Buying new computer soon(tm)

[Dogbert]

Buying a new computer soon. I'm very budget limited so I'll be buying a barebone system and I have a few questions:

Don't laugh cause I'm trying to squeeze the maximum into my tight budget and prices here are far from being low.

Case: Enermax fs710B with 350W enermax power supply 128$
- question: how loud does it go ? Is there a way to silence it ?
MB: Asus A7V333-E-Audio 145$
CPU: Athlon XP 1800 (retail box) 136$
Mem: 512MB Transcend PC2700 187$
HDD: Maxtor 60GB D740X-6L 106$
DVD: Pioneer DVD-116/2 69$
Burner: Plextor 40x12x40 IDE 156$
Net: 3com 3c905c-tx

How will my gaming experience be with a G400 32MB DH on this system ? (I currently have a Celeron 500@75Mhz with an Asus 7100-T )

Any ideas will be highly appreciated, I didn't find Liteon burners around here (yet) so skip this suggestion

[Ant]

I'd go for the Asus A7S333 motherboard instead, the SIS 745 chipset gets much better write ups than the VIA. I've ordered one of these myself with a XP2000+ and a Gig of PC2100.

[Dogbert]

I want one but I haven't seen any SIS 7xx bases boards anywhere around here. Nor any ALi chipsets as well.

I can only choose between AMD/VIA/nVIDIA chipsets which means KT333 / AMD MPX / AMD 761 / nVIDIA 420D.

[Dogbert]

Asked my retailer to try ordering an A7S for me.

Meanwhile, are there any reviews of the A7S online ?

[Dogbert]

No Asus A7S in Israel, nor there will be
A7V333 it'll be then.

[GT98]

If your looking at saving money get a Liteon CD-Burner. I just ordered a 40x Burner for $69 bucks and a Liteon DVD drive for $40 bucks. The LiteOn DVD is rated as one of the best CD-Readers and the LiteOn-burners dont have problems with making back ups of your orginal software that uses safedisc 2 copy protection

[GT98]

Originally posted by Ant
I'd go for the Asus A7S333 motherboard instead, the SIS 745 chipset gets much better write ups than the VIA. I've ordered one of these myself with a XP2000+ and a Gig of PC2100.

Damn whats the deal here...is Greebe brainwashing everyone into getting a Sis745 chipset

Oh well I was looking at getting mine before he got his MSI board...after Reading what DocM said about his ECS boards.

[William]

Originally posted by GT98
If your looking at saving money get a Liteon CD-Burner. I just ordered a 40x Burner for $69

If you want to save money on a CD burner, some of the 32x LiteOns are firmware upgradeable to 48x. Most of the 40x ones are as well

[Dr Mordrid]

Interesting note about those new SiS chipsets: they use multi-threaded I/O between the North and South bridge (SiS 735/745 for Athlon have both N & S bridges are in one package but the 645/650 P4 chipsets use separate ones).

SiS puts it this way;

"To resolve the PCI-133 bandwidth bottleneck, 3 technologies are utilized......namely multiple DMA buses, Multi-threaded I/O Link, and MuTIOL® Connect.

Instead of connecting all the I/O bus masters to the PCI bus, each integrated I/O bus master as well as the PCI master clusters is offered a dedicated DMA bus with separate address bus, input data bus, and output data bus that features pipeline & split transaction.

The integrated Multi-threaded I/O Link further buffers and manages these multiple DMA buses to ensure concurrency of multiple upstream and downstream data transfers. "

No wonder they work so good with the RT.X100, which really hammers the PCI bus hard when doing multiple layers of effects.

VansHardware gives this example of how this affects performance;

"SiS's very high-speed connection between the Northbridge and the Southbridge (Mutiol) make this board the very best 32-bit low-end server solution. I've seen one running SCSI RAID with two gigabit ethernet cards. We ping-flooded both gb ethernet ports and at the same time ran disk-io benchmarks. The results were excellent--especially when compared to a VIA KT266A-based board. This Mutiol technology does breathe new life into 32-bit PCI"

Dr. Mordrid

[Dogbert]

Ok,

Since there is no SIS motherboard around here, should I go AMD (761/MPX)/ VIA /nVIDIA (420D) ?

I've found one LiteOn CD-Burner in an online shop here but it costs as much as the Plextor, which is better then ?

[Dr Mordrid]

Do not go with nVIDIA's NForce, VIA or the MaJiK if you can help it, especially on multimedia systems.

If I had to choose something other than the SiS chipsets I'd go with the AMD 76x's.

Dr. Mordrid

[Wombat]

Wow, no ECS or MSI745 either?

[KvHagedorn]

Shoot.. the 760 is OLD.. you could wait til hammer is out (thats the next AMD chipset)

I wish AMD would be more on the ball with their chipsets.

[Dogbert]

The Only MSI boards I see here are P4 and not AMD ones.

Didn't see any SIS 74x nor ALi boards here as well. So my choice is limited to AMD / VIA chipsets.

The boards I'm currently considering are these:

Gigabyte GA-7DXR+ (AMD 761) 123$
Gigabyte GA-7VRXP (KT333) 134$
ASUS A7V333-E-Audio (no raid) 145$

[Evildead666]

I would steer clear of any VIA chipsets...i have nothing but problems with the IDE and possibly the AGP bus...
Abit KT7A-RAID.....Abit is good, but via is not.
edit: Then again this is an old board compared to the KT333 ones...

I would go with the AMD, and for the Burner, if Plex is as much as LiteOn, then get Plextor, they usually have more cache (4mb instead of 2Mb)