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Current system build guide
I have noticed lately that there is an awful lot of questions about build advice and the likes, and these questions are only going to continue to come. This little guide is being written in the hopes of helping to answer some of your questions and to help you ask the correct questions for what type of build you will need. In this guide I will only cover current technologies and will base all systems off the Scoket LGA 775 and AM2, at least till there are newer options supported. There are also Xeons and Opetrons based but since I find that thee are directed more so towards servers and workstations I feel that these wont fit this guide. Currently I do have a few Opetrons in this guide because of the lacking powers of AMD at this point, this could still be an option once the 4x4 is totally out and supported. Also since there are a few new Xeons that fit LGa 775 there is a chance they can replace some of the others, but I do not know enough about Xeons at this point. As technology advances I will keep this guide up to date. I will try and update every quarter or a big change in the the market.
If you find that I have missed a key point, added a crappy component, forgot a certain component, item or anything that can help with the overall guide please feel free to PM me or post in the thread and I will look into it and update the guide if need be. I want his guide not to be just my opinion but all of ours, so help if you can.
WE ARE NOT GODS OF HARDWARE so don't take this as the set in stone guide for the best components. This is based off of current reviews, first hand experience, and our educated opinions and knowledge of the manufactures and technologies.
The first and most important question to ask yourself is what type of user you are, what type of build you need. Do you fit into the entry level build, mid range, high range, or bleeding edge? I feel that this is the most important and hardest decision in the entire process of your build. Try and be realistic and it can end up saving you a lot of money. Here are a few questions to ask yourself for each build type.
BUDGET LEVEL:
Is keeping the cost to a minimum your main goal?
Do you perform only perform typical office tasks and minimal
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Here are a few terms that you will NEED know when building your PC. Granted there are a ton of other terms that I could post but only the needs are going into the guide. If you feel that I missed something important please let me know and I will add it.
Know the difference between a D-Sub connector (VGA) and a DVI.
Memory type is a graphics card-specific memory technology. There are a few flavors but most common are GDDR2, GDDR3 and GDDR4.
The video cards interface is very important since there are different types. There are a few versions of AGP as well as PCI and PCI-E. AGP and PCI are legacy.
There are few memory sizes but most common are 128MB, 256MB, 512MB and now with the big bad cards 640MB, 768MB and 1GB.
The same goes for memory interface where 128 bits and 256 bits are common and 320,384 and 512 bits are for the newer cards.
Core clock is the speed of a video card’s GPU or VPU, measured in megahertz (MHz)
DirectX is a collection of seven APIs (DirectDraw, Direct3D, DirectSound, DirectMusic, DirectInput, DirectPlay, DirectShow) produced and distributed by Microsoft. Current DX9 is the norm where DX10 is the future with Vista.
OpenGL is another 3D API that competes with Direct3D. OpenGL differs from Direct3D in that OpenGL is not maintained by a corporation (as Direct3D is maintained by Microsoft) and, as such, updates and revisions to its code tend to come quicker. All 3D video cards made today support both OpenGL and Direct3D
Knowing the difference between the RPM speeds 7200 being the most common. 5400 is legacy and 10000 is used in the Raptors and also SCSI which I wont cover.
Understanding how dBA also you will see as sone tie in with CFM
MOBO TERMS:
Have a understanding of the northbridge and the different types. For example Intel has, to name a few the 975X, P965. nVidia has its nForce series with the 500 series and now 600 series. And ATI/AMD with the Xpress series. There are also VIA, SiS, and ULi but those wont be covered.
If you know all the above you will be able to tie everything together. What socket type you need for your CPU, interface for your HDD, Video and RAM.
Last edited by justin3680 : December 9th, 2006 at 09:17 AM.
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CPU
Now onto the good stuff, the actual hardware. For processors I covered both AMD and Intel in all groups and selected 3 CPUs per group. Again this isnt any set in stone guide just my opinion and the reviews I have read, also you can look at the CPU Charts at tomshardware. All the CPUs in the budget are $100.00 and under, the mid is $100-225.00, high is $226-400.00 and the extreme is anything over $401.00. Intel CPU are for the LGA 775 socket and the AMD is for AM2. All of the prices were taken from www.newegg.com
Wher it come to the budget I would go AMD all the way. The Pentium D never was anything special and the Prescott was just do freakin hot. This was the era of AMD.
AMD cannot compete at this level. But one thing to still consider is the costs. The motherboards for AMD will be much less then the Intel boards. In the CPU charts the price/performance for the AMD X2 is better then the E6400. But Intel has the hands down better CPUs.
