Help Racket Build His New PC

[fox099]

I would change a few things on your setup.

-3 gigs of ram is all you can reference, assuming you are not using XP x64, so maybe just grab 3
-pick up a better video processor. it will be able to render video quicker. i suggest the asus eah 3850. I picked mine up for about 100 in may, so it is definately cheaper by now
-a new hard-drive will work wonders. it doesnt have to be huge, but certainly a 500gb western digital will be with you until the day you die

other than that i say the stats are fine. i love my amd setup.

[Droid party]

I would change a few things on your setup.

-3 gigs of ram is all you can reference, assuming you are not using XP x64, so maybe just grab 3

4gb packs are cheap as hell. If he went for 3gb he'd most likely be buying them seperatly which would cost more. I run 4gb and can only use 3.3gb. But meh whatever.

[racketboy]

I would change a few things on your setup.

-3 gigs of ram is all you can reference, assuming you are not using XP x64, so maybe just grab 3
-pick up a better video processor. it will be able to render video quicker. i suggest the asus eah 3850. I picked mine up for about 100 in may, so it is definately cheaper by now
-a new hard-drive will work wonders. it doesnt have to be huge, but certainly a 500gb western digital will be with you until the day you die

other than that i say the stats are fine. i love my amd setup.

A GPU helps with video processing?
And I have plenty of new HDs --- that the thing I update quite regularly.
I just bought a 1TB SATA drive a couple weeks ago.

[Niode]

Well they will when ATi Start offloading tasks to the GPU like nVidia has done with the CUDA project.

Racket, have you got a budget for this new system.

I just recently spent £500~ on a new system, Specs are:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 G0 Stepping @ 3.3 GHz on stock cooling
Asus P5Q Deluxe
2x 4GB OCZ Reaper HPC
500GB SATA Seagate Barracuda 32mb Cache 7200rpm
Optiarc 20x DVDrw with Lightscribe
ATi Radeon HD4870 512mb GDDR3 (Overclocked to 850MHz core and 1050 MHz memory)

So that should give you an idea of what kind of hardware you can get for the money.

If you are wanting a gpu for video capturing I would get one of the new All in Wonders.

[racketboy]

I was actually looking into getting a SATA Litescribe burner.

with the burner and the other items I listed, it comes to $318 shipped.

I'd like to keep things under $350.
Also keep in mind that some of my choices (lower wattage CPU, lower-end GPU) are to lower energy consumption.

As for the GPU thing -- doesn't the software have to support the processing?
And capturing: my Media Center PC does all that -- I just transfer the stuff to archive over the network to compress it and rip out commercials

[Japhei]

I was actually looking into getting a SATA Litescribe burner.

with the burner and the other items I listed, it comes to $318 shipped.

I'd like to keep things under $350.
Also keep in mind that some of my choices (lower wattage CPU, lower-end GPU) are to lower energy consumption.

As for the GPU thing -- doesn't the software have to support the processing?
And capturing: my Media Center PC does all that -- I just transfer the stuff to archive over the network to compress it and rip out commercials

Have you checked out Compusa?

They have the best prices for a computer out there right now!

[Niode]

As for the GPU thing -- doesn't the software have to support the processing?
And capturing: my Media Center PC does all that -- I just transfer the stuff to archive over the network to compress it and rip out commercials

Yes it does but there are encoders that support GPU acceleration out there. IF you are doing a lot of encoding then Phenoms are where it's at right now purely for the SSE4 instruction set gives quite a considerable performance increase. You don't have to go for a full x4 the x3 are very reasonably priced and lower in energy usage. I'd definitely go for one of those over an athlon.

Also there are benefits in encoding for users of 64 bit operating systems.

So on the same old programs you've been using, getting a phenom with SSE4 will improve performance immensely. On the other hand when parallel computing moves to GPU acceleration you will see a huge improvement in encoding tasks.

In the next 5 years I would expect most if not all high performance tasks that rely on parallel computing will be ran solely on the GPU. In the next 10 years I see CPU architecture moving towards SPUs rather than just more cores. It's the only way I can see Moore's law being fulfilled.

[racketboy]

I guess I can look more into the 3X Phenoms.
But it looks like the wattage per core is the same and the clock speeds are lower.
The extra instruction sets would be nice, but in reality, I only run large batches of encoding like a couple days of the month and do most of it at night.


As for the GPU, I'm sure I'll upgrade along the way.
One thing I've learned in PC building, only buy what you need now. By the time you need something better, its will be much cheaper.

[Mozgus]

My PSU is new -- the original died.

I'll be running XP for now.

What's different about a Phenom?

New means nothing. What are the specs? Watts and amperage on the rails.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817194002

That will technically work, but the wattage is low, so I hope you wont be powering many hard drives or anything additionally. If you get any full-system crashes or other issues randomly, with no leads pointing at software issues, do not hesitate to buy a better PSU. You seem to talk like you're buying midrange components, but that CPU you're looking at is actually quite high end. There's better out there, but it exists in the ludicrous end, which only retards dwell in.

[racketboy]

That will technically work, but the wattage is low, so I hope you wont be powering many hard drives or anything additionally. If you get any full-system crashes or other issues randomly, with no leads pointing at software issues, do not hesitate to buy a better PSU. You seem to talk like you're buying midrange components, but that CPU you're looking at is actually quite high end. There's better out there, but it exists in the ludicrous end, which only retards dwell in.

Well, it can't be much worse than what I'm running right now.
I believe the Pentium 4 I've got will draw more than this CPU. The lower wattage is one of the reasons I'm not jumping to the higher-clocked 64 X2s or the Phenoms.
I've got three hard drives in my current setup as well.
The graphics card is almost the same as what I currently have except for the fact that it's PCI Express instead of AGP.