Bungleau, have you built your pc yet

[kev]

Gday Bungleau,

After reading your posts a couple of weeks ago I agree with you on the sort of power that is required. I've done some more research & have found that a lot of the components are still coming down in price. I reckon I can build the pc that you suggested for about 700aud thats $350us. What do you think of the asus vn266 motherboards?

By the way go to the "user created polls" & vote for W&W as the most popular forum. That applies to everyone.

[Packrat]

Is that part number correct???? I couldn't find anything on the Asus site to match. (even in the archives)

[kev]

Sorry Packrat,

I misremembered the number it was in fact asus a7n266. I mixed it up with a gigabyte motherboard that I was also looking at.

It has the agp slot that you suggested & uses ddr ram. It also has usb 2.0 ports which I think will be indispensible in the future. The thing I like the most is the 32mb of graphics memory onboard. I will be able to play a lot of games & save for a video card later.

[Packrat]

That was my guess. It looks like it should do what you want....and it has room to grow.

The onboard Video, will be better then what you're used to....But the MX line...doesn't have all the pixel and vertex shaders, that make all the good eye candy. The prices on Geforce 3 cards is still going down and should really drop when Nv30 hits the shelf. (I here its been pushed out till Feb) A friend of mine had a GeForce 2 MX board in his dell...I just upgraded it with a Geforce3 Ti 200, I picked up for 63 US. His benchmark score went from...4023...to 8098...

He loves it..I also left him with my, loaner copy of W&W...I think he's hooked.

[kev]

Bungleau talked me into a 1.7gig cpu. I've seen a lot of amd ath xp1700 on sale for about$50us. are these really 1.7gig or is that just a model No.

I've managed to wrest the keys to the safe from the resident keymaster. I just have to wait until after our holiday to Queensland to use it. Until then I will be collecting all the small bits. I will be starting again because the at case sdram & 750meg cpu I have are now not going to be used.

[Packrat]

It's Amd's name game...the Athlon XP 1700 supposedly preforms as well as a 1.7 GHz chip...it actually runs at 1.47 GHz.
It will work fine. Most of gameing....happens in the video card and RAM....and then has to squeeze through a bottle neck to get to the CPU. So, once you upgrade the video...you'll be in great shape. Til then, you'll be in very good shape....

[Bungleau]

Hey, Kev, just dropping in here. I still haven't built up my machine, but I'm working on it. I plan on stopping in at one of the local PC shops here to check out their bare-bones PCs -- a minimal unit that may give me most of what I need. I'm not against building completely from scratch, but I find myself wondering just how many times I need to screw a motherboard into a case... I'll let you know what I come up with tomorrow. The new machine will probably be born in the next month or so, after I set up a linux server in here this week. Going to take advantage of professional "semi-down" time to get some mostly personal computer things configured.

As for the AMD speed thing, the real measure of performance these days is less the internal speed of the CPU, but how fast it can get things done -- and the two are not always identical. AMD (and Cyrix, if they're still around) have made a practice of implementing the same technology that Intel uses, only doing it better -- so they get better performance out of "older" technology. It's not that what they've got is old, but they have worked at improving its performance. So they broadcast numbers based on the throughput you can expect.

It's all marketing, which isn't all bad...