Half-Life 2 on my newly built PC is outdated so having the option of having two of them would be nice. I suppose the motherboard would be the bottleneck then.
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post #5 of 24
7/7/04 at 10:19am
Maybe I don't quite understand SLI, but if it's like the old Voodoo solution, you'd have 2 GeForce 6800s in 2 PCI Express slots. That's 1000 bucks just on video cards, and I'd rather spend 500 of that on the processor or RAM or something like that.
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post #6 of 24
7/7/04 at 11:16am
Quote:
Originally Posted by sorro
Maybe I don't quite understand SLI, but if it's like the old Voodoo solution, you'd have 2 GeForce 6800s in 2 PCI Express slots. That's 1000 bucks just on video cards, and I'd rather spend 500 of that on the processor or RAM or something like that.
Plus you'd need a 700 watt power supply running off of Plutonium to power those suckers.
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post #7 of 24
7/7/04 at 12:49pm
Solar power, my friend. Solar power.
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post #8 of 24
7/7/04 at 3:59pm
Thread Starter 

1.21 jigowatts

when those babies hit 88 degrees Fahrenheit you're going to see some serious shit...

cooling these things is going to be brutal is you can't rig it up to a slushy machine or that zalman bong thingy alienware's planning to do. that'll make upgrading it yourself (when dual Nvidia cards get obsolete) brutal.

So what about the new BTX standard as an option - I mean it was designed with cooling in mind (albeit for processors & ram) - that's gotta help a little? Hell, I saw a Thermaltake case at the store the other day that had 6 or 7 fans in the bugger.

Ok, real question here. Is Intel's new socket design shit? The way they decided to plop the pins onto the motherboard instead of on the chip itself? Right now there's no question about me going out and most likely building an athlon based system this fall (as an aside question - is it necessary for me to wait for ddr2 when the athlon fx chips have the memory controller built in?)
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post #9 of 24
7/7/04 at 6:12pm
It sounds great, I just don't understand the bitching. The simple solution is... don't buy this stuff when it's still new. Give it at least a year to become perfected and cost efficient. The current Radeons and GeForces should run the next gen games just fine. Let the tech nerds blow their cash and be our guinea pigs, the rest of us will laugh our way to the bank when we get the equivilant yet more streamlined models further down the road.
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post #10 of 24
7/7/04 at 7:03pm
If anyone wants a Radeon 9800XT for a REALLY good price let me know.
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post #11 of 24
7/7/04 at 7:50pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hexx
It sounds great, I just don't understand the bitching. The simple solution is... don't buy this stuff when it's still new. Give it at least a year to become perfected and cost efficient. The current Radeons and GeForces should run the next gen games just fine. Let the tech nerds blow their cash and be our guinea pigs, the rest of us will laugh our way to the bank when we get the equivilant yet more streamlined models further down the road.
It warms my heart when I read this. I mean that in all seriousness. If I wanted to have the latest and greatest as it fell off the assembly line I wouldn't have had kids.
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post #12 of 24
7/16/04 at 1:10pm
Thread Starter 
hehe, I don't want kids. evar.

(neither does the wife, yippie!!!)

Ok. Some of you cool cats last year built some decent rigs using the Antec Sonata case. How's it holding up for you guys? Would you buy it again? I'm looking at that case as an option, that garish Thermaltake model with the checkerboard front cover, or a Cooler Master Wavemaster (tac-something).

I still like the classy look of the Sonata; so basically, ignore the above options - but I have to know if the provided Power Supply meets your needs.
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post #13 of 24
7/16/04 at 1:34pm
I recently bought the Cooler Master Praetorian and I'm loving it. Very solid design and construction. Plus the fans that come with it are super quality and really quiet. Definately a must look at before you dump cash for a nice case.

Edit: You'll have to provide a power supply.
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post #14 of 24
7/16/04 at 1:56pm
Thread Starter 
not a problem. Got a friend at work who can set me up with one of those coveted, but not-findable-in-this-here-town PC Power & Cooling supplies.

edited to add: damn, that is a nice case....airflow is important, I'm realizing that now considering how humid it gets in this office (even in the fall). thanks for mentioning it.
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post #15 of 24
7/21/04 at 2:57pm
Thread Starter 
"No - no words. No words to describe it. Poetry! They should've sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful... I had no idea."

Now I see why it has gotten so much love. So much attention. Praise. The fucker is massive. A god damned brick. It will do nicely, yes it will.