Anything from Intel blows away AMD, but why do I have the X6800 on top? Well I found through reviews and the CPU Charts that the X6800 is the best CPU.
Last edited by Nilpo : February 5th, 2007 at 02:00 PM.
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MOTHERBOARD
When selecting a motherboard there is a ton of specs and information to consider. Knowing what type of user you are and what you need / will need in the future selecting a motherboard is a walk in the park. Again the AMD boards will be socket AM2 and Intel LGA 775, prices were again taken from newegg. Since AM2 boards are cheaper there is a different price range then the Intel boards. Budget is under $75.00, mid is $76.00-100.00, the High is $101.00-150.00 and the Bleeding edge is $151.00+. Intel boards start under $100.00, mid $101.00-150.00, High $151.00-200.00 and Bleeding Edge is $200.00+.
With the AM2 boards I found then to be very consistent with each other minus a few that just stand out. Selecting the AM2 boards wasnt easy so if I added a "crapo" board or forgot an awesome board let me know.
Two boards which I found a surprise to hit the list were the Biostar boards, which performed surprising well for a "crapo" brand. But for the most part you will see mostly the same vendors in each build type, they just go above and beyond the others.
RAM
RAM can be a tricky at times deciding which to buy and will work with your motherboard. If you want to be 100% certain the RAM will work with your mobo check the manufactures site for supported RAM. For the lower end builds all ram is at lower volts and the speeds are at DDR2 800 or lower, since most motherboards will support this. Also with the budget board it will have 1GB of RAM instead of 512 or 2GB. IMO 512 is just not enough and if Vista is ever an option you will always have slow performance. On the other hand 2GB would be overkill for someone who just surfs the net. Having 1GB for the budget is a nice happy medium. As for the rest, they all have 2GB which is the standard currently. Price ranges are under $125.00 for the budget, $126.00-226.00 for the mid, $226.00-380.00 for high and $381.00+ for the Bleeding Edge. Again all prices from newegg.
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VGA
Selecting a video card is really hard because there is so many to pick from and the many different vendors that carry them. Not only that but some vendors add better cooling, overclock them in house, and add extras to their bundles increasing the retail price. In this list all cards are the current series from ATI (X1K) and nVidia (7 & 8) in PCI-E only. Granted you can find great deals with the X series and 6 series but if I added them it would change the direction of this guide being "current." Budget build is ranged from $75.00-150.00, mid is $151.00-300.00, high is $301.00-500.00 and the Bleeding Edge is $500.00+, again all from newegg. You will notice some overlapping of cards into different groups and that is because of the price ranges can put a card in two groups.
BUDGET BUILD:
nVidia 7600GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 from $204.99-119.99
nVidia 7600GS 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 from $144.99-126.99
nVidia 7600GS 256MB 128-bit GDDR2, 3 from $135.99-96.99
ATI 1650PRO 256MB 128-bit GDDR2, 3 from $142.99-99.99
ATI 1600XT 256MB 125-bit GDDR3 from $126.99-112.99
ATI 1600PRO 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 from $159.99-84.99
MID LEVEL BUILD:
nVidia 7950GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 from $299.99-259.99
nVidia 7900GT 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 from $279.99-239.99
nVidia 7900GS 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 from $224.99-179.99
ATI 1950XT 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 from $339.99-249.99
ATI 1950PRO 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 from $239.99-199.99
ATI 1900GT 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 from $199.99-169.99
HIGH END BUILD:
nVidia 8800GTS 640MB 320-bit GDDR3 from $499.99-449.99
nVidia 7950GX2 1GB 512-bit from $569.99-469.99
nVidia 7900GTX 512 MB 256-bit GDDR3 $469.99
ATI 1950XTX 512MB 256-bit GDDR4 from $433.99-389.99
ATI 1950XT 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 from $339.99-249.99
ATI 1900XT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 $349.99
BLEEDING EDGE:
nVidia 8800GTX 768MB 384-bit GDDR3 SLI from $1599.98-1239.98
nVidia 8800GTX 768MB 384-bit GDDR3 from $799.99-619.99
nVidia 7950GX2 1GB 512-bit from $569.99-469.99
ATI 1950XTX 512MB 256-bit GDDR4 CF from $867.98-779.98
Curently there is absolutly nothing that can touch the 8 series and putting them in SLI is just flat out nuts, but ATI is working hard to get out the next series to try and contend. Two issues with this list are SLI and CrossFire, and the addition on third VGA to your setup. I only added SLI and CF to the bleeding edge parts because it would make it much harder to list. I could do a section of CF and SLI cards in a budget, mid, high and bleeding list in the future, but now it would take a lot of research and comparisons of different cards used together. Also using a third card for physics processing or just for a massive amount of monitors is possible with the Intel Badaxes, nVidia 600 series and I believe a few nForce 590 SLI mobo which all support three PCI-E x16 slots.
