Building for first time

[Kage]

It depends really. Look on your case to where would give the best airflow, like towards a hole in the case.

I'd presume the Vantec Spectrum PCI Fan Card with Blue UV LED one would work best since it'd create a gap at the back of the PC where the hot air would come out of.

 

[Lord Leviathan]

one thing about buying a new cpu is most companies include a pretty decent fan that will(suposedly last the lifetime of your chip...
reason? the company that builds the cpu (e.g intel) knows that if they put a 3 year waranty on a chip they are going to want it to last the time of the warranty at least, so they will stick a pretty decent fan on your chip. (depending on how you buy it)

 

[EricM]

I plan on getting the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ or the AMD ATHLON 64 X2 4400+ and now I need help on motherboards. I heard a new socket (M2) is coming out soon that supports DDR2 ram? So DDR2 RAM is better than dual channel? And does anybody know when these boards will start coming out? And what is SLI?

 

[jac006]

Yeah, wait for the m2. ddr2 is great for ram. it's faster, better, yeah, wait for it. sli = scalabe link interface. It's where you combine two graphics cards onto one mobo, so you get amazing graphics. m2 with sli = incredible. Especially with a cpu like that... go for it.

 

[EricM]

Thanks for the info. Now its a question of how much RAM, what speed and good motherboard companies. I am thinking at least 1 gig of ram maybe 2 but the DDR2 is going to be expensive. Does anyone know when the M2 will become more readibly available? Will it be out by the beginning of next year? As for motherboard companies DFI, MSI, Abit, ASUS... are these good companies? What others would you recommend?

 

[jac006]

1g is good enough. get msi or abit. THey're the best.

 

[TRDCorolla1]

Yes, those motherboard companies you pointed out are tops. 1GB of RAM is good enough like Jac said, but 2GB is quite large unless you are doing some serious quantitative approaches. Abit makes a really good high performance board called the Abit Fatal1ty. It's $200 some odd dollars but a very good overclocker.

As far as M2, don't count on it being out at the beginning of the year just yet. It will be available next year sometime. I think if you get a really decent setup, you don't reallly need that fancy M2 and DDR2 stuff. Hardware changes so much anyways so you'll never keep up unless you're willing to upgrade every year. Get a nice PC built that is fast and you'll be set.

 

[Kage]

Yeah, I have 1gig of RAM on the system, and I multitask almost all the time, yet I always seem to have just below 512mb free, but thats not saying I should have got 512mb instead, because I've given the computer a bit of freedom to go further if it has to.

It also depends on the RAM speed too, and unless you get a very expensive motherboard, it's only going to support DDR standard, and I have an ABIT AV8 and the max speed it supports is DDR 200 ( i think), or in other words PC3200 which is fast but not the fastest around, so its all determined really on what motherboard you get first.

As soon as thats sorted, you can go about thinking of the RAM speed you want to get

 

[EricM]

I can try and hold off but it will cost a bit of money. If i plan on spending say $2000 now and wait till the M2 comes out that will go up to like 3000 wont it? And on motherboards I see that they now have two pci-e gigabit ethernet connections? What does this mean ? You can put two ethernet connections so it will be like having two internet lines on one computer? And on another topic... When is Windows Vista going to be released??

 

[EricM]

Had to bump this up.