My Turbo Cool 510-Deluxe just arrived. Cannot wait to add it to the new rig I'm throwing together. (Though I'm still waiting on other parts to show up)...now I'm almost tempted to see how far I can push it - maybe forego the x800 and go for brute force in the form of the Radeon 6800...just because, or something.
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post #16 of 24
7/26/04 at 2:35pm
Thread Starter 

A better pc...built

-Black Cooler Master Praetorian Case - great recommendation billy, 4 fans keep this fucker cool
-PC Power & Cooling 510 Deluxe
-Asus A8V Delux mobo
-AMD Athlon 64 3800 - Freaking fast little bugger. Don't regret not getting the FX-53. Maybe in a year the FX 55 or 57 will take it's place.
-1 Gig Corsair XMS Ram 2-3-3-6-1t
-Two 80 gig Western Digital drives - the raptors weren't in the budget.
-Plextor px-708 drive - a hold over from the old comp
-Toshiba 1617 dvd-rom - flashed for region free playage/quicker cd-rips.
-Audigy 2 - from old comp
-Radeon 9600 XT - The only 'weak' link in the whole setup. Cannot find any of the newer cards these days.
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post #17 of 24
7/26/04 at 2:58pm
Educate me...what's the difference b/w a graphics card and a graphics accelerator? I just bought what I thought was a graphics card, yet it says "Graphics Accelerator" on the box. But it's advertised as a stand-alone graphics card (i.e., on the hardware requirements, it doesn't mention anything about needing an additional video card to work). Can someone enlighten me before I open this thing up?
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post #18 of 24
7/26/04 at 3:20pm
Thread Starter 
...a little confused at the question. If this was 1998 the answer would be clear.

A graphics card would be a card capable of displaying 2D images - windows, your applications, the browser - at any screen resolution you desired (at varying degrees of color usage).

A graphics accelerator was an add in card that you supplemented your main card with - ie, the Voodoo 2 line of cards. These handled all of the 3d related tasks if you were into playing games like quake or unreal.

Now, these days, pretty much all the good cards ($120 and up) are both doubling as graphics cards to handle windows tasks, while having some beefy (or not) processing to handle games like Halo, Far Cry, Neverwinter Nights....

name the card, manufacturer, and model #....someone should be quickly able to answer if it's worth opening the box and installing it.
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post #19 of 24
7/26/04 at 3:57pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by mongycore
name the card, manufacturer, and model #....someone should be quickly able to answer if it's worth opening the box and installing it.
Mad Dog Predator MX 4000 Plus, 8x/4x AGP 128 MB DDR Ram, NVidia GeForce MX4000 chipset.

I'm mainly going for the extra RAM in the card, not the gaming aspect, as I'm just trying to download and edit home videos to burn to a DVD. If I need to take this back and get the ATI Radeon 9200 SE, I will.

The main thing I'm asking is, am I going to be able to take out my current graphics card, and just stick this one in it's place?

I usually research the hell out of things like this, but with Google being down most of the day due to a virus attack, I couldn't find the same info on yahoo.com's search. I think I'm just going with this card, as it will replace a 32mb video card, so it's sure to give me more power in my machine. Thanks for the info.
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post #20 of 24
7/26/04 at 6:40pm
Please correct me if I am wrong, but I thought I read earlier this year that AGP mobos were about to be extinct. I thought I read that there is a new type of PCI coming that is faster and that it will take the place of the current PCI and AGP slots. Is that true?
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post #21 of 24
7/26/04 at 7:01pm
Thread Starter 
you speak of PCI Express. They've been released with Intel's new socket T design (that and DDR 2 support). Eventually AGP is going to be phased out, but not anytime soon (I hope), because the new format will allow games/programs higher rates of data transfer equalling better looking games and shit.
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post #22 of 24
7/26/04 at 7:19pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by mongycore
you speak of PCI Express. They've been released with Intel's new socket T design (that and DDR 2 support). Eventually AGP is going to be phased out, but not anytime soon (I hope), because the new format will allow games/programs higher rates of data transfer equalling better looking games and shit.
Ah, thank you Mongy.
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post #23 of 24
7/26/04 at 7:22pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by mongycore
Eventually AGP is going to be phased out, but not anytime soon (I hope)
I wouldn't worry about that, just look at ISA slots.
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post #24 of 24
7/26/04 at 11:04pm
Well, finally got this mother home and installed. I did the 3dMark2001 SE benchmark score (using DirectX 8.1) before and after:

Before -- ATI All in Wonder 128 Pro (32 MB) - 940
After -- Mad Dog Predator 4000MX (nVidia 4000 MX with 128 MB DDR Ram) -- 1811

A marked improvement! I'm just pissed now that I took my ATI card out, and noticed that it doesn't have a connector for a hardware-decoder DVD player card. The old broken card I took out does have that feature. Dammit. I may have to go buy yet another card to take advantage of it.
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