Last edited by justin3680 : December 13th, 2006 at 05:51 AM.
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CASE
There are a tons of options that need to be considered when selecting a case. First selecting the type of case, you can go ATX, BTX, Server and caseless. Will it be a desktop, full tower, mid tower, mini tower, media center, slim case or server? Do you want it to be made of aluminum, plastic, steel, acrylic a mixture of types, or custom. What about air flow and amount of fans, cooling is a huge. These are the main questions, some of the smaller questions to ask are can I mod it, does it have front ports, windowed or not, do you like a smooth look or all the bling bling. Since BTX hasn’t taken off really and I'm clueless about media centers we are going to stick with ATX tower types. With my case selections you will start to notice a common trend. Budget build is from $25.00-75.00, mid $76.00-175.00, high $175.00-275.00 and high $275.00+, guess what its from newegg again.
Silverstone, Lian LI, Antec, and Cooler Master all rule their price ranges. Silverstone and Lian Li cases are hands down the best brands out there, they think of everything when designing a case. Anterc and Cooler Master are just all around high quality cases and they can give it to you for a reasonable price.
Beside having manufacture cases there are a few shops out there that do custom mods to cases as well as building their own. These weren't added because I wanted just the case and not the addition of the mods. We can always mod our own. Here are a few Frozencpu, mountainmods, Performance-PC
AIR/WATER COOLING
With cooling I’m going to be realistic here and go far as a basic TEC setup, because of the excessive prep work that comes with sub ambient temps I will not cover any sort of Phase changing or extreme cooling. Also Im going to stick to cooling the CPU and VGA, I could cover fans and airflow but that could easily be a guide on its own.. Also cooling the ram, chipset and HDD is left out because of all the different options, so sticking with the stock cooler for the chipset, heat spreaders for ram and a fan for the HDD. Why cover the VGA and not the others? Well because of how hot these bad boys get it needs to be brought into consideration of overall system cooling. What will be covered is air coolers and water cooling setups for the CPU and VGA.
CPU AIR
BUDGET BUILD:
There wouldn't be a setup for the budget build just the stock cooler
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HDD
There are many options for HDD formats from IDE, SCSI, SATA 150and SATA 3gb, but for the most part it will be SATA 3gb covered with a few SATA 150. There used to be a standard of 2 IDE ports on a mobo but now only one is needed IMO and that's just for my optical drives. When SATA optical drives start to be the norm we wont see a IDE port at all. Legacy. SCSI is for servers and workstations and for dorks who think they are badass having SCSI drives in their PC. So that leaves SATA 150 drives and SATA 3Gb. The only SATA 150 that are still worth using are the Raptors. Beside what format we are using there is the question of RAID and which to use if at all. The basic two are 0 (stripe = speed) and 1 (mirror = security). Look back at the terms for what these are and the others. Another hard question is to ask is how much space do I need, well what to you do? Games, photos, video, documents blah blah blah. Are your files KB, MB or GB? Since 80GB seams to be the smallest you can find at most shops we will start there.
If your nuts and got the money to spend on 4 of the Raptors in RAID 0+1 you have insane speed + data security. Or 5 of the 750GB Seagates in RAID 5. RAID is where it starts to get really fun and that is a topic that could have a guide alone.
PSU
This is the most underrated component in your build. A lot of people think they can skimp here because power is power, but you are dead wrong. Without a solid PSU you just purchased all these components for a paper weight. Its just a matter of time before your crap PSU fries everything. So....DO NOT SKIMP ON A PSU. If you have extra money and was wondering if you should get better ram, cpu or video card forget all of them and get a better PSU.
For the bleeding edge there is an absolute need for 4xPCIE cables since 8800GTX in SLI will need these. Also having awesome 12v rails and a high efficiency is need for the edge.
Last edited by Nilpo : January 20th, 2007 at 11:43 AM.
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WILL IT LAST:
IMO it looks as there wont be any huge changes till late 2007 or 2008. There are a few socket updates from both AMD and Intel expected for 2008 and the release of DDR3 is expected mid to late 2007, where Intel has announced they expect to be able to support it in 2008. These loot to be the only huge changes to our current layouts. So I feel that any build we go with now, with quad support will last us a while.
CHANGES:
AMD 4x4 platform using Socket F(1207)can have an impact on some AMD heavy spenders. Its potential is very good all depending on AMDs CPU.
AMD next socket AM3 is expected late 2007 early 2008.
Intel has in the works two sockets, socket B and H for around the same time as AM3.
UPGRADEABLE:
As of now the only things that I can see that you would need to look out of is if your motherboard will support quad core CPUS and the option of three video cards. If you consider yourself a high high end guy, or bleeding edge this is something you need to keep open. Granted there isnt much physics support yet but I think with the introduction of Vista and DX10 we will see a lot more.
VISTA & DX10:
If you want DX10 you NEED Vista. It is not backwards computable with any previous Windows OS. I think that this really wont start to bother us until we start to see some really nasty games that take advantage of the additions to DX10. Also the first few DX10 games loot to be backwards computable with DX9.
PSU UPGRADES:
A lot of people here will tell you that you dont need that many watts to run your PC. I think that is aimed towards people who don't expect to upgrade anytime soon or have a power hungry system. High end users and Bleeding edge users need to consider the future power requirements from our various components. Example is the R600 which is expected to use between 130W and 225W. I used the extreme PSU calculator to get a rough estimate for a current bleeding build including quad core, SLI 8800GTX, 1 SATA, 1DVD, 2GB of ram, 2 120mm fans and thats it, it came to 931W without any overclocking or added goodies. Think if you added a third card how much would it be. Granted there aren't many people out there that use a rig of this power, but its just an example of CURRENT power requirements. It will only get worse. Check the site out and play around and see what im talking about.
Last edited by justin3680 : December 12th, 2006 at 11:49 AM.
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......Well thats about it for now, I will do my best to keep this guide up to date. Also I would appreciate any comments, questions or additions to the guide.
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Just a question
Would you recommend 939 as a budget build?
(not talking about changes to the Guide I like it.)
I do to some people because overall system build is cheap and
it still gives good performance, parts are easy to find.
The biggest problem today is not hardware though, it is the software
still no 64bit programs CPUs are under utilized and bottlenecked to
half there performance level.
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Last edited by cy : January 2nd, 2007 at 02:37 PM.
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personally I would recommend 939 because AMD just switched over to AM2. 939 was rock solid. but for this guide I want to keep it at only the main socket types for each Intel and AMD if I added any other this guide would be freakin huge. I could throw in the Scoket F (1207) but then would need to thrown in 771
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Budget AMD socket 939 rig?
DFI Lanparty nF4 + Venice 3200+ (or X2 San Diego 3800+) + OCZ Plat Rev2 TCCD's = AMD overclocking fun!
... same goes with Opteron 165.
Socket 939 was very solid. Enough said.
If I would be offered to pick one AMD rig my choice would be definitely either an socket 939 based Venice/San Diego (due to X2) or an Opteron 165.
But, at this time, I wouldn't buy anything but Core2.
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Last edited by madhyena : January 2nd, 2007 at 02:57 PM.
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good budget powersupplies:
HEC ORION 585w http://www.directron.com/hp585d.html
i dunno if it will do 585w, but it handles powerfull sytems 7900gt & amd4000x2 no sweat. i suspect it's true rating to be closer to 500w, but that's just a guess. 500w is still good!
SuperFlower psu's with 120mm blue led fan's, can be found here in australia, victoria http://www.msy.com.au
i have used many of these and found the rails to be steady and about 2.5% over: 3.3v is usually around to 3.38v, 5v is around 5.15 and 12v around 12.25. they drop down to about 1% over under load and they are quiet. they used to be quite cheap but word has gotten around that they are good, demand & reputation have gone up.... still good value tho.
i have read claims that both HEC ORION & superflower manufacturers were used for antec at one time or another. ORION is a good, used to be a fairly well known name. superflower actually sounds good before it's translated to english.
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For the links I left out the last ] so you would get the entire thing. Just letting you know Im going through the rest of the components so there will be more change logs. Thanks guys.
BTW this code come in real handy
Change log
Last edited by justin3680 : February 5th, 2007 at 01:25 PM.
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There has been some changes made which are still in the process of being applied to the guide. Currently the changes have only been done for the CPU since its a long process. You will notice the addition of Xeons and a socket F option. Initially I said that I wouldn't add Xeons since they were more server/workstation based, but their performance over any previous Netburst processor is just to much not to have them listed. All the Xeons added are Socket LGA 775.
Also for the top AMD system I have added one Socket F. which is the 4x4 option. As far as I know there is still only one motherboard that supports it so I will add that to the top AMD motherboard section. Currently the 4x4 solution isn't enough to take the Intel Quad cores but it does have potential. So it for those AMD Fanboy, giving you a little hope.
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